Designing the Future at Google Creative Lab! 🤖 (Translating Tech to Humans)

So one thing that kept coming up while learning about your career was this idea of translation, like translating technology into human experiences, business challenges into creative opportunities and ideas into things people can connect with.

Has becoming a creative leader changed the way you think about what creativity actually is?

No, I mean, I think that really is the heart of it.

I think if we are successful in what we're doing, we are essentially creative translators.

We're taking things that feel either hard to understand or we're taking sometimes even business objectives.

We're taking people's hopes and dreams for the future of their business and trying to translate that into something that people can either get excited about about or understand better.

But yeah, I feel that that is very much at the heart of what we do.

During your time at Google Creative Lab, you were helping people understand technologies that didn't yet have an obvious place in their lives.

Looking back, what was the creative challenge of introducing people to something they didn't even know they needed to understand?

Yeah, I mean, I think at the core of all of this is the idea of empathy.

And I think if you meet people where they are and have a good understanding of maybe what their hesitations are, what their needs are, what could actually help transform their lives, day-to-day life, that you're on the right track.

So at Google Creative Lab, we were actively creating the future, as cheesy as that sounds.

But we were responsible for helping people understand how this technology was going to have these massive impacts in their lives.

And sometimes it was about things like solar technology.

And, you know, how we can better use the data that Google has from Google Maps, as well as, you know, the hardware understanding and the software understanding.

All of that, how does that translate into a product that will actually like help people understand? from a business standpoint, but also from an individual standpoint, like power their lives.

We were working on early, early machine learning.

It was before AI was such a common term and we were thinking about it as machine learning and trying to help people understand what it meant to for machines to learn and how to actually teach machines at the same time, and what the benefits potentially were for this.

We were working on helping connect this to cancer research, to the workplace itself, to translation.

So it was really all about helping people get a sense of how the world might change in the not-so-distant future, and now we're seeing that change today.

So it was very fascinating to kind of be there at the very beginning.

And, well, machine learning and AI has had a much longer history than that.

But to be there at the beginning of this chapter, to try to personify it in some ways.

We were working on the Google Assistant at the time, which was a guide that was kind of helping people navigate AI.

all their all their tools and how do you what kind of personality does that want what kind of interaction design does that want all of those kinds of things down to the kind of stories that we wanted to tell to try to make these things you know dimensional and real for people.