Fast Forward at One Madison with IBM and Debbie Millman

Brought to you by Atlassian, AI-powered collaboration software that makes the impossible possible.

Hello listeners, I'm Brendan Vaughn, Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company. Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to tell you about an exclusive deal on Fast Company Premium. This gives you full access to everything Fast Company has to offer. We publish dozens of subscriber-only articles every month, taking readers deep inside the company's driving innovation. You'll also get every story we publish in the print magazine, my Sunday morning premium newsletter, and soon access to Fast Company journalists at subscriber-only virtual events.

If you sign up right now at fastcompany.offer, it's only $19.99 for a full year of coverage. That's a 40% savings on the annual subscription price. For more details, go to fastcompany.com slash offer or follow the link in the show notes. Brought to you by Williams. We make clean energy happen.

Welcome to another special episode of Most Innovative Companies. Joining me again is Mansway to Venture CEO and Chief Content Officer, Stephanie Mette. Just a note for some of our listeners, Mansway to Ventures is the parent company of Ink and Fast Company. Hi, Stephanie. Welcome back. Glad to be back. So you recently moderated a panel as part of a series called Fast Forward at One Madison, a couple of other episodes of this are already out. And you spoke with Debbie Millman, a writer, designer, educator, and host of Design Matters. What did you two chat about?

It was a great conversation. So for some context, as you know, the speaker series is a partnership between Fast Company and IBM, and we speak with select tech and design luminaries. And as you said, our third guest was Debbie Melman, and we chatted about the future of design, from the role of generative AI and creativity to the evolving relationship between design and business. And I kicked off the conversation by asking her about some of the technology she uses to get her job done.

Well, I should make it clear that I came up through the ranks of design beginning in the 80s. So I've been doing this for a very long time. And I was probably the last full generation of designers that were taught on the drafting table with exacto blades and with waxing machines and drafting tables and

And I can go on and whack sentimental for the entire time we have to talk, but I won't. I had a bit of difficulty making the transition to computers initially, mostly because I did everything by hand. And I liked doing everything by hand. And I'm also an artist. And so for me, it was all kind of blurring into the same discipline.

So I've struggled, I did struggle for quite some time with the, you know, transition to Cork Express and then the transition to all of the Adobe suite. But then in 2018, I was actually at type of Berlin. And I had a conversation with Oliver Jeffers, the great illustrator, writer, designer. And he sort of asked me to come over and he said, you want to see my latest book, the work that I'm doing for my latest book. And I was like,

Of course, Oliver Jeffers is of the day the crayons left, that whole franchise. That's Oliver. And expecting him to take out like a sketch pad, he took out his iPad and showed me what he was doing with an Apple pencil in Procreate. And suddenly my life was transformed.

I suddenly saw how I could take everything that I was doing that was handmade and even work that I did years ago for a fast company when I was working with Florian Batchelder. I did a piece on world changing ideas. I did it all by hand. Cut out felt letters by hand. Suddenly my life transformed because I could make everything by hand in Procreate on an iPad with an Apple pencil.

So that is really my go-to device now, and I do everything, everything that way.

And how have you started to think about the role of AI in creativity? In addition to being a teacher and a designer and an instructor, you have a great podcast design matters. If none of you have checked it out, please find it where you find your podcasts. You talk to a lot of folks about AI and creativity and AI and design for the designers in the room, but also for the technologists in the room. How should they be thinking about AI?

I think they should be thinking about it a lot. And I'm actually glad I mentioned that sort of previous bit of history about my journey as a designer with technology because I want to make it very clear that I'm hearing the exact same arguments against AI as I did against the Macintosh computer 40 years ago.

The exact. 40 years ago, when designers were starting to transition into using Apple computers to make their design work, no offense to IBM. Love you IBM. Love your stock.

One argument was that the computer was going to lose all of the soul in design, take all of the craft away, take all of the artistry away. I was very, very aware of what some of the great, great designers of that time were saying.

I became very good friends with several of them over the decades. I remember Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli, all just excoriating the possibility that any good design work could occur on a computer. I heard about all the jobs that were going to be lost.

There were some typesetting, some retouching, but there were hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been made as a result.

I wouldn't even have the career that I have in podcasting had technology not been fully incorporated into design. I didn't grow up thinking when I was a little girl, I'm going to be a podcaster when I grow up. That didn't even exist. So I think that in general, human beings hate change.

I often joke that the only people that like design changes are brand designers. No one else is going to a shelf and going, would you look at that? Tropicana changed their identity again. Really good opportunity to give them another shot. Nobody's thinking that. People are going to the shelf and thinking, why is that bottle different? Am I getting the same amount? I'm not getting the same amount. I am going to stop buying this brand now.

People hate change. They hate uncertainty. They hate not being able to predict the future. That we're hardwired into that. If you walked across the street, nearly got hit by a bicycle, your adrenaline would kick in and you would jump out of the way as fast as you could. You couldn't will yourself to

Adrenaline, kick in. Doesn't happen that way. It's all subconscious and involuntary. It's the same way we approach any change. How is this going to impact me? What am I going to lose? Am I going to be short changed? And so I think that while there are certainly lots of bad behavior that could be utilized or emphasized with AI,

I've seen enough in the last year and experimented enough in the last year to also see the vast possibilities that feel hard to imagine in an optimistic way because we've all been raised with the Terminator movies.

So talk a little bit about some of the experimentation you've been doing or that you've seen. The example, Jonathan cited of AI enabling designers to move into more original work is certainly something that we hear echoed across different functions. What are some of the things that are specific to design and AI that excite you?

I think that there's actually more opportunity to develop creativity with AI, at least from what I'm experimenting with and seeing than with actual writing, chat, GPT. And my students know this. We do an entire exercise on writing the ideal resume and the ideal cover letter.

If they use AI, I can almost always tell. First of all, no one under 25 uses the words hence or moreover. So it's a dead giveaway. What they also end up seeing is how the letters all begin to sound alike. You put in the prompt for a cover letter you're going to get the most popular cover letters.

So I find the design aspect of this much more interesting and engaging. But mostly for reference, to create an original idea, AI can't create an original idea. It could give you door openings to help you get to an original idea maybe faster. But it's not going to give you something that has yet to be imagined.

It's just going to give you existing patterns that they recognize, or they, it. I love that we all. I mean, everybody I know is calling AI they. There's something really spooky about that. But in any case, whatever it gives you. So an example that I can give you that I found really, really interesting. I have a book coming out in April. And it's a book about gardening.

And it features the entire book, our photographs and illustrations that I made. And they're all, and recipes. And recipes, yes, recipes for my wife.

So it's called Love Letter to a Garden. And it's about a lifelong quest to have a successful garden when I've struggled pretty much my whole life to like grow a shrub, like the most basic kind of foliage. And during COVID, I had a lot more luck because I had a lot more time. And I did a piece for the TED conference. I did an interstitial about gardening.

And it was all done using procreate in my drawings and my photographs. And somebody from Timber Press, a gardening imprint from Heshette, reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a book on gardening. I'm like, you don't want me to do a book on gardening because I am really the

worst gardener in the world if you would even call me a gardener. And they're like, no, that would be good. Talk about all your failures. I was like, OK, I could do that. And so it ended up becoming a semi-memoir in my journey through learning about the wonder of a garden.

And when I was a little girl, I'm a native New Yorker. My grandparents lived in Brooklyn. And they lived in a row house. And the row houses in Burrow Park all butted up against each other. So you had the back of one and the back of another. And then rather than just being a fence separating the two homes, there was an alleyway. And I'm getting to my AI story, I promise. But this back story is really important to this story.

when I was a little girl, I remembered vividly there being these giant trees, like a canopy of trees over this alleyway, and I remember running down the alleyway, and at the end of the alleyway was a waterfall, like a waterfall that just fell down in Borough Park, Brooklyn. This was so vivid to me, I was certain it was real.

And in 2008, when Google was able to give you an aerial view, I did a Google search on the address and looked at the satellite view and saw the trees. And they were there, just like giant trees, over setting the houses. But there was no waterfall. There was definitely no waterfall in Brooklyn. And I wanted to write this story. Now, I draw from reference. I'm not a good enough artist to be able to say,

OK, let's do a row house backyard series of homes with a waterfall at the vanishing point. There's just no way. So I went into mid-journey. I did a series of prompts, backyard, 1960s. Also, I couldn't get access to any of the backyards. I did actually go, but because I don't look like an orthodox Jew, everybody was really, really suspect of what I was doing there.

And I really wanted to say, can I just look at your backyard? Nobody was into it. So I went, I did this prompting, and none of them were exactly right, but I was able to piece it together like a David Hockney painting almost, and then draw from that. So first I drew it, then I painted it, and then I did a watercolor and sort of mishmashed them together. And I wouldn't have been able to do that without AI.

I couldn't have. There's just no way I would have been able to figure out how to draw a waterfall at the end of a city street in Brooklyn. So I feel like, and I was very clear about what I did. I wrote about it in the book that this was, I was helped along. So I think that there's opportunities, one of the biggest opportunities that I learned about last year, earlier this year, I did a panel

at South by Southwest where I was talking to doctors about how they were using AI to find patterns to isolate where Alzheimer's might be indicated in the neural pathways of the eyes. Think about what that could do for us as a species.

So I think like anything else, like any other technology available to us, it's us that is going to be the determinant of whether this is used for good or for evil. In the same way that there are no evil corporations, there are only evil people that work in corporations. And so I always have to think about whatever it is that we're talking about, thinking about, engaging with,

as humans positioning this thing in a certain way for other people to believe it is a certain way.

I want to let everybody know that we'll have time for some Q&A with Debbie, so please start to think about some questions you might have for her. It's interesting that you mentioned corporations. We're here at IBM, which was very progressive in its thinking around design, going back to the 1950s when Thomas Watson Jr. was the CEO. He was

the first person to establish, Jonathan mentioned this industrial design practice within IBM. And Thomas Watson hired Elliot Noise, the famous architect, to help figure out how to inject design into strategy. Fast forward to today, and certainly Fast Company and others have written about a sort of

cooling of corporate passion for design? Are you observing that as well? And what do you think is happening? I am. I think that trends have pendulums. But what concerns me about this particular trend, very few corporations do things altruistically.

If there are for-profit organization that lives and dies by Wall Street returns, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholder. And that is the priority. If design helps business, if design helps the bottom line, it will be embraced.

If it is a profit center, if it is a way to reengage consumers or engage them in a new way or reinvigorate them to an entirely new audience, then it will help an organization do well. So a lot of that depends on who they hire, who they work with, who they contract,

and how much of an investment they put into the initiative. They put the investment into the initiative. And then the designers have to do their part. Sometimes it's easier than others because of bureaucracies and politics within corporations. Corporations are some of the most difficult clients to have because they have to weigh both an audience that they are engaging through market research.

a stakeholder or a shareholder within an organization and Wall Street.

That's a lot of people. That's a big decision-making committee. So it's very, very difficult to make something that's going to break through existing patterns of recognition and really get people to notice something that they didn't notice before or intrigue them or engage them to at least try something. So yes, I do see it cooling, but I see that cooling because there was

a huge downturn in the supermarket brands during COVID. And then with inflation, that has also really, really impacted how much corporations are putting into design because their margins are so decimated.

So it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next eight years. But I've always said that the fast-moving consumer goods market is the first indication of what the design market is, what's going to happen to the design market. Same thing happened in 2008. Before the housing crisis, the market, the fast-moving consumer good market in design, corporate design, was really starting to change. And all of the brand design agencies were like,

What's going on? Why is this happening? Well, back then, price of salt, price of butter, price of milk, price of eggs. Everybody talks about how the price of eggs determined the presidential results. Well, that really, really represents the investment in design in an organization. And it's really hard to believe that they're that correlated, but they are. So it's now more important than ever that designers

really push to create the best possible design that will engage people in the most exciting way to really save the future of design in the next decade. No pressure.

G'day, we're Atlassian. We make team collaboration software like Jira, Confluence, and Loom, which power enterprise businesses around the world, including 83% of the Fortune 500. With Atlassian, you'll unlock AI-powered teamwork, which means more time doing the work that matters. In fact, our customers experience a 25% reduction in project duration per year.

So you'll have more time to listen to podcasts. Unleash the potential of your team at Atlassian.com. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N.com Atlassian. As clean, reliable energy demand increases at historic rates, one company is uniquely positioned to accelerate America forward. Williams, we have 116 years of know-how in powering progress, and we're ready to power the next 100 years of innovation.

Learn how our natural gas infrastructure is critical to power the future of AI and electrification at Williams.com.

Going back to AI though, will there be companies that say, well, we can do the same amount of work that we were doing with a fleet of designers, with a smaller number of designers, we'll just use mid-journey. We'll just use these tech tools that are available to us. We don't need this large staff because we are feeling pressure from Wall Street.

Does anybody here remember 99 designs? 99designs.com came out and they were essentially a logo factory. And everybody was really, really clutching their pearls over this one. This is going to destroy design. You could buy a logo for $5. Like, you get what you pay for. First of all, let them try.

You know, what are we gonna do, stand in the way? No, you can't do that.

Let them try. It's a lot harder than it seems. You can't just put in a bunch of prompts. One of the people that I think is doing it the best in advertising and design is an agency called Design Army, and it's Poom Left Abure, who's really got a stylized eye and did an entire campaign, which actually Fast Company really wrote about quite extensively. She did an entire ad campaign with Midjourney.

You'd never know, but it took her the time that our entire staff would have put into doing an advertising campaign. It took her doing the prompts and the revisions and then moving it all into Photoshop. I mean, it's gorgeous, but it's a tremendous amount of work.

So I know just enough to be dangerous. I don't want to give anybody the wrong advice. What I can say is that the people that I see using it are really skilled at it in the same way that you have to be skilled at using any technology. The big concern back in

1992, was that anyone with a computer can become a designer now? And then when Instagram came, anybody with an Instagram account can become a photographer. There's still lots of photographers. Even when television came out, this is going to end radio. No, it didn't.

There's a whole new industry called podcasting. So I think it's really going to be interesting to see what happens next. We're very bad as a species at imagining what could happen. We're much, much more adept at thinking about what won't happen because or what can't happen because. And I think they'll be good things and they'll be bad things, just like there is with anything.

We're going to go to questions in one second, speaking of good things and bad things. Best design of 2024 and worst design of 2024, in your opinion. Oh, okay. This is going to surprise a lot of people. I think the best design of 2024 is Jaguar.

I think it's fantastic. I think it's beautiful. I think it's like welcome to the 21st century, 25 years later. I think it's gorgeous. I think it's minimal. I think it's modern. I think it's doing everything it should be doing. No one likes brand design at first. No one. If they do, it's not pushed it far enough. And if everybody loves it right away, they'll hate it in 10 months, less than a year.

Worst design? Because I love these people. So I'm going to say there's a best design and a worst design from this agency just to be fair because I love them so much. Best design coming out of Pentagram this year was Reddit. OK? Gorgeous. Worst design was PayPal. Interesting. I just can't look at the P's anymore. I just can't. So there. Yeah.

Best packaging design of the best packaging redesign KitKat. Gorgeous. Really beautiful. And I'm really happy to say it's from my Elma Motta. It came out of Sterling Brands, which makes me so happy. I have nothing to do with them. I have no skin in the game. I'm just really, really happy to see that they did this gorgeous work.

Well, now I'm getting hungry. All right, questions from the audience. I think we have some mic runners. Let us go to, let's go to this gentleman in the, oh, a woman in the back right there. An extra, extra credit if you're one of my students. Yeah.

Okay, so my name is Sandra. I'm actually an educator. I'm an IT educator. So my question is, because I've been having a hard time as an educator, I work at a vocational high school with primarily males and I teach IT and I have a women demographic very small. My problem is to keep them engaged and I'm thinking about doing an AI project.

in spring. I want them to not be intimidated by technology since it's male dominant. What project should I introduce in them so they could be more encouraged to dwell into AI and other technologies? I do a project with my grad students, which I learned about through the great legendary designers Seymour Quast.

And he used to do this with his students to sort of break the ice and get them to know each other more quickly. And it's called creating a non-representational psychological self-portrait.

So you have to create a way to communicate who you are without actually using any photographs of who you are. And so this non-representational, so it's not about how you look, psychological, so it's about how you think.

self-portrait is really, really maximized by doing something technological as opposed to a collage, which feels really old-fashioned and boring. So I would recommend doing that and see what they can discover, and then they have to present it so they have to sort of declare more about themselves through the visual imagery that they find.

So just to clarify, is it like a storybook? It's basically a storybook about themselves. Does it use images? I would say it's more like a storyboard. OK. OK. Thank you. Love that. Good luck. Props to more quest. Let's go to the very far end of the room. And is there a mic there? Great. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. My name is Venuska. I'm from Brooklyn. And my question is... You live near a waterfall? No, I'm from Flatbush. Anybody from Flatbush, Flatbush? Okay, that's cool. Just me. So my question is, what advice would you give to a young entrepreneur who wants to start using AIs to run their small business? What do you want to use AI for? Communications. So in what way? You have to give me a lot more detail.

I'm just basically follow up email, sending emails out, recruiting people to the company and all that great stuff. So how will AI help you? How will it minimize the amount of effort that's a MailChimp or another one of those email marketing tools. WordPress has a good one too. Anyone that they have, how would that help in a better way? How would it create less friction and tension in your life?

Wow, it would save a lot of time to do other things, definitely. So what would you ask AI to do for you? What would it be doing that you currently do that you would want it to do better and faster? Sending emails out, recruiting people, stuff like basically emails, communication. So the interesting thing about design, technology, brands,

is that they don't exist on their own. They can't self-direct, at least not yet. They have to be directed by someone. So what would you be telling or prompting AI to do for you that would help you? Write a letter?

send emails, write a letter, send a text message. So send emails isn't something that is isolated only to AI. That could be scheduled on almost any emailing program.

But writing a letter, writing a really compelling letter, my recommendation to you first would be to write your own letter in your own words and inject as much of your soul as you can. Because the same way that I was saying that I can tell by the use of words like Hens and Moreover, that it's not human written.

What's missing right now from chat GPT and other generative AI programs is Sol. Put the Sol in first, let it wordsmith you after that. But it's not going to inject Sol. Even if you say, please inject Sol.

It doesn't understand that yet. And I don't know that it ever will. Nothing is going to replace your DNA. But then in first, then see what it comes up with. And then you can schedule your emails to go out whenever you want them to go out. Thank you so much. That was great feedback. Thank you. Can we get a microphone here in the front? We'll take these two questions here. We'll start here and then go to you.

Hi, really enjoying the conversation and your candor as well. Frankness. So I work in the intersection of artificial intelligence and also branding. So I just saw. Yes. Podcast audition started. So, you know, a lot of controversy, the Coca-Cola, all AI ad, a lot of backlash about that. Then Adidas just came out with a

and higher beginnings to end all AI. So they're like in sneakers, break dancing in the middle of like AI backdrops. And so I've just been seeing in the comments section is the truth of what people are perceiving these ads to be. And the common denominator is it doesn't resonate. It doesn't resonate. So what do you advise brands do to utilize AI in a way that would resonate?

Okay, how old would you say the public use of AI is? What do you mean? How old is it? How long has it been in sort of our consciousness in the market? Well, chat GBT, which launched before, you know, they were ready, was October 2021, right? And so to me, because I do all this research and, you know, I presented a fast company about AI.

2024 was supposed to be the year of mass AI adoption. It was not. And so now I think 2025 is sink or swim. So I think there's still a lot of people that are very confused and not really grounded in actual understanding of what AI is. If they're using it, they really don't know how to strategically use it. They dabble.

I'm just surprised every time how much people don't know what they don't know about. Well, that's because it's three years old. Right. And if anybody thinks that this is the end game, that this is it, that it's never going to get any better, that it's never going to get any more interesting, then they're

Not thinking about it enough. They need to think about it as this is an infant. We're seeing AI in its infancy. Think about design on the computer. Think about the little SE, was that what it was called? That little tiny box that we all had on our computer, on our desks in the 80s?

That's what we'll think about, think about how far telephones have come. Think about how, I mean, anybody remember an answering machine? I mean, I remember my dad telling me in the 80s when I got my answering machine, he was so appalled that I was so narcissistic that I needed to know who called me when I wasn't home. He's like, can't they just call you back? You know, now we check our phones 3,000 times a day. And that's a low number.

I think that we're at the very beginning of this technology. I think that it's very risky but also kind of courageous for anybody to be launching anything creative using this sort of prehistoric what we'll look back on and see as prehistoric technologies of AI. But I think it's great that people are trying it. The good news is is that most people hate the way it looks.

Most people are deriding the agencies or the companies that are doing it. That will change because there'll be more acceptance, there'll be more excellence, and it'll likely create a lot more jobs. I don't think it's going to eliminate jobs. I think it'll eliminate some jobs, and it's going to create a lot more in the same way that the computer did. And so while I worry about bad behavior, human-directed bad behavior,

I'm not really worried about AI-directed bad behavior because it'll be decades if ever that it'll be sentient. I don't know that that will ever happen. I know just enough about neuroscience to understand how difficult that would be. Brands, computers, design, technology, they're not self-directed. Humans direct them. We still have the power.

So that's what I would say we need to remember. Thank you. I'm very sorry to cut this short, but we do have cocktails and are networking and 10 or 15 students from Debbie's class that are looking for jobs. So we've got to get to the networking. I want to thank Debbie Millman, author, podcaster, teacher.

A plug for Love Letters. Love Letter to a Garden. Love Letter to a Garden coming out in April. April 15th. And thank you all. Thank you again to IBM and to all of the wonderful partners here for supporting this speaker series. It's been great to see a couple of familiar faces and returning faces. And happy holidays to all of you and Debbie. Thank you again. Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you so much.

That's all for this special episode of Most Innovative Companies. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe.