The key message of the next speaker, Zach Lieberman, the co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation that teaches students how to use code as a medium for poetry and art, is to constantly look for opportunities in which we can learn and grow — and help others do the same.

“The key to creativity is finding a way to listen to yourself.”
— Zach Lieberman, Co-founder of School for Poetic Computation

Zach Lieberman is followed by Kyle T. Webster, a Design Evangelist at Adobe. He makes a point stressing how we entertain our minds from morning to night with ever more screen time although boredom is a blessing and a key driver of creativity — a means to unlock the place where creative ideas come from. “We are so bad in being bored. We have to allow ourselves the time and space for boredom. What if we perceive boredom as a blank canvas for our mind?” are some of his central statements.

“We can’t control our subconscious, but we can create the circumstances where our subconscious comes into play.”
 — Kyle T. Webster, Design Evangelist at Adobe

Next, IDEO’s Tim Brown is interviewed by Courtney E. Martin about various design topics. In his opinion, it is the best time in history to be a designer.

Similar to Dr. Ming before, Brown also addresses the necessary creative confidence to go into the unknown as well as the necessity in our times to master the design of evolving products when iteration and a constant management of ecosystems comes into play. You can’t just design products and are done, ready to move on to the next project — there is no finite moment anymore. Speaking about ecosystems, he makes the comparison with natural ecosystems like rainforests that are diverse, complex and ever evolving.

In addition, he talks about that design is a team sport as well as politics. More ideas fail in organizations than from market rejection so that getting a great idea through the maze is equally important as coming up with the idea in the first place. In this respect, he mentions that mastery in design largely means mastering people and organizations. You have to design for the organization that is the vehicle, for example by creating real experiences as soon as possible instead of bland PowerPoint slides.

Towards the end of the interview, Brown speaks about the necessary ethics of design work – at the same time warning that if you only care about not creating any sort of harm for anyone, you will never create something new. “The thing about new ideas is that they’re like a fragile new species. They have to live for awhile before they flourish. If they get killed before that, they don’t have a chance to flourish,” he says. Instead, we need a system or agreement to make sure we don’t do intentional harm.

“That confidence to leap into the unknown is a form of mastery.”
 — Tim Brown, CEO & President of IDEO

Kat Holmes, Director UX Design at Google and Founder of Mismatch.design, takes the opportunity to speak about inclusive design and how it can be a catalyst for design as it opens up your thinking. “What if there is no average, no normal?” she asks. She tells us to always ask what is missing in one’s design and what changes for all users when moving from a human to a digital experience for example. “Disability is no health condition but a mismatch — a mismatched interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment they live in,” Holmes says. “Don’t expect people to match your design. It should be the other way around.”

“What if there was no such thing as normal? How would we proceed in our design?”
 — Kat Holmes, Director UX Design at Google & Founder of Mismatch.design

In the following talk, Joel Beckerman, Founder, Composer and Producer at Man Made Music, makes us aware that a lot of designers simply forget about sound although it is the experience dimension to which users respond most quickly. “If you’re afraid of a horror movie, don’t close your eyes, close your ears,” he tells us. Therefore Beckerman encourages us to practice better storytelling by using music and sounds and also to keep in mind the reaction you want to create with an experience in a given environment. Can you imagine the beeping sounds in hospitals to promote health and well-being?

“When the sound doesn’t match the visuals, your brain believes your ears first.”
— Joel Beckerman, Founder, Composer & Producer at Man Made Music

In the afternoon, I attend a high-energy workshop run by Disney’s former Head of Innovation & Creativity, Duncan Wardle.

Following the title ‘Blue Sky Thinking: Where Revolutionary Ideas Come From’, Wardle speaks about how to spark creativity and come up with new ideas as well as how to share them with your team and the client in a sucessful way.

He shares the story behind the Disney MagicBand — a plastic bracelet in use at Walt Disney World Resort that provides a way for the system to connect data to guests. “At the start of its development, the central question was ‘How can we avoid standing in lines?’ and not ‘How can we raise profit by 3%?’” Wardle says. “Start by embedding new solutions deeply in and financial success will follow.”

Speaking about ideation, Wardle encourages us to get into a subconscious state, something that usually doesn’t happen in the office, to encourage playfulness and to regularly break out of our daily habits. Doing things differently every time allows us to access a fresh mind for creative ideas.

Another approach to thinking beyond the usual patterns is the involvement of naive experts — to have an outsider in the room in the form of a person from a different country or industry, who asks the ‘stupid’ questions and brings in new possibilities for solutions. Similarly, he recommends to list all the rules of a challenge and challenge them by asking ‘What if these rules didn’t apply? What would our possibilities be?’.

In an attempt to create an open, positive space for sharing new ideas,
Wardle reminds us of preferring the phrasing ‘Yes, and …’ over the use of
‘No, because …‘ to transfer a concept from ‘my/your idea’ to a group idea and also to grow infant ideas that are still very rough and by no means fully fleshed out yet.

When a new idea is born, Wardle always captures it in a few full sentences right away to avoid not remembering important details the next day.

Presenting the results to clients, he is a big fan of creating an environment with no barriers such as a table as well as of putting the presentation up on all four walls and taking the client for a walk around the room — turning the presentation into a conversation.

The subsequent master class is entitled ‘Gathering and Presenting Design Research’ and is hosted by Paige Bennett, a Design Researcher at Dropbox.

She shares ways to communicate your research results to turn the larger team into advocates of our findings. “Your findings must be able to live on without you as their guardian,” she says. Exhibit pop ups in central office locations, collaterals like fun stickers with key results as well as an informal ‘brown bag’ Q&A session over lunch or a coffee are all proven formats to get attention and buy-in from people outside of the core research team.

In addition, Bennett suggests to share intentions and results early and continuously during the process, using formats like a ‘What to expect and not to expect’ summary, dispatches from the field, theme progression insights as well as a highlight reel in the end.