My Key Takeaways from SXSW 2018

South by Southwest is a massive festival/conference with countless events ranging from country music concerts to VR cinema. Since it’s only humanly possible to attend about 2% of these everyone has their own personal experience. What follows is a recap of mine.

Designing for Humanity

Bruce Mau, Chief Design Officer at Freeman, is somewhat of a design guru. In his career he has taken on some of the toughest design challenges imaginable taking many shapes and sizes. To name a few he has taken on the challenge of redesigning the national identity of Guatemala and has been tasked to redesign Mecca – the actual pilgrimmage destination in Saudi Arabia – to make sure fewer people died during the Hajj.

Mau @ SXSW — Bruce Mau Performing in Ballroom EFG at The Austin Convention Center

In his talk “Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Massive Change” he stressed the importance of the human element in design – taking into consideration both designers and designees (the users). He’s a firm believer in sustainable and ethical design which contributes to the greater good of society and nature. Designers should be mindful of their surroundings and consider the impact of their decisions. Here’s the complete set of his 24 principle manifesto for massive change:

An interesting insight to gain from Mau’s career is that he identifies simply with the broad title “Designer” without any prefixes or further clarification. Utilizing his talent, experience and knowledge of the design process he has been able to solve complex problems of many shapes and sizes ranging from corporate visual identities to large scale architecture and thus hasn’t specialized in any narrow field of design.

In his work for the Freeman corporation Mau believes in educating all employees regardless of title in keeping a designer’s mindset. The organization itself claims to create holistic brand experiences catering to all the human senses and has proven to do so by arranging a seamless SXSW festival this year.

Designing for Humans

Mike Pell, Principal Design Lead at the Microsoft Corporate Garage, introduced his talk “Envisioning Holograms For Storytellers & Explorers” with the following slide summarizing an important theme at this year’s SXSW. At a good deal of the events I attended ’empathy’ was brought up as one of the main values for designing responsible technologies in the future.

"People Are Always the Key. It is Never About Technology." — “People Are Always the Key. It is Never About Technology.”

Having empathy for your users also means acknowledging the diversity and varying abilities of those humans. Ayesha Zafar from WillowTree Apps gave an concise and inspiring pitch about the importance of App Accessibility at the Various By Design at Ignite SXSW session. One of her main points was that accessibility is often perceived by companies to pose an obstacle to creating great designs. But this attitude is built on myths and ignorance – if accessibility is mindfully considered and baked into a product from the beginning it does not make that product more difficult to produce nor less appealing to the target audience.

Myth 3: "Making my app accessible will make it ugly" — Myth 3: “Making my app accessible will make it ugly”

Designing for humanity

Tanarra Schneider from the Chicago Office of Fjord gave a nuanced and critical analysis on current and upcoming trends within the world of tech in her session entitled “Fjord Trends 2018 Tension as Opportunity”. As the title suggests Fjord believes technology to pose both opportunities and threats to humans in general. She especially stressed the importance of considering the social human context before beginning to design and develop new technologies – although placing hidden cameras inside children’s toys is possible it may not be preferable or responsible. A great overview of Fjord’s trend analysis as well as their advice on how to utilize them as a company can be found at trends.fjordnet.com

The Future of AI – Good or Bad?

Whereas Schneider chose to deliver a very nuanced and cautious view on technology, the two hosts from the “Alexa Stop” podcast, Robert Belgrave & Jim Bowes, had an entirely positive outlook on the future in their session “The Best is Yet to Come, Digital Renaissance”. These guys believe technology has a massive potential to increase the wealth and well-being of the human race in what they believe to be the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Integral to this idea is the looming 5G mobile network, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and advances within MedTech.

Belgrave & Bowes @ SXSW 2018 — Robert Belgrave & Jim Bowes from “Alexa Stop” discussing the positive potential of technology at the Austin Fairmont Hotel

A great example of their optimism was the idea that robot surgeons in the near future will be able to learn cumulatively and collectively from all operations performed worldwide. When making this point they shared this incredible video of the “da Vinci Robot” stitching up a grape:

Last but not least I was lucky/early enough to get a ticket for Elon Musk’s Q&A session “Elon Musk: Answers Your Questions” which was moderated by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan and turned out to be mainly about his Mars adventure. His view on technology is quite the contrary to that of Belgrave & Bowes and surprisingly sinister. He firmly believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will pose a fatal threat to humanity within a foreseeable future – which is the main driver for his Mars ambitions at SpaceX. According to Musk the human race desperately needs a place to escape when earth becomes inhabitable due to the threat from AI. Although Musk seemed a bit hungover the audience was trembling with excitement of being in his company. Towards the end the session took an interesting turn when Musk’s brother joined and the three men on stage began to sing and dance.

Dancing Elon — Elon Musk put on his cowboy hat before concluding his Q&A session singing a country song with Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan and his brother Kimbal Musk

All in all my first SXSW experience was a blast and really raised my awareness of the societal impact of design and technology. The future really is what we make it so as designers we are obliged to make it a good one.