Announcing: Design As Season Three

Design As is a podcast series that asks a diverse array of design practitioners to imagine a better world together. Who does design belong to, and who is it for? How does it serve us—all of us—and how can we learn to better understand its future and our own?

Subscribe to “Design As” on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. 

Season three draws from recordings taken at the Shapeshift Summit hosted by the Institute of Design May 2025 in Chicago.

Featured on this season of Design As

Transcript

Lee Moreau: [00:00:01] Design As is back. Starting September 9th, we’ll be in your feed every Tuesday speculating on the future of design and bringing you a range of different perspectives. And just like everyone else, we’re talking about AI this season. Now, we recorded this season at the Institute of Design’s ShapeShift Summit in the last weekend of May, 2025. And in terms of AI, that was ages ago. But I think that part of our role at Design Observer is to provide a space for reflection. And we’ve been doing that for a long time. I remember working in New York in the mid-aughts, which seems like ages ago — and I remember appreciating Design Observer as a space for reflection then. I’m not sure that there’s been a topic like AI, a technology, a force, that has the potential to create as much impact on the design and creative communities as AI. And it’s something that we need to really focus our attention on, think about, and continue to discuss. One thing I found particularly interesting about this conference is that it brought together a lot of people that don’t seem to be talking a lot these days. It brought together the developers of AI, the people in organizations that are building it, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. [00:01:13][72.2]

TB Bardlavens: [00:01:14] How do we ensure at the end of it all, the outcomes for anyone who uses Adobe products is equal and equitable? [00:01:20][5.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:01:21] Also the deployers of AI. The people who are bringing this technology to the world through their products and services. Making it relevant to us. [00:01:29][8.6]

Liz Danzico: [00:01:29] The conversation is supposed to be away from the typical conversation about what the technology can do, centering the human. [00:01:41][11.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:01:42] And the designers, who will ultimately, and hopefully, have a hand in determining how this technology meets the world. And these designers are already doing that hard work, but they’re not necessarily talking to these other people as much. And that was what was so powerful about this experience. It struck me that there are very few moments where these groups are actually in dialog, where they share space and where they talk, and we need much more of that. So the Shapeshift Summit was a start. And hopefully this season of Design As can extend that discussion. And we’re excited to share it with you. Now, we’re gonna be doing something a little different this season. We’re not framing each episode around one keyword, but really it’s the space between opposing keywords. So the sort of continuum or spectrum, or we’re going to call it the space for conversation. AI itself isn’t one thing, it’s many things. It’s many technologies. We love to describe it as a simple thing. AI, give it a name, its easy. But there’s a lot going on there. And most of the time, it intersects with design in contradicting or contrasting ways, certainly complicating it. We’re not looking for a simple answer here at Design Observer, and that was reflected in the Shapeshift Summit. [00:02:53][71.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:02:54] Do you think we run away from these topics as designers? [00:02:57][2.7]

Patrick Whitney: [00:02:57] No, [00:02:57][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:02:58] Is that safe to say? [00:02:58][0.1]

Patrick Whitney: [00:02:58] We went towards them, but then we simplified them, oversimplified them. [00:03:01][3.2]

Lee Moreau: [00:03:03] And hopefully that will be reflected in this season as well. Make sure you subscribe to Design As wherever you get your podcasts and make sure you’re following Design Observer on all our socials to never miss an episode. [00:03:03][0.0]