John Maeda delivers the Design in Tech Report at SXSW Interactive 2015
Taken as a whole, the sweeping scope of topics discussed within the sessions on offer at SXSW Interactive formed an MRI-like portrait of the sub-currents coursing beneath the surface of our society. One of the dominant themes to emerge throughout the conference was the need to populate the tech, design and creative industries with makers and leaders who reflect the diversity of the audiences and users they aim to serve.
This imperative for inclusivity among the ranks of our creative and technological influencers bubbled up early and often on Day 2 of our coverage, in a variety of milieu beginning with our first session of the day: What Does an Art and Design Incubator Look Like? The panel’s lineup of NY-based artists and innovators included Art Center alum Lisa Park (Fine Art), whose performance installation pieces deploy technology in the service of illuminating our emotional lives through the use of sensors and sound, in addition to three other artist-entrepreneurs whose creative practices straddle the intersection of the entrepreneurial, technological and creative spheres.
The panel’s moderator, Julia Kaganskiy, who directs New Inc, the first museum-led art and design incubator housed within New York City’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, kicked off the exchange explaining that New Inc was designed to offer an alternative to the techie archetype of the “hoodie-wearing bro-grammer” by creating an incubator that fostered the talents of a different kind of creative entrepreneur. “We hear about the need for more women and minority voices,” Kaganskiy said. ” But I’d like to add that we need more artists and designers in this space as well.”
Though each of the panelists’ projects captivatingly occupied the bleeding-edge frontier of experiential and functional art; the session’s most resonant ideas had more to do with the thinking around the rapidly evolving relationship between art, commerce and innovation that lead to the formation of the incubator. “Creativity is the most important leadership skill in an increasingly complex world,” Kaganskiy said. “And because artists and designers are divergent thinkers, they’re able to explore a wider range of ideas, which often leads to innovation. This rabbit hole is deep and exciting.”
If there were an influencer to the influencers it would be Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker staff writer whose bestselling books on the sociology of success (Outliers) and the under-rated role of intuition (Blink) have infused the cultural conversation about the hows and whys we navigate contemporary society. So it should come as no surprise that crowds swarmed the airplane hanger-sized exhibit hall housing Gladwell’s conversation with venture capitalist Bill Gurley.
However, Gladwell had not come to SXSW to serve up another paradigm-exploding theory about, say, the enduring impact of increasing shift from face-to-face to screen-based communication. Instead, he showed up in his capacity as a journalist prepared to ask questions and listen to Gurley’s far-ranging expertise on the future of healthcare, transportation and the tech bubble.
Gurley, an early investor in Uber among many other hyper-successful tech startups, insists that it’s nearly impossible to overstate the transformative impact of transportation apps like Uber and Lyft. “For 80 years we grossly underestimated the demand for transportation services,” Gurley said. “Today we’re five times bigger than the entire limo market was when we started. Now it’s an alternative to taxis that’s safer, better and cheaper. We just got lucky with some of the demographic changes. Milllennials don’t give a shit about cars. They view cars as a utility, not as a social statement which is a huge sea change for north America. This is disruptive in a real sense. The economy may be dependent on something [i.e. the automotive industry] that is about to be devastated. But I think that’s true of everything that changes. Amazon causes problems for bookstores. When something changes you get the biggest standard of living change for the whole populous.”
Gladwell wrapped up the conversation with the one question everyone wants to ask a Silicon Valley venture capitalist: Where will we see the next big tech growth spurt? “In the video world,” Gurley said without missing a beat. “For a while I thought the forces wouldn’t be there to upset the apple cart around cable bundling. But it’s coming apart fast. YouTube and others aren’t very curated. It’s not easy to find things. We’re going to see some cool stuff coming online in that area very soon.”
As it turned out, the next keynote session would provide a window onto that future and it looked like it had been ripped from the pages of a Philip K. Dick novel. Meet Martine Rothblatt, the highest paid female CEO in America who launched the biotech firm United Therapeutics after founding Sirius Radio. She also happens to be an outspoken transgendered trans-humanist who advocates for technological immortality via robotics, artificial intelligence and mind cloning.
If that last bit sounds like science fiction, think again. Rothblatt is nothing if not an early adopter. And in this case that means creating a robot in the image of her wife that’s been imbued with a personality that mirrors the woman on whom she was based. “I think there will be continued advances in software that will eventually rise to the level of cognitive intelligence or artificial consciousness and it will be hard to tell if the software is alive with a human body or not,” said Rothblatt. “There are so many examples of science heading in the direction of AI. Cyber consciousness creates the greatest mirror humanity will ever develop to help us understand ourselves. We’ll eventually have a cyber clone of our own mind. Our identity will transcend our body. Younger people will say the mind clone is me too.”
Rothblatt, who recently published the book Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality, argues against the idea of the Singularity, which predicts a dystopian future dominated by machines and artificial intelligence. “It’s not us vs. cyber space,” insists Rothblatt, whose robot has been answering questions autonomously journalists for the Washington Post and New York Magazine. “If one person with a team of roboticists can get this far. What happens when all these makers in the world get together and put open source mindware and create really creative code? It’s completely inevitable.”
The day’s final event may have also been its most relevant to what we do here at Art Center. Former RISD president John Maeda made the case for the centrality of design in building the future described in many of the other SXSW talks described here in the first in what will be an annual series of Design in Tech reports. Over the course of his forty minute presentation, he built an argument for design’s “rapid ascension in the innovation economy. “Design has moved from a nice-to-have competency to a need-to-have competency,” Maeda said. “It’s the golden age of design in the technology industry for products that are consumer facing at a high user count.”
He supported his thesis with a battery of data visualization charting the growing dominance of design-centered corporations atop the Forbes 500 List, the widespread trend among Silicon Valley venture capital firms toward hiring in-house designers to direct investments in the innovation economy as well as the wider cultural adoption of well-designed devices. “You can’t find an algorithm for good design,” Maeda proclaimed. “Design is about combining great business thinking and engineering thinking. We’re moving from a world of capitalism to talentism.” Now there’s an argument for an Art Center education if ever there was one.
