#FOI13: SUPERNATURAL

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Interviewing Louisa Heinrich: designer, strategist and technology enthusiast ☺

While attending Frontiers of Interaction a few weeks ago I had the chance to attend a workshop held by Louisa. I didn’t miss the chance to ask her for an interview and she has been very kind and replied me all the questions.

Enjoy!

I attended Louisa’s workshop at FOI13 and I have been amazed by her skills. Engaging, curious, full of energy. This is a small sunto of how she looked like.

Her workshop, “Your Life as a Cyborg Superhero”, strived to find out what new technologies can add to everyday’s life in a near future and how. Designer and strategist, technology enthusiast, Louisa has a brilliant career: among other things, she was a Design Director in the first dotcom boom, an Executive at the BBC, and launched an Innovation Lab for Electrical Engineers. Most recently, she was Head of Strategy for international Service Design agency Fjord. She recently founded her own company, SuperHuman Ltd., a consultancy with the strapline, “putting people first.” She believes that technology has the capability to give us all superpowers if we apply it correctly, and we do that by keeping our focus on what’s most important: people.

Louisa’s work is mostly about looking the future and seeing above it.

Speaking about what can improve us in the future, via cyber-futuristic implants, starting from the well known Google glasses to smart apps and more sophisticated prosthetic implants that improve blind’s vision or allow people to hold objects or walk even in case of amputation or missing limbs. Technology that can enhance human skills or restore what’s called “normality”. All of this makes us, in the end, cyborgs.

1. What makes you so passionate about these topics?

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved technology — but I’ve also always loved storytelling, people, understanding why we do the things we do. Because technology moves so fast and people are, let’s face it, pretty chaotic and complicated, there’s a tendency for businesses and technologists to focus on their own needs, instead of the needs of the people who will use the technology or the product. I think we miss out on a lot of opportunities that way.

I’m also relentlessly curious and love learning new things. My favourite way to learn is through conversation and collaboration with brilliant people, by working through interesting challenges together. My work allows me to engage with many people I admire, discussing and working through interesting challenges together.
Ultimately, I want what we all want: to make brilliant things. I want those things to make a positive difference in real people’s lives, because when I see people happier because of something I’ve been involved with, there’s no other feeling quite like it.

2. Nowadays more and more girls are involved in tech topics. I am very confident about it as girls-against-tech is a boring cliché, and I love to hear experiences. What did you drive towards all of this magic world? Do you have any story to tell us, any encouragement for who’s trying?

When I was about 5, my family moved to the USA. I became friends with a girl who lived in our road. Her mother was big on male/female stereotypes and once told me, when I tried to take a blue cupcake instead of a pink one, that “pink is for girls and blue is for boys.” She also told her daughter that “girls can’t be doctors, girls can be nurses. Boys are doctors.” Then again, she also tried to tell me that thunder was the sound of God bowling, so I knew not to take her too seriously. But when I told my mother about this, she marched down the street and gave the woman a very stern talking to about how her daughter could do *anything she wanted* and how dare she say otherwise!

So when I was a girl, I didn’t even notice that most of my honours Maths class were boys. It didn’t occur to me to think that my study or career choices were limited by gender (or colour or class, but that’s a different story). I still don’t. If I find something that’s interesting, I’ll explore it. It just doesn’t occur to me that my gender would get in the way of that.
Thus, I think focussing on gender is counterproductive. If you love technology, if you’re interested in maths, if you want to be an electrician or work in concert production or whatever it is you want to do, then I say go for it. Apply yourself with all your heart, put all your passion toward it. It’s really hard for anyone to disqualify a person who has passion for their work and real depth of understanding. Unfortunately, gender inequality does still exist, both in the technology world and elsewhere, but I’ve been quite happy focussing on what interests me, pushing myself to learn and grow — and not worrying about whether people see me differently because I’m female.

3. How is it exploring future trends? How does it look like? Sounds exciting, but what does it require? Imagination, skills, both?

You’d be surprised how rarely people ask this question, so I’m glad you did! Exploring trends is super-fun and rewarding, but as with most rewarding things, it does require rather a lot of work as well. And it’s important to remember, as Salvatore Iaconesi said in his workshop at FOI, the things that we imagine for the future are often the things we end up creating. Sometimes I wish I could find the people who design computer interfaces for sci-fi movies and, ahem, *have a word* with them.

For me, exploring the future is about spotting patterns in the past and present and looking at the underlying ‘why’ — there’s a lot more to it than technology. There’s the business landscape, the sociopolitical climate, economics and governmental policy. But for me, the most effective anchor is human behaviour. We change and evolve much more slowly than technology, and we are also at the heard of all of these systems. My trends work weaves together the strands of influence across business, economics and technology and tells a story that’s centred on humans. Then again, my degrees are in Theatre and Anthropology, so that’s a big part of how I learnt to understand the world.

4. Speaking of the workshop you held at FOI13: could you tell the readers what was it about? What was the final target and what results you got?

Most importantly, I wanted everyone to think freely and have some fun! I think a lot of our best ideas come when we’re relaxed and enjoying ourselves. But as with most of the things I try to do, for me the workshop was about focusing on the person rather than the technology, and debunking some myths. I think we spend a lot of our time as technologists thinking about what new technology we could invent and insert into people’s lives. At the same time, we tend to think of a lot of things as distant science fiction when in reality they’re just around the corner.
In the workshop, I asked each group to design a specific, themed superhero (e.g. super cop, super-firefighter, etc.) by thinking about what kind of problem they’d want a superhero to help with (or what kind of hero they’d like to be!), and which abilities their superhero would need to face those challenges. The point was to focus on the person and what they were trying to accomplish — using technology to enable them to do those things better. Then we explored what that would mean for the superhero — what they’d have to give up in exchange for these powers, what their lives would be like. At the end, each group told a story that featured their superhero.

All of them were interesting, but one really leapt out at me: their superhero was by far the most augmented, with enhanced vision, hearing, smell, touch, etc. But their story described a journey where at the end, the man turned off all his tech-powers, because (as one of the participants said), “It’s the human that’s the real superhero.”

I found that really powerful. Technology is super-cool, but it’s humans who use it to shape the world, and that’s what I find most inspiring.

Thank you, Louisa, for your time, your kindness and this awesome interview! ☺