Design consciousness, lean startup, and AI academy

A weekly round-up—3 discoveries, 1 reflection and a quote worth remembering in the innovation & design space—for leaders invested in digital transformation.

By Maish Nichani

External happenings

AI needs design consciousness

Filipe Nzongo’s article on Medium nicely sums up what Don Norman describes deeply in his new book, Design for a Better World. Filipe introduces design consciousness as “the pressing need to consider an ethical and socially responsible approach when developing and implementing artificial intelligence (AI).” He prescribes additional perspectives to consider when designing products and services:

• Imagine: Include people and the planet as part of your discovery process
• Design: Ground your design by the impact on people and the planet for short, medium and long-term
• Build: Create your product with ethics in mind
• Evolve: Embrace dialogue as a tool to ensure your AI product serves the greater interest

O’Reilly?AI Academy

You know AI is going mainstream in a big way when O’Reilly starts an academy just to teach AI to business executives and employees. I feel this is just a start. There will be many more offerings in this space. Kudos to O’Reilly for leading the charge.

Steve Blank foresees an acceleration of his “lean startup” approach

Steve Blank created the lean startup movement, mainstreaming terms like ‘minimum viable product (MVP)’ and ‘pivots’. Today, he sees the advancements in AI as a way of supercharging the lean startup method.

“It’s not hard to imagine this being automated by AI: In the morning, I could create 100 digital archetypes of customers and populate a website with 1,000 images of a product they might like. By the afternoon it could run A/B testing with thousands of virtual tests. The foundational ideas are the same—but when a machine runs it, versus a human being? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Internal reflections

Last week, I was in Bangalore, India, to attend the DesignUp 2024 conference. I wanted to capture the place's design zeitgeist. I was pleasantly surprised. Design, in all its forms, is thriving in Bangalore. Over 1,000 people attended the event. Yes, you could not avoid the talk about the “Figmatisation” of design, but there were mature themes as well. What stood out for me was the localisation of design—solving for local community and business needs by adopting local culture and history. Check out DesignUp’s LinkedIn feed and Jay Dutta’s wrap-up post.

Quote worth remembering

“Success is having stakeholders repeat your ideas back to you.”

- Ben Sauer at the DesignUp 2024 Conference on the power of clarity in communications.