Designing the Future with Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley from Stanford's d.school
In this episode of We Are Not Doomed, we delve into the transformative world of design and its implications for our future with special guests Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley from Stanford's d.school. Carissa, the Academic Director, and Scott, the Creative Director, share their insights on how design can address some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including climate change and technological advancements. They discuss their book, "Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future," and highlight how speculative fiction can help us envision and prepare for future possibilities.
One of the key themes of the episode is the role of emerging technologies like AI and synthetic biology in design. Carissa and Scott emphasize the importance of understanding these tools, not just at a technical level but as mediums that can shape our world in profound ways. They also explore the concept of "histories of the future," speculative stories that imagine future scenarios and their impacts on society. These narratives help designers think beyond the present and consider the broader implications of their creations. The episode is a hopeful and inspiring look at how design thinking can lead to innovative solutions and a more sustainable future.
Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:07:08 - Describing the Book: A Designer’s Perspective
00:07:52 - Histories of the Future: Speculative Fiction in Design
00:10:24 - Mammoth De-extinction: Exploring Future Ecosystems
00:14:59 - AI in Design Education: Tools and Implications
00:16:40 - Emerging Technologies: Beyond Traditional Mediums
00:24:34 - The Role of Designers: Healing Gaps in Systems
00:31:53 - Climate Change Impact on Food Systems
00:32:42 - Optimism in Technology and Human Ingenuity
Links:
Episode Transcript:
Carissa Carter (00:00):
There are lots of differences in how we approach problems. Let's learn from that and collaborate more value each other, skillset more. And I'll go out and say it. We should not put the solving of all of our technological problems, our climate problems in the hands of the people that have caused them, right? We need all of us working on this.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:30):
Hello everyone, and welcome to We Are Not Doomed. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change every day. We are not doomed. As produced by Puddle Creative, we are a full service podcast production agency. And I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer today. My guests are Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley. Carissa and Scott are both with the Stanford D School. Carissa is the academic director and Scott is the creative director. The Stanford D School has a master's and a bachelor's program in design, and they take a multidisciplinary approach to design, thinking about design in all different fields and careers. Scott and Carissa recently, co-authored a book together called Assembling Tomorrow, A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future. In it, they cover topics such as AI and other advancements in technology, social media, synthetic biology, and of course climate change, which is what we focus on in today's interview.
(01:36):
I was really interested to talk to them about a part of their book called Histories of the Future, which are little stories in their book describing something that might happen in the future as if it has already happened. And looking back on how it changed our culture, they talk a lot about some of the work that their students are doing to fight climate change with things such as palm oil. It's a really interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. If you like it, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and follow the podcast. Alright, here's the interview. So I want to welcome Carissa Carter and Scott Doley to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here guys.
Carissa Carter (02:22):
Thanks for having us.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (02:25):
So Carissa, you're the academic director at the Stanford D School. And Scott, you're the creative director there, and you've written a book together called Assembling Tomorrow, A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future. And we're going to talk all about the book today, but I want to first just get some background. So for people who don't know, I dunno who wants to field this question, but maybe you can talk about what the Stanford D School is and what the program is there.
Carissa Carter (02:58):
Sure. The Stanford D School, we are on Stanford's campus obviously, and we teach design to Stanford students and to people beyond Stanford's walls. So on campus we have an undergraduate design degree, a master's design program, and also a whole suite of courses that students from all over the university at any level of their education can take. And then we have a number of professional programs for people in the workplace, in social sector organizations, et cetera, that they can come and learn and take workshops with us as well. We also put out a series of books of which assembling tomorrow is one.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (03:45):
Nice. And when you say, so I'm just imagining students who go through this program when you say design is this, I know a little bit from the book kind of your all encompassing view of design, but what kinds of jobs are people going into and what kinds of design are people studying?
Scott Doorley (04:07):
We think of design very expansively. It's really a way to find the possibility in a situation and then make something that changes the circumstances in that situation. So it's a process, it's a way of approaching work. We also teach students very granular things like how to work with digital technology or how to work with manufacturing, but the real approach is to try and find a problem worth working on and something to make that's going to change that problem. So the students will go on to make anything from a musical instrument that teaches you how to play music to a systems level approach to using palm oil production, to curb climate change. So it's a very broad range, but what we do is kind of encourage the students to find the niche that they're going to be really good at within that bigger picture of all the ways design shows up in the world.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (05:05):
Wow, that sounds really cool. So assembling tomorrow, talk to me about how you guys collaborated on it and what the book is about.
Carissa Carter (05:16):
I think we've both been working on the themes within this book for over a decade in some ways, like threads of emerging technology work that we were doing back in 20 16, 20 17. And we were putting out new tools for using emerging technologies in analog ways that work from long ago amalgamated into, oh wow, this is something really important to be talking about, to come together to share within a book like this. And we each have many threads along front that we worked on in our classes with each other, with others at the D school and beyond. And when it came time to be putting the idea for a book like this together, the natural thing that designers do is you put up the palette of possibilities. Here's all the things that we care about that we like to show up in there. Scott and I had many a big expansive session trying to figure out, okay, the book could be about these four themes. It could also be about these 10 things, or we could look at it this way. We did a lot of framing and reframing. This was really an active synthesis for us in concretizing what we value, what we know is important, where we see design going. And it was a real opportunity and privilege to be able to put pen to paper together to see that come to life.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (06:57):
And Scott, maybe you can answer this question. If you're at a cocktail party or something talking to people who are not in your field at all, how would you describe the book to them?
Scott Doorley (07:08):
Yeah, the main thing is we can all feel that things seem to be going haywire in every dimension at once. Yes, we have climate change, but also there's political unrest and then there's all this emerging technology and we're just wondering why is this happening? And if it is going to continue to happen, which I think we've got a couple decades of a lot of change right now, it feels like what can we do about it? How can we think about things differently? To be able to take a designer's eye and see how the things that we put out into the world change the world and change us? How can we look at that differently to kind of pull possibility out of all this turmoil? It's kind of the main thrust.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (07:52):
Nice. So diving into the book a little bit, I just want to kind of highlight some things for people to maybe get them interested. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting was kind of peppered throughout the book, you have these sections called History of the Future that almost read a novel sometimes or a little fiction. Well, maybe you can explain what the histories of the future are and if you could pull out an example, I would love to chat about your favorite one or one you talking about.
Carissa Carter (08:35):
We're so excited to talk about the histories of the future.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (08:41):
Yeah,
Carissa Carter (08:44):
Yeah. I mean they are fiction. So each history of the future and the entire book is a piece of speculative fiction. And we did that because we all know that every single design in the world begins as a fiction. It has to be imagined before it can be created. And so what those fictions are, the histories of the future in our book are us imagining future worlds and trying them on. And sometimes one of those fictions looks at something that's highly climate related. We have one story that is plum in the middle of the book called On the Mammoth step, and it really envisions a world in which the mammoth de-extinction effort has been successful to a certain degree. And then there's a series of jobs that go along with maintaining our ecosystem if that was to come to pass. And so what does that mean if there's somebody that has a job of really programming an entire biome, who are all the stakeholders that you have to consider if that's under your purview, you have to consider not only the countries that are within that biome, but also the organizations that operate within it, the land, the plants who has a voice, where does the environment get equal voting rights to people?
(10:24):
And so that's just one example of one of these histories of the future, but we use them to try on possibilities.
Scott Doorley (10:33):
And the reason fiction I think was so important there is because take that mammoth step, I mean mammoth de-extinction is a thing. People are working on that right now. And so you can just talk about that as an idea of, well, what if we had mammoths in the world? Or you can put 'em into a situation and then say, okay, now that we have mammoths, what other things have to happen and why do we have them and how are we going to work with them? So writing the stories and then reading them forces, you get it almost into the details of daily life in a way that you wouldn't be able to get into it if we were just sort of postulating about what might happen. And so for us, it was a great exercise and I think hopefully in the book they come across as like, wow, we're talking about day-to-day life and how it'll change when these really weird things that we're bringing to the surface happen
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (11:30):
That brings, I feel like two things are going through my mind when you're talking about that. Of course, this podcast, we focus on a lot of climate change issues. And so one of the things that I wanted to ask about was just that in just design climate change is kind of affecting every aspect of our lives now in terms of how our jobs are, in terms of how our lives are. And Scott, you were saying earlier about we're entering this time where there's just a lot of change in general and a lot of those societal changes, political changes are also interwoven into climate change as well. But one of those is technology and ai, which is very buzzy right now. But I think the history of the future, it seems to me that there's a lot of AI tools now that seemed only bound by what we can imagine to do with them rather than being bound by the technicalities, the technical abilities of that, the system.
Scott Doorley (12:54):
Yeah, I mean, to some degree, a way to put that is it feels like the technology is getting ahead of our imagination. Even as we were writing this book, we would come up with ideas for those stories, the histories of the future, and then within five months that technology would emerge. So there's the first stories about resurrecting a loved one through ai, and when we wrote that, which is probably in 2020 that didn't exist by 2021, it existed. And that's just like, wow. It's outpacing our ability to imagine what's coming, which feels like a first. And I think with ai, just take any of the buzzy emerging technologies, what they're really doing is fundamentally changing how we relate to each other, how we relate to the environment, how we relate to the technology itself. And they're shifting all those relationships. So this example of a story that Carissa wrote, the mammoth step, that's technology or that's kind of nature becoming technology or technology becoming nature.
(13:59):
And then that opens up all kinds of weird, frankly, sometimes scary things. But then it also opens up all these opportunities. Well, we can nudge things in this way and maybe that'll help, but then it also creates all these impacts afterwards. And I think the main thing or the main tension, the thing we have to get over is how do we get up to speed on the impacts before they arrive? Because all the prior technologies, in fact, climate change itself is an example of a failure to recognize the impacts of what we were doing. And then even after we recognized it, a failure to really internalize that and do something about it. And these things, as we said at the beginning, they're going faster. So we're going to have to get ahead of those implications quicker and hopefully we can do it. This is a hopeful podcast. So I think there are some ways we could do it, which we can talk about, but that's kind of the crux.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (14:59):
So this is kind of going off on a tangent, but how do you think about AI in the design school in the Stanford D school? How are you using it today? How are you thinking about the putting guardrails on it in terms of letting it not get in the way of students learning and doing actual work and things like that?
Carissa Carter (15:28):
Well, AI really, it's a tool. It's a medium of making. And in the same way that we want our students to be able to quickly hack out a prototype made of cardboard or to build something out of wood or metal over in the machine shops or even create something with pixels on a screen and look at a user interface flow, you have to be able to know how AI works, how the different algorithms within ai, what does the classification type algorithm actually do? Because in order for the products that AI is creating to represent all of us, it has to be created by all of us. And so a mantra we like to use is, you don't have to know all the code, but you do need to know what that code can do, what it can enable. And so that's about really getting more literacy in these more emergent tools for making AI like synthetic biology, like blockchain, these very invisible materials.
(16:40):
This is another phenomenon that's very new, is that it used to be most of our mediums of making are things you can feel in your hands. So even if you don't know how to weld yourself, you know that somebody is melting a bead of metal to connect and fuse these other two bits. You can touch it and you get a sense for that. You can get a sense for how strong it is. And if that's broken, it's very visible, you know it see the crack, you feel that frayed edge. But when an algorithm goes awry, we often, we don't know right away, we see the effects of that crash later on based on what's happened because of it. So when we think about that within our classes, it's one, how do you learn how to build with these emerging technologies without having to get super deep into being the one that codes them? But then also where our responsibility as designers comes out is thinking through the implications both positive and negative. This is a kind what Scott was talking about just a second ago.
(17:58):
What's that first, second, third order, potential consequence. If your work is wildly successful, even if your work is successful, it's going to displace something else. It's going to alter a system out there. We often say your thing might not break, but it will break something else. And the more humble we can be and not approach, there's a tendency to want to think our creations will save the world. Our intentions are always great, but let's acknowledge that that doesn't mean that other systems won't be affected. So how do we get better at shepherding what we make into the future?
Scott Doorley (18:44):
And that may sound like focusing on how things break. It may sound like, I don't know, a little negative or something. It's not just let's have the big idea go out there. But actually that's where the magic happens. Design is in, when you're in design school, you learn over and over that constraints are the thing you're looking for. You want to find the limits, you want to find the thing that's the most important thing. And then the great beautiful designs that are these long lasting designs, whether that's mid-century furniture or some digital product or the iPhone or something. They come from really going right at your limits and right at those constraints. And if you can take those into the account from the beginning, you can make something you're super proud of. It's not just like, oh, I got this cool thing into the world. It made a big splash, but it made a big splash and it's functioning and am creating this thing that's actually benefiting people because I took all these breaking points into account. So it's actually my feeling about it is taking, breaking into account is actually a pretty positive, hopeful, exciting thing. It's just more honest.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (19:59):
Yeah. So talking about this podcast is about climate change. So maybe we could highlight if you want to talk about is there any students current or former that are working on projects related to climate change? I'm sure there are or portions in the book where you talk about this, there's lots of things people and companies are doing now days to combat climate change in terms of reducing emissions, but also there's lots of new technology about capturing carbon out of the air and sequestering it underground and things like that.
Carissa Carter (20:42):
Yeah, I mean it's worth, we also want to say Scott and I are both designers that care a lot about climate. We're not climate scientists. And we see that as a positive because we like to be, as designers, outsiders looking in at possibility because oftentimes you can get so mired in your own way of working that it takes a step back from your assumptions to see what's happening. So our classes often have projects that have a climate lens to them. One, one that is very recent, Scott mentioned it earlier, is called Lio, sustainable Palm Oil Solutions by two students, Kelly Redmond and Gabriela Dweck. And these two students were master students in our program. And really what they've aimed to do is to create an alternative for a palm oil. And palm oil is this oil that is in almost every single product that you use. For most of us, you used it when you washed your hair this morning, you probably consumed it, you brushed your teeth with it. It is everywhere. And in the creation of palm oil, there's a lot of destruction of palm forests primarily in the Indonesian area, and that's a very big problem to be working on as two students.
(22:27):
But they've been tackling it. They've been looking at coming up with a synthetic palm oil agent. They have partnered with different areas and ecosystems to figure out what is the impact on small holder farmers in Indonesia, where might this be used first? How do you work with big business that currently controls palm oil production? So it's a approaching this from a design standpoint, it means needing to work with climate scientists means needing to work and understand how does big business in this space work? It means having a real deep understanding for the farmers that have a range of types of incentives for maintaining their own forests. So it's a very designer sees many pieces of the puzzle and really needs to figure out where's the opportunity to intervene and they're really successful. I suggest everybody check them out and see how their work is progressing.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (23:41):
That's great. I think one thing that, you mentioned this a second ago, as designers, sometimes it's nice to be on the outside and not necessarily a climate scientist or somebody who's admired in the details. And that can honestly give you, you're almost starting from a place of optimism rather than sometimes probably, I'm imagining being, let's say I'm in the palm oil industry and I've been in the industry for many years. You sometimes have those blinders on and you can't see the possibilities. Whereas somebody can come in who's more fresh and see the whole entire system and say, well, why not? Why can't we change this thing? So I think, yeah,
Scott Doorley (24:34):
We see one of the jobs of a designer is to notice the gaps between things. So it might be like, oh, this thing isn't working with this thing quite well, so we're going to intervene there a lot of people, and we have a lot of students who do design as a way to innovate and breakthrough. There's another way to look at it too, which is to heal these gaps that are out there. Sometimes you do, if you're in the middle of it. I think about this with my own work all the time. It's so beneficial to have somebody else look at my work because I'm all emotionally caught up in it and I've been doing it for so long, I have certain ways of doing it, and I just miss these opportunities. And there are these opportunities everywhere, and they never go away because we live in a dynamic world, something's always changing. So as soon as something changes, a new gap opens up, and then you need somebody to come heal that gap, and then a new gap opens up and then you heal that gap. So it's a never ending thing, and it's really just a point of view of, well, we have to tend to this world that we've created. We're not just throwing things out into it and hoping for the best. And again, that's like once you get into that, it's like there's as much excitement in doing that as there is in creating the big breakthrough.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (25:50):
And I think another point of optimism here is for people listening, is that these are students who decided to work on a project like this and are making a huge difference in their little corner of the world, but that little corner of the world happens to be this invisible thing that actually touches so many corners of the world.
Scott Doorley (26:15):
And it is just so cool that they chose to work on that. It is an invisible thing, but everywhere, like Carissa mentioned, it's in toothpaste, it's in food, it's in shampoo, it's in everything. And what a great thing to work on. And I have to say, all the students right now, just for sort of optimistic point of view, they want to work on those problems. 10 years ago it was like, I want to make the app for the thing for the, and now it's like, I want to work on palm oil and how to bring harmony through the way that that's made, where most people aren't even thinking about that at all. But I do see a really strong trend among our students toward projects like that. Not to say that the other projects aren't great, it's just really exciting to see that they really care at that level.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (27:03):
So who is this book for and what do you want them to really take away from it?
Scott Doorley (27:13):
Of course, we want it to be for everybody. So if you're listening, it's for you. But I think when we talk about this and when we put ourselves into the shoes of who will benefit from this, I think it's for people who might not identify themselves this way, but they're people who are helping make the future happen. And there are a lot of people like that. So a teacher does that because a teacher is helping the next generation move through this life. A parent does that for the same reason. Business leaders do that because they're tending to organizations and nonprofits and governments that are really building the future because everything we make is for the future. It's just going to end up there because time just pushes it there. It's going to get delivered to the future no matter what. And then of course, designers, people who are making things because as soon as you make something, it really is, it's for the future fundamentally because you ship it today and then it's used tomorrow. So it's really just people who feel like they care about what's to come, which is a lot of people who are also doing that. They're engaged in that behavior already.
Carissa Carter (28:22):
The book is really filled with a bunch of techniques too, for the scene of the unseeable. And so if you feel stuck in the current way that you're operating and you want to try on some techniques to envision your own work in a new way, if you're having a hard time seeing if your sphere of influence affects climate and how maybe there's a technique in the book for you there, it's quite manageable no matter what domain of expertise you are in.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (28:59):
That's a great pitch for the book. So
Scott Doorley (29:04):
Write that down. Yeah,
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (29:06):
I'll send you the transcript and you can. Sounds great. So you mentioned earlier that you both obviously as people living in 2024 care about the climate. How does the climate affect you or climate change? How has it affected you? How do you think about it and what keeps you optimistic?
Carissa Carter (29:33):
Well, yeah, yeah,
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (29:35):
Sorry, there's three questions in one. Yeah, yeah.
Carissa Carter (29:42):
I mean, how does it affect us? We are in the San Francisco Bay area, part of the world, and we now have a wildfire season, which equates to a period of the year when the air quality is very poor. And I think this hit most of us hardest in the 2020 year when the fires were particularly impactful in this area. But we haven't had seasons without fire since it feels like a new normal that is not only important at the FireTime of year, but also creates different patterns in the way that you set up where you'll be throughout the year and how you create a clean airspace within your home. And if you have asthma, if others do, there are just new, all these subtler ways that trickles down across your life. So that's a very direct way that climate has affected us in this area.
Scott Doorley (30:50):
And it seems like too, everything, and I know everyone's experiencing this, and we're probably experiencing it less than a lot of places, but everything's a little more extreme. It's sort of not in the middle anymore. So we had five years of drought, and then we had two years of tons of rain, and then the first year after the tons of rain, there were just trees falling everywhere because they had dried out and they were loose, and then they were filling with water, and then the wind blew and they were just falling over. And so it just feels like we're in that world now. Also, I notice the way people talk about things feels a lot different to me now. Just even weather terms. We never had bomb cyclones, and I know that's a branding thing or atmospheric rivers, and it just feels like they just keep coming. So I think we're relatively in a good place, frankly. But you can feel it even here a lot.
Carissa Carter (31:53):
I mean even it definitely propagates to our food systems. I believe this is the second year in a row that commercial salmon fishing season has been canceled in the bay, and that has ripple effects. What we eat is changing because of that
Scott Doorley (32:15):
And the people working on it. I mean, we're definitely, and I think the sort of worrisome part is that it's just kind of constant shifts and you're kind of constantly reacting. And I think that can be very hard over time to deal with. I mean, imagine if your job, the season of your job gets canceled and that's fundamentally unsettling at the least.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:42):
Yeah. So what keeps you optimistic and keeps you getting up in the morning?
Scott Doorley (32:49):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different ways to look at it. I mentioned that students today really seem to care about these issues and they're smart enough to tackle them, and that's amazing. I think there's a lot of hope in the technology too, particularly if you take ai, A kind of really powerful thing about AI is the ability to predict things and sort of model things. And we are terrible as humans, as I mentioned earlier at predicting the effects of the things we make. So these tools could be used to model those effects, and there's the potential that we could stave them off. We also have a colleague named Drew Andy, who is a bioengineer, and he had a project a long time ago that was looking at how could you grow a house so you genetically engineer say a tree so that it grows in the structure of a house.
(33:40):
Now, I have no idea if this is possible or not. I think it's really cool, but it brings up a thing where if trees, the biomass, the carbon in trees comes out of the air, we don't think of that. It seems like it comes out of the ground, they grow out of the ground, but actually it's pulling the carbon out of the air. And sort of 90% of a tree is air is the carbon from the air, which is why they're so great at carbon capture. So you could imagine we could make huge sculptures that are great carbon capture machines, and maybe they don't even look like trees. Maybe there are other things that are optimized to pull the carbon out of the air. So there's a lot of potential for these kind of bizarre solutions that we wouldn't have really thought about before that could really create, could help us solve the problems that we created previously. So I think there's a lot of hope in the tech itself really.
Carissa Carter (34:36):
And then in parallel with hope in the tech, I see a lot of hope in the humans. So as a society, we are really beginning to value people who approach the world differently, that they think differently. They see opportunities because their brains are structured differently. Like Temple Grandin's an incredible ambassador of this, or Greta Thunberg, these people that are both advocates for what might be in terms of the world as well as the brains and the thinking behind what allowed them to get there. I think that's really paved the way for us to value a range of abilities in types of human. And there's so much untapped potential that it's one thing to have a way that your brain works differently, but even if you have different types of expertise, there are lots of differences in how we approach problems. Let's learn from that and collaborate more value each other's skillset more. And I'll go out and say it, we should not put the solving of all of our technological problems, our climate problems in the hands of the people that have caused them. We need all of us working on this, and that's what it's going to take. And I think that there has been a shift towards of seeing the possibility with that. And that's super optimistic too.
Scott Doorley (36:08):
And these things have all happened before in some way. So the industrial era created a lot of issues around the way people worked, right? There was a lot of exploitation in the way people worked, and then that created unions and unions came up with weekends. So we all have weekends because of the industrial era and the need to figure that out. I think the hope for me is like, can we notice these problems as they're coming and kind of come up with the proverbial weekend before we have to go through the exploitation to get there. And I do think people's consciousness seem to be in that space. Conversations like this are happening way more than they used to. So it's like you could see that we might get quicker at responding as well.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (36:59):
So Carissa and Scott, thanks so much for being on the podcast, and congratulations on your new book, assembling Tomorrow. Where can people go to find out more about you and the Stanford Dschool in your book?
Scott Doorley (37:15):
We have on the Dschool website, there's a book section, which is dschool.stanford.edu/books, and you can find it there.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (37:25):
Nice. Well, thanks for being on the podcast.
Carissa Carter (37:30):
Thanks for having us.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (37:34):
Thanks to Carissa and Scott for coming on the podcast, and thank you for listening to We Are Not Doomed. I'm Jonah Guile Neufeld with Puddle Creative. To find more episodes of the podcast, go to We Are Not doomed.com. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Until next time, have a great week.