Inspiring the future of design at IxDA’s Interaction 23 conference
Three members of Zalando’s product design community share their takeaways from Interaction 23, a design conference that focuses on tomorrow’s design challenges.
Our role as Product Designers is all about creating meaningful experiences, and the deeper we explore our craft, the greater the scope of that meaning becomes. A holistic approach leads us to consider the impact of design on culture, technology, and the environment. IxDA’s Interaction 23 conference, which took place in Zurich in March 2023, created a space to discuss how we can ethically move forward as an industry, combining our skills and expertise with advanced technology to solve the hard problems. Over four days of workshops and talks, the brightest minds in interaction design examined themes such as design ethics, decentralization, the environmental impact of technology, and decision-making processes.
“Interaction 23 not only brought together designers but design thinkers and critical theorists to help contextualize the discussions,” says Stephanie Marie Cedeño, who attended the conference with fellow Product Designer Santiago Camargo and Principal Product Designer Kim Does as ambassadors of Zalando. “As the co-organizer of the Machine Learning Design Club at Zalando, I was especially curious to gain some expert context on the AI topic.”
The trio, who are part of the Connected Network (B2B), Zalando Lounge (B2C), and Partner Tech (B2B) teams respectively, were the lucky winners of a Zalando design community raffle — one of the ways we ensure our community members can benefit from these key industry events. “I am always looking to open my mind, so attending was a great opportunity for personal development,” Kim reflects.
From solving the “wicked problems” to planet-centric design and the words on everyone’s lips, artificial intelligence: read on for Santiago, Kim, and Stephanie’s biggest takeaways from their horizon-broadening Interaction 23 experience.
Solving the “wicked problems”
Purpose begets meaning. To create a better world, we need to start by solving problems that matter. The work of Zalando’s Size & Fit team is a great example of a cross-functional endeavor to make customers’ lives easier, while significantly reducing CO2 emissions through fewer size-related returns. Taking design’s potential to do good a step further, Daniel Burka’s Interaction 23 talk asked if designers can not only improve lives but save them. Noting that public health programs affecting millions of patients in places like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Nigeria are largely untouched by professional designers, Burka highlighted the enormous potential of bringing user-centered design principles to large-scale public health programs.
“Daniel Burka’s health initiative, Resolve to Save Lives, is super interesting,” says Santiago. “He’s working with a very talented team of designers in rural places to fix the complex, interconnected problems that are referred to as ‘wicked problems.’ He made the case that maybe we are focusing too much on how to make better household items and not on the really hard problems that need more designer eyes.”
From human-centric to planet-centric
For design to be truly human-centric, it must also be planet-centric. Samuel Huber’s talk, Prototyping for the Planet, called for designers to recalibrate their ways of working and craft in consideration of design’s impact on the ecosystem. “The talk opened my mind and made me realize that, even in my day-to-day work, there are things I can do,” says Kim. “All it requires is a mindset shift for us to start challenging traditional ways of working, design for the better, and advance the industry.”
Working with AI, not against it
Not so long ago, the idea that artificial intelligence might take our jobs seemed pretty implausible, or at least too far away to seriously care about. But with the recent explosion of AI tools, and their shockingly rapid advancement, the fear of being displaced by machines has begun to enter the minds of even the most skilled professions. However, as Santiago reflects, the way forward is not to compete with AI, but to join it.
“A lot of my, and the audience’s, questions to speakers asked them to address the topic of AI. If this technology will eventually replace some people’s jobs, how are they upskilling them so that they can utilize this tool? It’s not a matter of getting rid of the old thing and bringing in the new thing; it’s more about making a transition. The actual future of AI is the increased potential to build our creative capabilities by removing the more menial tasks that consume our time. Though we are still very far from the displacement issue, we should familiarize ourselves with the tools and plan ahead.”
Jason Edward Lewis’ talk, Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences, argued that artificial intelligence does not so much have an ethics problem as it has an epistemology problem. ‘Epistemology’ is a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge. He asked how we might take inspiration from Indigenous knowledge frameworks that situate knowing within a web of relationships among humans and non-humans. And how we might consider integrating advanced computational practices, such as AI, into traditional knowledge frameworks to the benefit of Indigenous communities. “It was a powerful and beautiful way to imagine what a decolonial design practice can be when designing for non-human intelligences,” says Stephanie. “By offering a set of strategies, Lewis propelled us into imagining the futures we want to create.”
Seeing the big picture
Stephanie reflects that one thing she loved about the conference was that the speakers were not only inspiring, but proposed ways forward. “It is good to be confronted with difficult issues that we don’t necessarily think about every day. There’s something productive in discomfort; it lifts our view and starts important conversations and lines of inquiry that we can implement in our work.”
“It was good to get a heads up so that we can work backward from future scenarios, prioritizing issues like ethics and the environment,” Santiago adds.
Kim agrees: “The conference jarred me out of the comfortable day-to-day and pushed me to step back a little to consider how we impact the world and how we can do better. It was also amazing to be exposed to designers working in many different fields — a lot of smart people!”
Next, read how we are designing a more accessible future at Zalando: Principal Product Designer Layla Martins shares how her team applied the 4D process to optimize accessibility enablement at Zalando Lounge.
