Marco Bevolo and Filiberto Amati interview:
Bisi Williams, Co-Founder and Chief Insights Officer, Massive Change Network, Chicago
Transcript
Filiberto Amati
Hello, good evening. This is Filiberto Amati. And we live today for another of our episodes on the research of the future of design and design thinking. Marco Bevolo is gonna introduce our esteemed guest of today. Thank you, Malcolm and welcome.
Marco Bevolo
Thank you. Filiberto, we are very pleased to host the co founder of massive change network in Chicago, the current host of the Escarra 2049 podcaster programmer that is running on various social media platforms, and especially, the very talented personality busy Williams, busy welcome to our series. We are delighted that you are that you are with us tonight and we are going to explore a few points on the future of design and on the future of design thinking on your vision. We have seen very useful editorial products by Bruce Mau that represent the backbone, the intellectual skeleton behind the practice of massive change network. And now we are delighted to take the time and get to know better the co founder of these practice in studio so the first question is actually how you decided to co found the studio you met Bruce in 1988. I think you were in Melange with him in 1995. But leaving on the Canadian timezone. So we never met although we were both working at flash shot international with Giancarlo, Politi and Elena control over how did you come to the decision to join him? Not only in life, but also in work?
Bisi Williams
Well, that’s a great question. Marco, I felt bachelor, thank you for having me on your show. I’m super excited to be here and talk about my favorite subject, besides my husband, Bruce design and the future of design, so I’m thrilled to be here. So that’s a rather loaded question. You know, design for me, was a mystery. Until I met Bruce. And I was very much involved in the humanities, the family background, the work that we do was largely sciences and medicine. And, you know, very, very academic fair. And so the idea of design was rather foreign. I mean, we knew Big D design. When I was in journalism school when I met Bruce like, donkeys and eons ago, you know, he, I met him studying Chinese history. And Bruce had just finished designing Zone One, two, and he was explaining to me a while he designed the book, and it’s typical. Did you write the book? Well, no. Did you glue the pages together? No, did you do that. And then it was really a whole world. And he opened my eyes to that. And then I realized as a journalist, that I was actually a designer, and we were not talk design at all. And, you know, you were splicing and putting things together didn’t about montage, etc. And then I just opened my brain. And I realized that there are different types of intelligence. And I kind of made it a mission, for those of us on the humanity side, to sort of bridge that gap. So there’s not only the social emotional component of design and on understanding it, but also understanding that the different intelligences and how they might approach a problem, you know, and then design that link. So if you want to think about that, for me, you know, if you think about the genesis of design thinking, that’s where it happened, because I realized that people, designers would say things and they would do things and the client would be completely bewildered, eyes blinking, not understanding the process, not really understanding the value, and I realized that there’s a translation that had to happen that had to happen. And then the second thing I realized is that wow, you know, this design thing is super valuable. I think that we need to articulate it a little clearer so that other people who are or actually making businesses or programs, or movements, or you name it, anyone who has an idea could actually benefit from someone who has the ability to synthesize and visualize, which is very, very key. What is happening, so you can have a client who was spending hundreds of millions of dollars, they want to admit it, they can’t read blueprints, they have a vision of a store that they’re going to build, and it’s all grand, and they’re explaining that this escalator is gonna go here, and the foyer is gonna look like this. And in without a word of a lie. We were the client. And first of all, I don’t see the escalator. Anyone naming you don’t see, I don’t see the escalator. So we made a model. And sure enough, you know, the big money spot, a great big huge two story extravaganza was a minute, you know, rather playing perfunctory piece of engineering. And that, for me was the aha moment, right, the real moment of trust, the real moment of vulnerability for the clients who don’t know what they don’t know, and are relying on us as industry experts to actually guide them through this journey. So that’s kind of where I begin. And, and I was always the, the advocate. So
when we started massive change, in 2010, that’s when I realized that I was mature enough to actually work with Bruce, and that I was actually mature enough to have some ideas and a perspective in terms of how we could collaborate together. And what were are the lanes that we play, and where I can be additive to this process. And so I’m bringing heavy research and analysis into the design process, looking at data, really looking at storytelling, looking at the social emotional compacts or impact of what we do. And we started massive change in 2010, after the market crashed, and you realized that we had all sorts of design solutions, but they weren’t codified that, in fact, design is the ticket to get us out of this mess. But you know, can’t believe me if I just tell you about it. And so we really spent this the last 10 years designing the platform for what we’re calling life centered design, we also have three children and recognize that the world is getting more complex problems were complicated. And that if we could design a platform with tools to allow people to open their minds and open their heart and look at a new way of solving problems, that that would be our contribution to the world. And so with that mandate, it was easy for Bruce and I to actually work together in parallel and start the master change network.
Marco Bevolo
Well, thank you, actually, you share with Filiberto, a very important traitor, you both have three kids. They’ve been very lazy. And I have passed on this subject. I would like to ask Filiberto to formulate a question for you related to actually one thing that I found one notion that I found in that we discussed from the book already. Our first interview with with Bruce and Julio Mario Tino, that is the notion of the blur. In the book, the blur is presented in its article articulated, we actually found it in in a paper of ours or Filiberto, in die in 2017. In a kind of trade paper is is a notion II will introduce more eloquent eloquent eloquently than I can, we published the paper on word ledger journal, in 2020, incorporating insights from the COVID-19 pandemics. So
Filiberto Amati
before we got Malko, may I because I actually wanted to build on something that BC just said, which struck with me a little bit, which is, on one end, we have this gap, and this lack of lingua franca between the designers and the clients. Now. As an engineering student, I was told the 3d visualization it’s basically to make non engineer and this Then what’s going on? But engineers don’t need them. So why are you laughing? That that’s basically one insight. But on the other side business had, you know, design, it’s actually the solution to get out of this mess. So, which, of course, it’s the purpose of the, of this initiative. So how do we bridge the two? How do we explain that to the ones who can’t really understand design? That design can help us solve the bigger problem? So for non designers, for dummies?
Bisi Williams
Right? Well, we spent the right the last, I would say, the 10 years really translating design for non designers. And we realized that the way that the disciplines talk about it, and of course, you know, the disciplines are very complicated work, there are problems that you need to solve. But we’re dealing at the level of complexity, right. So this is the area of synthesis and translation. And one of the things that we recognized and this is kind of the space that we play in, is that we use design in the vernacular from a leadership perspective, right. So if you’re a leader, and you have a vision, you’re systematically working towards that vision, right? You do not have all the answers. But you realize that you will need other people along the journey to get you there. In this case, I’m going to start a business. First thing you do get an A lawyer, you get an accountant. And I say, you know, if you’re going to start a business, get a lawyer, and an accountant and a designer, why? Because your designer will actually help you visualize what it is that you’re trying to say, they will actually be able to synthesize the money, the verbiage, the story, and this world that you’re trying to build, right, you’re world building at any stage. And so in order to world build, right, you need a container, if you will, a person who actually understands, and I didn’t say an artist, I said, a designer, you guys in design, we have a client, and we have an invoice, and there’s a purchase order, and we have to design to budget on time. But in that way, when you work with your designer, they can actually help you organize your thoughts. So in this instance, you know, if you’re working with the CEO, we help you with your strategic vision so that everyone in the business can understand what it is that you’re saying. And you can get alignment. If we’re working with the Chief Operating Officer, well, then let’s organize your operations so that people can understand where things are, how things work, and how you need to communicate effectively. And if you’re working with marketing or growth, here’s the opportunity, here’s the Delta, here’s the space, we can imagine, from a business perspective, how you can actually not only secure the place that you’re in, but design the future of your business to make you unassailable. So really, you know, I say designers painting with money, you want a visual of this, we can give you your world in 3d. And so that’s how we translate it. And then the fourth piece of that is, we don’t know your business. So we’ve come in superduper, humble, we have to learn from you. And learning requires a moment of stepping back, and then understanding what it is that you’re trying to say. So that we can actually translate it clearly. And when you do that, then you allow them to tell you all the things that they wouldn’t necessarily tell an expert, because the expert already knows. And they come to us to design something different to design the Delta to make them defensible. And it’s that little piece there, that if you spend the time with your client, that it’s not forcing us or forcing them to go on a journey that they don’t want to go on. Because it’s not about us, it’s really about them. But in order to understand them, we need a 360 view. And then we need to be able to present them back to themselves. And so that’s the bridge, you know, it’s like I would never pretend that I’m a surgeon. I might like reading surgical books, I might like to understand that whole world and the history etc. I’m not going to do the procedure, but I can actually help you look at your room ergonomically look at your, you know, what you want to do, how you’d like to do it, how you want to enhance the experience. That’s what I realized, around 2015 and 17. With New York State Medicaid as they were doing the redesign were designed could actually play a significant role, where you look at the systems around People, you look around systems around products, technology, communication. There’s all sorts of room for design for that synthesis to make everybody better work to their best game, and actually understand how all of those other disciplines can communicate effectively with each other. Right? The knowledge lies within them. Were the translators.
Marco Bevolo
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s a beautiful definition design is painting with money. And we discussed from, from the Nexus, so the new book by Bruce, who you might rutina, the kind of Italian Renaissance. Actually, the painters in the Italian Renaissance were commissioners who were receiving a check at the end of the commission, and very often were late in the way they they delivered. Should we go back to the blur? Filiberto, do you think it’s the right time?
Filiberto Amati
Go ahead Marco. Well, we
Marco Bevolo
do not another dog. We identified we did a project with Filiberto, I think it was 2017. And we interviewed a number of designers, marketing professionals, corporate leaders, in various areas from pharmaceutics to coffee to hospitality and our purpose was to identify what could come next is a reaction from digitalization. So, how would categories I would lifestyler father further develop along the lines of digitalization, what we found, what we validated as our hypotheses is is that of the blur, the blur is I can make the easiest example, there is not leisure time and working time as 100 years ago or 50 years ago, because nowadays you can be at your office, if you still have an office, and you book your holidays on your mobile phone, and you you might sit at home at midnight, a you are working on on emails or communication exchange with another continent, straight from from your bedroom. So, the lines that used to be free time where you express yourself professional time where you perform to standards is totally evaporated. We found traces of these phenomenon everywhere from categories of over very us drinking products in drinking, offering to the design of hospitality venues where people actually go because it’s it feels like a living room where they actually work. So, this this is what we found that we further refine the idea. And in 2020, we published it in a peer reviewed journal. We saw really elements of the pandemic crisis being anticipated in this line of thinking from the point of view of healthcare, there is also a lot of convergence, anticipatory healthcare, the whole idea to disaggregate big hospitals, into regional and local venues. The possibilities of digitalization for remote care and for treatment from distance out do you see the blur? Do you think in 2049, which is the year of your reference, do you think we will still speak of health care and wellness? This? Or do you think we will speak of a heck of something else? New categories that do not exist now? And now we’ll design play a role to get there?
Bisi Williams
Wow, well, that’s a great question. And so it’s interesting when I look at the blur, because the blur, I think, is something that just happens. And that’s we don’t design it, right. So all of these things are accidental. And so as a result, you get these results. And, for me, I’ve taken an activist stance. So, you know, because I can see how very quickly these things can slide, how the imagination slides, how quickly we’re moving. So, for example, so I’m, I mean, from my mouth, you know, I mean, I’m advocating, I think that speed and acceleration is super important. But I’m also saying we need to take a beat, take a breath. And one of the things in our practice that I’m a huge advocate for, and I’ve maybe loudly and I think everyone either capitulated or they see it is that, you know, from a design perspective, we have to look at it from a 360 view, right? We can have discrete solutions. If you see something on there and knock on effects, I think it’s incumbent upon us to look at the knock on effects, or at least question them, and then run those numbers. And so so when I look at where we are, and what’s possible, and where we’re going, for me, I’m always thinking, What about team life? What is the effect of that on the human body, but also other forms of life. And, you know, when I think of autonomous vehicles, and I think of AI, and I think of all of these incredible developments that are making technological leaps, I’m thinking, there’s also a huge pandemic of loneliness among young people. And older, exacerbated by the pandemic, I don’t want to refer to the pandemic too much, but this was happening before. And, and these with our tools, we feel super connected more than ever with our devices. So on the one hand, you know, having a phone that has FaceTime, as a mother allowed me to let my daughter go away to school, you know, for a year, and I felt like she was close enough. And I wasn’t heartbroken enough because we could FaceTime, but she’s still away. When you and I don’t get to hug her. And if she’s crying, I don’t get to dry her tears. And if she’s lonely, they’re there. But it’s not that hug. Well, when you think of the pandemic of loneliness, and then you think of autonomous vehicles, works the way that you and we’re designing these cities of the future, how do you run into someone? How do you have a meet cute? Where do you go for coffee? Where it is that cute boy, girl or girl boy, or whatever your preferences? How do you make that connection? And so part of me is thinking like, Wow, we got to slow down, because we’ll have lost something in our human development with all of this efficiency that we have. So when I look at that, from a design perspective, you know, generally with our clients now, yes, we have VR, we have AR, and I’m like, you know, where we can avoid in an interface, let’s do that, where we can have something be super real, let’s have it where someone can build a relationship or have a real connection. Let’s engineer that, let’s design that. Let’s put the slow the beautiful, the timeliness of things into, into our design and into our worlds in an authentic way. So I, on the one hand, you know, we need to meet the needs of a great number of people. But on the other hand, does it is that the default that the poor will have no touch? And the wealthy Will? Will you have, you know, beautiful gardens and things that take time for those who actually have the time. And for everyone else, that’s experience. So you’ve taken care of the problem. But have you really right so when I look at the future of healthcare, and when I look at the end, by the way, there’s only two things of value as far as I’m concerned, time and health.
And you know, some amount of money can get you that but you can never get time back. No one. No one can pay you back for a bad design a bad moment, a bad experience. Even your health, right? So when you think about wellness, and we think BPP, clack, clack, clack, it’s all painted, whatever, you know, what about a plant? What about like materials that, you know, come from nature? What about, you know, the look and feel of those things for healing? What’s our food look like? What are we serving it on, you know, the data shows, put your potatoes and your vegetables and your little piece of meat on a china plate, psychologically, you don’t feel sick. So even if you’re in the hospital, you can get out and that’s kind of retrograde. Right? Like not a melon mean play by like, you know, China play they made out of porcelain, will psychologically help you feel better, right? Because you have these little touch. So when I look at the future, I just say to everyone, you know, compete with beauty. Real Beauty and, and just take a moment to just see like, what it’s going to feel like, what are you going to experience in the future? Does that answer your question?
Marco Bevolo
Well, the, the image that I get is that of a continuum, from the healthcare we know, to the therapeutic, or anticipatory, or preventive power of objects, experiences and emotion. Am I correct?
Bisi Williams
Absolutely. And that’s what I say to put in. Right? So yes, of course, I love predictive stuff. I think all of that’s great. And having that data, and behaving in a preventative way. And when I look at it, I think we the name, it hasn’t come up for me yet, but I’m looking at it as well care. And I feel that that is the way that we need to to move. And Marco, you’ve talked about this and your work, right, the mark of a society is how you treat your most vulnerable. So in that sense, you know, looking at how we treat our vulnerable, what is the way What does care look like, and it doesn’t have to be trillions of dollars, sometimes it’s just someone holding your hand letting you know that you’ll be okay, a little bit of the placebo effect, that can have a tremendous effect. So I see it as that and and I’ll share with you as we were designing, we’re working on a prototype for a program a series, right? Because stories, I think, help you tell this the future, the stories you tell yourself today will be the future that you design, essentially, right with lots of images, etc, you build these worlds. So we’ve been sort of looking at a world that’s rich and abundant, right, that is, you know, has a life center at the beginning, that we take care of all of these beings. And we’re mindful about how we progress. And I had had a designer work on my team to sort of do the renderings as we imagine, like what the welfare center of the future would look like in the event that you happen to have a momentary turn. And it was a no, it has its own farm. It’s growing its own food and as farm to table food, you know, you realize that the doctors also realized that they get the benefit of like fresh air greenery and flowers and trees and so on. So it was really kind of embedded into the landscape, not completely, the the tower on the hill. And I showed it to my colleague, and he said, No one’s gonna believe that no one is gonna think that that’s how the world is gonna look in 50 years from now or 30 years. And I’m like, why is it It’s too beautiful. It’s not realistic. And I was stung, because I was like, What do you mean, you know, why can’t the most vulnerable doesn’t matter have the most beautiful things to get? Well, and I I was really unnerved by that. Because as we know, good design doesn’t cost any more than bad design. It’s the same for square footage. It just is right. So I came home and I was really wrestling with it. And then, and then Bruce started wrestling with it. And we were wrestling with it together. And then Bruce said you’re gonna need to design a new vernacular for institutional design. Because if it looks beautiful, people can’t tell the difference and they think it is expensive. That it’s a waste of money, time and energy that it doesn’t have that you know, what we have here in America, the DMV with the stucco falling over the walls and the things glued to it. That’s what service design looks like. And that’s now put me on a mission to say, Okay, how do we design this new vernacular that is actually conducive wherever we are in classrooms and in our hospitals and our in government buildings, that allows your humanity and life to shine through? Right? So that’s kind of where we are. And when you think about life centered design, and you realize, you know, we’re all in rooms that have windows on two sides, like that’s $1.95, right, that you have a view to the outside, that you can be grounded in nature, that that that that this also helps productivity and wellness. Right, these are simple things.
Unknown Speaker
To bear to you.
Filiberto Amati
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a lot of insights and my concern, and on the healthcare, in partially we’ll touch on that is that when we look at the future of healthcare, we look at of both AI and computer submerging hemorrhaging, which, in a way, remove the empathy from the equation. At least, that’s the scenarios that we hear about, and the companies talk about, you know, the fact that a doctor can do a surgery operation with a remote trouble, from, you know, 12 time zones away. Which, by the way, it’s in the present, it’s going to be more pervasive in the future. So the question is, how do we bring it back, you know, that empathy, that relationship that to small, little things, whereas design, right now has led Hospital and Healthcare, because it’s mostly, you know, at least in Europe, public money, so to be very, very, very efficient. I was recently in, in a hospital, because one of my children, no problem, and we were there for 10 days, and, you know, great health care, but it’s literally bring your own cup, you need to have your cups from because they’re not going to give you china cups because they break and make us money. And so you need to bring your own cups. Otherwise, they don’t serve your tea or coffee. Wow. And that’s how, by the way, public healthcare works. I am from the south of Italy, and in Italy. Now healthcare, its regional. And my region is very well known for being one of the highest deficits due to health care. And one of the reasons is that one hospital basically, which is enabled, it’s called cardarelli, makes half of the budget of healthcare in my region, and now spittle, it’s the one hospital. It’s the size of a city, basically, you have buses going around, you have taxi services inside to move from one building to the other, it’s really, really very, very big. And you could work it could get lost for hours and it without actually reaching where you want to work. And now speed as basically one of the ER which serves special cases from all the other regions. So you go to the hospital, and you look around yourself, and you see infrastructure from the 70s. And then because of course they need to be efficient because it’s costing money. And so by design, you know, it looks not to be honestly very reassuring, either. But yet, it’s where the most critical cases are treated for most of the south of Italy. In fact, I think it’s, it has more le copter connections from the South to the hospital than any other place in Italy. They have their own, you know, radio rather than men for the helicopters because they arrive so many of the time it’s almost like an elephant. So my concern here is really how do we explain what you just said to people who run the healthcare and politicians run the health care in your healthcare needs to have the kind of empathy and sense of wellness for people to get better.
Bisi Williams
It again, it comes to design again. So you’ve got like people processes technology, right? And communication. And with all of that machinery, the doctors need to be trained differently. In fact, with all that machinery and that efficiency, it actually allows for that space of empathy. It should be designed for your care team, to be able to spend the time with you like the distractions, right, so the machines are the distractions, the thing that people forget, and I, and again, this comes out of the research that we’ve done working in looking at how design can play a role in the New York State Medicaid redesign. Okay, so that’s a budget of 60 billion with a B dollars, that serves 6 million of the most vulnerable people in the state of New York. So on a per capita basis, they spend more than anybody on the planet, okay, and the problem was at, nobody was happy, the patients weren’t happy. And the care providers weren’t happy. So my co host, he thought, let’s redesign this. And so the first process and they use the word design, which is really interesting. But they started from an engineering and an accounting perspective. So they went for efficiency. And they were making tremendous gains. So by this point, my colleague and friend had 7 billion with a B, dollars worth of efficiency. But I turned to and we were, it was very, very difficult to get us into this process, because they were very suspicious of the designers like, and they’re like, Okay, well, who are you? You know, the accounting people? Who are the engineering people? Who are you like, what is it you want to do, we’re actually looking at this holistically, right to design this, this this future vision. Anyway, Jason did everything he could, and again, but we just worked from the periphery, sort of coaching him from the outside. But what I’ve said to Jason is great, you know, this is really amazing. But here’s the thing, all of these gains that you’ve made, and now it’s currently at $19 billion, in efficiencies and savings, is that won’t work unless you design it. You can only be efficient and engineer so long. So you really need to work on designing the relationships with the staff, the doctors and the nurses, you need to design the relationships with the insurance providers and how they speak to each other and how they agree you need to repair and redesign the, the communication with the families and the patients that you have here, you actually have to look at everything that you have here is designed, not built for the purpose of the person who’s here, it’s built for you, we realized that hospital design for efficiency was designed by Florence Nightingale during the Civil War, when she had a lot of eyes and so on. It’s an and I checked, and I realized we don’t have to have the rooms look like this. They don’t have to sound like this is somebody you know, it’s expensive for someone to come to emergency and I respect everything that they do when someone has a trauma 100% You need you don’t need flowers, when somebody’s you know, in a trauma. However, somebody wanders in and they’re lonely, or they’re confused, or having some tea and cookies for them. Having somebody in the community that’s $1.95 to say, How can I help you today? You know, right? This person is actually lonely, and they just need a minute a company that saves $10,000 for you know, running a full diagnostic. But that person also has a nice experience when they enter in there. They’re met by a human being. They’re actually you know, that’s part of the triage. And don’t you think you feel better when someone listens to you, gives you some tea, something a warm drink, something slightly nutritious and tells you that you’re gonna be okay, right? Like, we need to build the relationships in here. So I hear what you’re saying. But I also said, like, imagine when somebody comes into a hospital with their child, they’re terrified.
They don’t know what to do, and they don’t know what’s happening. And you do and you speak a foreign language. It’s not like our designers talk to their clients. If you took a beat, and just explained where you were in the journey, I think you’d have better outcomes first of all right? Nobody does anything when they’re afraid. So What is that that we do here to design your approach that mitigates fear so that you can actually get a better response from your client? Right? So building these relationships into that experience and thinking about, well, why am I here? Right? As designers, we ask that questions. Why do we do it like that? Why? Because we’ve always done it that way. Well, we can do better. And we can redesign that our and we have this opportunity now, to actually make not only the lives of patients better, but the lives of doctors and cared and nurses and surgeons and everyone else’s life better too. Because that design is like it’s not sustainable, the way that they conduct their business and how they conduct their their work, and how those those outcomes come out. And the second part is, we the consumer, everything in the world has been disrupted. Everything except for hospital care. And I tell them, it’s going to be a shock when you actually have people bite back, that actually understand that things can be and should be better. Do you want to be behind the eight ball, you want to get in front of that. So that actually, you know that you have a job, and that you can design the way that you’d like to practice rather having it being mandated by somebody else? For you, right? So I think that that world is changing too slowly, you know, they call it here, value based care. And there’s a reciprocity there. And I think that that’s where the world is going. We talked about 100 years ago. You know, 100 years ago, there were some things that were nice and not so nice, but I think that there’s a romance to the idea that we actually had time, human relationships, the ability to process things, there was beauty and joy around us even in small moments, and that we shouldn’t lose our humanity in the, in the in the forward journey of progress. I think we’re kind of beautiful apes in a weird way. Like there are certain weird things that we do, that can be I think, should be celebrated.
Marco Bevolo
Well, actually, the title of this conversation is what’s next, because we wanted to build upon the launch of the Nexus, the book, but we also wanted to explore with you visions of the future and I think massive change network is inspired by these radical optimism and I would actually like to twist a little bit these these view of optimism, I like to go back one moment to someone you might have known or not, his name was almost the loss of as a was a very good friend of mine, he was a pioneer of inclusive design, and actually in 2013 You had an accident, and that was the most tragic event because due to mistakes, the other like Medical Center II was paralyzed. And he was a brilliant designer from while he was with me at Philips, he was at Samsung at Microsoft values, the company’s interest, what he did in the settlement, he received a damage compensation for whatever you can damage compensated damage like that, but he demanded that he will also receive the assignment to redesign the system failure that brought up the mistakes based on which he remained paralyzed. So I easily he is a remarkable figure in in American design and in global design is is being a passed away a couple of years ago, you due to complications from the COVID-19 but I think there is a twist of taking the most tragic failure as the opportunity to actually redesign the system. And I wanted to ask you, perhaps as a way to lead towards the end of our conversation in the movie Mau by John Benjamin Batman, we see a couple of setbacks in for for Bruce mowing for for yourself so the kind of criticism to massive change to to the show in Vancouver, and especially I was really impressed by the If the reaction were massive action in China was frozen and stopped in 2019. Because of the diplomatic situation, if not crisis between Canada and in China, what is in a way, the best of failure are you have seen throughout all these years, and in your design commitment, as co founder of massive change network, what is the setback? Perhaps at the time, it angered view the most but that now retrospectively, you see as the best is the best opportunity in your professional personal life.
Bisi Williams
Wow. Okay. Marco and Filiberto? I think that’s a great question. And I want to say a few things. And so you know, yes, we fail. We do. I mean, life is a process and, but I look at those as learning opportunities, you know, so it’s really, so China, you know, some people say, is it a failure? I’m like, No, life is long. You know, we just happened to get in a hiccup, right. And, I mean, honestly, that footage with us, in China, we were actually putting together the deal and doing the whole nine yards. And that was December 1. And then I flew home from China, and then December 11, you know, what a surprise. And that was a surprise. And, but I, I, I believe that, that idea of massive action that China is committed to it, and the it did sting at the time, and it was like events beyond our control. And, you know, it was like, okay, but the ideas don’t go away. In fact, you’re still building on them all the time. And then when we saw the film, he was so inspired, we’re like, let’s just dust that up. And like, the world has changed. And so we were learning from that, you know, in terms of like, maybe the scale is too large. So you know, 75,000 square feet times eight cities is a lot. But and museums in Right, right. And so you think, Okay, well, the average Museum in Europe and in North America 7000 Square feets, how can we design it better to be more modular? So we are rethinking how we do that we think the network, and that’s the learning too, sometimes bigger isn’t always better, right? And, you know, different ways. And I think that our biggest failures, always and, and into less, it may not be catastrophic for the client, or whatever. But when we fail to listen, or really get the the nuance, right, and it’s like, what, what can we do to make our work better our clients that are the world that are and if you can go back and fix those opportunities, but generally, we don’t have too many of those lying on the ground. And I’m not answering your question directly, because it’s like,
Marco Bevolo
Oh, you, did? You I think you did perfectly.
Bisi Williams
Okay. Because I just think that it’s not brain surgery that we’re doing, although it is people’s money, and it’s emotional. And so we’re very, very careful with what we do. But we’re also, you know, you try and mitigate against untoward circumstances. But really, I, you know, it’s interesting, I take issue with Bruce on that, because for massive change. Again, it’s an evolution, you can look back on it and do a post mortem. And we realized, like we did, we had a hypothesis that if we just showed people stuff that they could do it, and we realized, no, so let’s go back and redesign it. So it’s like, actually, you need to build those bridges, like you make a large number of assumptions. And from those assumptions, there’s learning. And so in that case, I would say, we didn’t really fail. But we realized, Oh, that was a missed opportunity, which we are now redesigning for. And part of the learning so for us. That’s that’s the that’s the design life, baby, right? I mean, you get to do a redo. If you think it’s bad, you always get to fix it, and you can always solve. So I think that’s the beauty of why we love what we do. And the privilege of the future of design and design thinking is that it’s a place for wild imagination. It’s a place for dreamers. It’s a place where people who want to make the world better and systematically take those steps to get there and bring as many people as you can to the party. I mean, because we can’t do it alone. So I’m bullish on the future of design. I’m bullish on the future of synthesis and I’m bullish on humanity, you know, getting it together to find new ways of collaborating to solve problems right? Like can’t do it alone. So
Marco Bevolo
well, I’m not going to elaborate on my setbacks and my failures because otherwise we need a
very, very demanding and I get irritated only if, if a cable arrives late but I would like to leave the final word to close the interview to Filiberto, thank you so much busy for a wonderful opening on what’s next and on the future of design and design thinking and humanities and humanity Filiberto, would you like to
Filiberto Amati
remark? I just wanted to thank you very much. It was really an honor for us to be able to talk to you about, you know, this project and the future of design and what’s next. It’s been a real pleasure, and we look forward to speaking to you in the future again. Thank you,
Bisi Williams
Alberto. Thank you. Thank you, Margo. And this has been so much fun and onto the Nexus and beyond. Thank you. Thank you.
Marco Bevolo and Filiberto Amati interview: Bisi Williams, Co-Founder and Chief Insights Officer, Massive Change Network, Chicago