EP.81 EXPERIENCE DESIGN IN AN ENTROPIC FUTURE with Christian Davies, Chief Strategy Officer, Bergmeyer

ABOUT CHRISTIAN DAVIES:

Christian's LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/christian-davies-fcsd-3728a513

Websites: https://www.bergmeyer.com

email: cdavies@bergmeyer.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christianthdavies/ 

Christian Davies Bio: 

Davies brings 30+ years' experience as a creative leader, working with brands across the globe, from disruptive startups to the very top Fortune 500 contenders in retail, experiential, beauty, fashion, hospitality, technology, luxury, and more. His veteran status includes over 100 national and international design awards (15 of which earned top honors for Store of the Year Awards), including a five-time winner of design:retail’s Retail Design Influencer as well as a coveted Retail Design Luminary award.  

As a Chief Strategy Officer for Bergmeyer, strategic innovation and design leadership define Davies role, stemming from a robust background in creative direction and design thinking. His approach harnesses the power of diverse, interdisciplinary teams, developed through hands-on experience in various roles across a wide variety of companies throughout his career. As Chief Strategy Officer, steering the business strategy and our passion for innovation encapsulates my daily mission.

Prior to Bergmeyer, Davies served as Managing Director of the Creative Marketing Group at Verizon, Creative Vice President of Global Design and Innovation for Starbucks, Executive Creative Director of the Americas at Fitch, and Vice President/Managing Creative Director at FRCH Design Worldwide.

Also See: https://www.bergmeyer.com/people/christian-davies 

SHOW INTRODUCTION:

Welcome to Episode 81! of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast…

What started at a pivotal moment during the COVID pandemic in early 2020 has continued for seven seasons and now 81 episodes. 

This season we continue to follow our catch phrase of having “Dynamic Dialogues About DATA: Design, Architecture, Technology and the Arts. In the coming weeks we have some terrific conversations that are both fun and inspiring. 

They are going to include thought provoking futurists, AI technology mavens, retailers, international hotel design executives as well as designers and architects of brand experience places.

We talk with authors and people focused on wellness and sustainable design practices as well as neuroscientists who will continue to help us look at the built environment and the connections between our mind-body and the built world around us.

We’ll also have guests who are creative marketing masters from international brands and people who have started and grown some of the companies that are striking a new path for us follow.

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is grateful for the support of VMSD magazine.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing us to keep on talking about what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience.

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org 

Today, EPISODE 81… I talk with Christian Davies. We actually recorded this discussion months ago and Christian wondered if publishing it now was still relevant.

I assured him it was, since Christian tends to unearth issues that are future forward - things to be mindful about should we want to address the issues we all face as individuals or societies or as architects and designers making places and things as we serve as our clients creative sherpa guides bringing ideas into the built world. 

Now… Christian has been sitting atop the heap of 80 conversations as the most listened to episode since we recorded our first talk a couple years ago. So, I thought, well why not do Christian Davies 2.0?

Christian does not disappoint - never has – over a couple of decades, Christian has consistently drawn audiences and colleagues into conversation, sometimes challenging, and always brilliant and things that drive design thinking. His matter-of-fact English attitude to the world of design is sometimes a ‘no holds barred’ reality check that makes you think twice about the truths you have held dear. 

His drive towards excellence is irrepressible. That makes him, some may say, demanding because I think he expects that we all give a damn about what we are brining into the world. And why not? We all share space on this little blue dot and, we had better get it, and soon, that we are part of a vast ecosystem of interdependencies.

We cover a lot of ground in this open-ended conversation – I’d not expect less from Christian - And here is a few thoughts on subject areas we touch on…

1. Entropy:

Entropy is a scientific measure of disorder, randomness.

Astrophysicist and other cosmologists have postulated that our universe is continuing to expand to a maximum state of entropy from a moment in time, the beginning of the Universe that they have called The Big Bang.

There's lots of great content that you can certainly dig up on what happens when the universe finally expands to maximum entropy and all particles are spread out evenly within the unimaginably large space of the universe. It's suggested that of course this maximun expansion will take something like 10 to the 36 or 37 power years in other words trillions and trillions of years. A very very long time….

But for now, the way I try to think of it is things will expand and eventually slow down as they all spread out to be evenly distributed throughout the universe… seems reasonable…

It's kind of like imagining the initial moments after a massive explosion. Things spread out pretty quickly from the epicenter of the explosion and as they're flung far and wide, particles eventually slow and if you think of it in terms of entropy they all reach maximum randomness.

I kind of think that right now, today, considering that the scientists think that the universe has only been around for 14 1/2 billion years or so, that we're kind of right at that very beginning stage of the explosion and things are moving faster and faster away from the epicenter of The Big Bang. 

This is interesting if you think that the universe will continue to be expanding for a few trillion years so right now yeah, we're kind of sort of in the one second after the explosion time frame. Anyway I am not an astrophysicist and some of these enormous ideas still leave me scratching my head…

If we look at today, and everything around us, it certainly seems that things are speeding up and becoming more distributed, more random.

I know I've talked about the whole idea of the pace of change in a number of episodes but I find this really interesting because, as I discussed with Christian, it's really hard to design into a future state when you consider that the sands beneath your feet are always shifting.

How do we know which step is the right one? How do you know when we step on solid ground or drop forever into a bottomless void…

I think the challenge here for designers is that, at least for a time, we need to have a sense of stability and order. The challenge is, I think, is that we're moving to an increasing rate of change where stability and order might be elusive to say the least.

2. Moments of human connection make experiences great:

I think as we speed along and never ending sea of change perhaps one of the things that we can hang on to, a stake in the ground if you will, will continue to be our ability to maintain our relationships.

Change has a funny way of, well… changing people. And, one of our jobs will be to keep up with changing expectations of brands and their customers. One thing is sure, as we scream along this ever changing path, relationships will remain as one of the fundamental qualities of great experiences. 

Both brand experience architecture and the means with which we engage with brands will change to meet evolving expecations but, my expectation, (or maybe it's just my hope) is that humans still stay at the center of it all - Since at least for this short little time that humans have been in existence, we have relied on the empathic connection between individuals to help create meaning and connection to the world around us as well as the things well as the things we simply buy.

And I, like Christian, believe that in the end, when you look at successful projects in our long design careers, the good ones, I mean the really good ones, we're not just because we received a great brief with an inspired client who had a vision of changing up the world,

but that the teams we were connected to both on the consultant and client sides were also great. There was something that clicked. 

There was a gel in communication, respect and collaboration that drove these projects forward.

Some may have heard me say before projects will come and go but the relationships are really what make the work great. I'd rather lose a project than trash the relationships…

3. Three things that facilitate success stories in the world of retail place-making:

So, if you're going to look at success stories over a career full of projects, when you look back at what really made them great was, of course that they were successful from a financial point of view, that they drove increase customers and deeper brand relationships and better revenues all those things are important indicators of success but that there are things that are required to make all of that happen. One would be that there's a big idea someone at the helm of a brand or business that has a thought about doing something different breaking out of a traditional way of bringing goods or services to market, of serving a customer in a different way and technology is often being a facilitator of that.

There was coffee long before Starbucks. There was getting from A to B lby horse, camel, richshaw, long before Uber. There were places to stay along the Silk Road before Airbnb. And if you had a shaman in your village you could likely find out where you ame from and where your future was going to be long before there were anything like 23&Me or ancestry.com. 

In some ways the goods or services have not really changed. How we get them in the hands of customers has changed and that has often been facilitated with new technologies.

4. AI – as a new tool for ideation and the ‘why’ behind design:

One of those technological advances of course that everybody is talking about these days is artificial intelligence.

AI it's both causing a lot of excitement about what it sees has to offer in the short term, becoming a new tool in the architect and designers toolbox for ideation as well as causing a lot of concern about what happens to humankind when we finally get to general AI or super artificial intelligence.

I am both excited and increasingly aware of influences that it will have on the job market, delivery of goods and services and other parts of the ecosystem like education and manufacturing etcetera etcetera.

But if we just for a moment set some of the anxieties aside and simply look at as a tool for imagination and engagement with clients fostering the collaborative process of ideation, it has extraordinary potential to change the game of how we designers and architects work with our clients and create ideas about bringing their goods and services to market.

There's a lot of opportunity and uncertainty about what happens when you turbocharge the creative process with AI tools.

In the end though, at least for now, the question remains - is that there is a human at the helm of prompt curation?

The output is only as good as the input that I'm able to suggest as a prompt. If not… garbage in – garbage out.

This of course is interesting because it puts the initial burden still on people to be able to articulate their vision in language and use AI tools to refine the visualizations and other content that emerges from using them.

As we use these tools they make things faster but I also sometimes wonder about whether they simply make us lazy and remove our thinking from the process.

So Christian does talk about the idea of the drawings or images being very compelling but also needing to ask, and answer, the question of ‘why this particular approach or output is relevant and connected to the brand or customer that we're trying to serve?

In the end it’s not about the ‘what’ of things that make solutions to design challenges great but more and more about the ‘why’ you're doing certain things.

It’s about the process by which you got to the solution rather than simply the solution itself.

Don't get me wrong the solutions to the challenges are sometimes very satisfying but what I'm ultimately interested in is the thinking process that led you to along this pathway… it's the journey not just the destination that's important in the creative process….

And I think it's ever more important to our clients in the design world that they're looking for people who are not just production oriented but who are also focused on guiding them through an uncertain future

5. B-Corporations:

And this in a way leads us to the part of our my discussion with Christian about how his company Bergmeyer has recently become a B-Corp.

A B-Corporation is a for profit company, but it is certified by the non-profit  B Lab Global and the whole idea is that it seeks to meet high standards for social and environmental performance and accountability and even more so transparency in the ways that they are doing business in support of being good stewards of our environment.

In the changing sands that we're all standing on, as entropy increases and uncertainty continues to unfold in front of us, there is certainty that our planet is also in peril as climate change continues to wreak havoc on environmental systems. 

These B-corporations are seen as a force for good who work to balance profit with a commitment to both people and our planet. What differentiates them from other traditional companies is that they prioritize the social and environmental impacts of their business while at the same time not discounting the fact that they still are in business - that they are accountable to stakeholders as well as shareholders.

The stakeholders can be considered as all of us because as companies continue to pull resources out of the ground and push the byproducts of industrialization into landfills and oceans all of our lives are at stake.

All right then that's a not so brief summary of some of the ideas that Christian and I riff on in our conversation…

Let's dig into some of the details…

ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites: 

https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: david.kepron@NXTLVLexperiencedesign.com

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.