Aug 28, 2026 · 13 min · 7 segments
In this episode of Overnight Success, I sit down with Savannah Kunovsky – Partner @ IDEO, where she leads innovation at the intersection of emotional intelligence, speculative design, and emerging…
Savannah KunovskyGuestChris JoannouHost
helped to popularize human-centered design and design thinking, which are basically methods of bringing in human perspective into helping organizations or systems or people figure out what to do what's next.
yeah and so to me what kind of blew my mind around like working with corporates and stuff like that that's just our sound
but is is how few of them actually talk to customers Is that just a common problem with enterprise worldwide? Is that a thing? Or is this my own experience?
And then it's also how much are you letting... what you're hearing actually change and shape your vision versus being really holding on tight to it.
And then there's another thing of, especially when you're working in emerging technology, which is the lab and the part of the IDEO that I run, a lot of the time we are designing products and experiences that nobody has any precedent to understand.
And same thing with some of the futuristic hardware that we work on or the future shapes of different organizations that might have different forms of technology.
So sometimes the human perspective on today is actually kind of like limiting.
And so we have to use more of those methods of sci-fi and of speculative design and, you know, bringing ideas to life.
Speculative design is basically the process of it's kind of what you see in sci fi.
So like, you know, somebody is imagining a future world and then different scenarios and different technologies inside of those future worlds and actually using that as part of how we inform like.
helped to popularize human-centered design and design thinking, which are basically methods of bringing in human perspective into helping organizations or systems or people figure out what to do what's next.
yeah and so to me what kind of blew my mind around like working with corporates and stuff like that that's just our sound
but is is how few of them actually talk to customers Is that just a common problem with enterprise worldwide? Is that a thing? Or is this my own experience?
And then it's also how much are you letting... what you're hearing actually change and shape your vision versus being really holding on tight to it.
And then there's another thing of, especially when you're working in emerging technology, which is the lab and the part of the IDEO that I run, a lot of the time we are designing products and experiences that nobody has any precedent to understand.
And same thing with some of the futuristic hardware that we work on or the future shapes of different organizations that might have different forms of technology.
So sometimes the human perspective on today is actually kind of like limiting.
And so we have to use more of those methods of sci-fi and of speculative design and, you know, bringing ideas to life.
Speculative design is basically the process of it's kind of what you see in sci fi.
So like, you know, somebody is imagining a future world and then different scenarios and different technologies inside of those future worlds and actually using that as part of how we inform like.
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