3 Takeaways from SXSW
This year, more than 100,000 people from all over the world descended on Austin, TX, for the 2018 South by Southwest Festival. Designers, developers, and brand builders from every kind of industry attended the Interactive portion of the festival in order to learn from each other. Attendees spend much of their time in lines, competing for a seat to hear technology trailblazers, or to swap big ideas over craft cocktails.
A handful of Rocketeers from the Experience Design (XD) department (myself included) shuttled down I-35 eager to expand our worldview, one keynote and handshake at a time. Every Austin corner housed an experience — a new technology to try, goats to pet, and barbecue to consume. SXSW is the perfect intersection of technology and culture. As if the tech and smoked meats weren’t enough, I also got to watch my favorite comedy troop (The Upright Citizens Brigade) improvise a show in which Elon Musk ‘drops in’ on unassuming bystanders every chance he gets.
Throughout the week, I noticed patterns among the speakers. And while I only scratched the surface (my feet fell victim first), I came away with a better idea of where design is headed. Here are my key takeaways from this year:
1. Expand the experience
In the 2018 Tech Trends Report, Amy Webb, founder and CEO of Future Today Institute predicts the following:
“During the next decade, we will start to transition to the next era of computing and connected devices, which we will wear and will command using our voices, gesture and touch. The transition from smartphones to smart wearables and invisible interfaces — earbuds that have biometric sensors and speakers; rings and bracelets that sense motion; smart glasses that record and display information — will forever change how we experience the physical world.”
It’s more important now than ever to integrate the digital with the physical. Brands must work towards “experience orchestration” — combining unique and distinct “instruments” in order to deliver a full-sensory experience. Make a conscious effort to tell a unified story with every channel. Tools like the 5 Whys and other Design Thinking principles are great ways to help you investigate how best to connect with your customers (i.e., why do we need an app? VR? A chatbot?) Invest in key innovations that best fit your voice. And if you decide that invisible interfaces are your thing, it’s probably not a bad idea to go ahead and start thinking of the actual “voice” too.
2. Equal but not the same
One of my favorite parts of the conference was listening to Melinda Gates and a panel of highly qualified women make a call to action for a change in workplace culture. Create equal opportunity for young people, women, and people of color to “create a future of breakthrough innovations open to anyone who dreams of having them.” I whole-heartedly stand in solidarity with these women and, as a designer, take serious the fact that equality means so much more than sameness.
Equality doesn’t negate the need to empathize with those that are unlike us, to celebrate and design according to our differences. Through analytics and globalization, we know more about our audience than ever before — what language they speak, their cultural context, how they respond to certain tones or messages. We can understand these difference without leaving the house. For instance, most young kids today can comfortably make commands of Alexa — while adults struggle to learn the lingo. How will designers use these nuances to their benefit, across generational and cultural divides?
Huatong Sun, a SXSW panel speaker in her book “Cross-Cultural Technology Design” puts it this way,
“Individual users are the heroes of this era of participatory culture…They are not passive users but active designers who shape, redesign, and localize an available technology to fit into their local contexts…The fact that a user would use technology according to his or her lifestyle raises intriguing questions for cross-cultural design: How can technology be designed as both usable and meaningful to culturally diverse users? How can we strike a balance between local cultural ethos and individual subjectivity in a design? How could such a design appeal to a local context without stereotyping the local culture in an essentialist fashion?”
It’s our duty and privilege as designers in this era to use the tools at hand to make unique and meaningful experiences that people of all ages, all over the world, can learn and love. And maybe also, create new tools that extend our capabilities and improve the lives of people for whom we design.
3. Challenge the limits
In her talk “Beyond Design Process: Designing the Intangibles” Carissa Carter from the Standford d.school, made a call to “navigate ambiguity.” There’s no better sentiment to sum up our feelings on the future. How do we determine what can best move our business forward, whether that be machine learning, AI, or blockchain? How can we move into this next era of computing in full confidence that the platform we’ve partnered with will be right for our business? For our customers? The key is to use these learning technologies as an extension of what you do well, and not to replace the process completely.
One company that excels in this algorithm-human partnership is Stich Fix, an online retail and delivery company. Human stylists partner with smart and consumable data about their clients, data that relies on the combination of machine learning, AI, and natural language processing. This technology is an extension of what the stylists are already doing — learning about their clients, extending empathy by way of perfectly curated collections, and providing a recommendation based on evolving styles, sizes, and expectations.
The good news is that it’s not difficult to get started. Established companies and startups alike can leverage off-the-shelf solutions from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Alphabet in order to expand their databases, train models, or house data. Identify the best partners to help you expedite and experiment with these technologies so you can fail faster than the competition.
SXSW fosters innovation by setting up the intersection of industries. So much of what makes the festival a success is the ability to bump up against those that are not like yourself and be willing to swap experiences. I learned so much from the keynotes, the seminars, and the carefully crafted panel discussions. However, I would argue that what made SXSW unique for me was the friendship kindled in line at the party, the conversation over ramen with a local actor, or the Uber shared with a solar strategist from Switzerland. Those are the more profound and personal interactions that I will remember throughout the year. Until next time….
