The story of the Design Thinking w/Joy Mountford
“Making things simple is the hardest challenge ever. Making things complicated is very easy.
So if you do not think of the basics of how a human has to use it, you can get overwhelmed by what the technology does. Is this something that people want?”
Joy’s TedTalk on Design Thinking
Creation of QuickTime at Apple Inc.
Stanford University Human Computer Interface Group - Joy Mountford
Today’s guest —Joy Mountford
The Future of Work Area — Design Thinking, User Experience, Customer Experience, and Human-Computer Interface
Listen to the full episode :
Joy Mountford is an internationally recognized leader in design, particularly human-computer interface, user experience, and interaction design. She has built and led the world-class design and innovation teams at Apple, Ford Motors, Akamai, Yahoo, and Interval Research. She has designed interfaces for various systems including airplane cockpits, computers, the web, consumer electronics, musical instruments, and toys. She is an inventor on over 28 key patents granted in multimedia and human-computer interaction. She created the International University Design Expo, which has touched the lives of thousands of design students for more than 20 years. She has given invited presentations at the top conferences in the field including ACM SIGCHI, IDCA, EG, and TED. She received the Women in Leadership Award in 2019 and received the SIGCHI Life-Time Practice Award and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012. In 2021 she contributed one of the first 3 invited transcripts covering her life works archived for the Babbage Institute 2021.
“Joy is a founder of the intellectual and practical elite of design, a design legend" John Maeda – executive, designer, and technologist
"Joy is one of 1000 most creative individuals in U.S." Harry Marks, co-creator TED conferences
About the Episode
It's my absolute pleasure and privilege today to host one and only Joy Mountford. She is one of the women pioneers of technology. She began her career in the human-computer interface at Honeywell, designing user interfaces for military avionics systems. She has been designing interfaces for over twenty years in applications ranging from aircraft to personal computers, consumer devices, and music systems. Some of you may know the products she built when she joined Apple Computer.
At Apple, she managed the Human Interface Group and worked towards extending the user interface beyond the desktop application. Her research turned to audio and speech interfaces, 3-D design tasks, hand-held players, and multimedia systems. The Human Interface Group was involved with the evolution of QuickTime, Navigable Scenes, Bubble Help, AppleSearch, Macintosh Finder, uses of color and information filters, and portable devices. Joy is an internationally recognized leader in user-centered interaction design. She focuses on enabling technology for artists in music, theatre, the visual arts, and movie making. Her collaborative art and technology work uses new generative data visualization techniques. It includes diverse data sources such as air traffic patterns over North America and bursts of mobile phone usage on New Year’s Day. She is a pioneer of technology and one of the key influencers who defined design thinking and user experience today.
Some questions we discussed:
As a pioneer in your field, how did your journey begin that led you to explore the human-computer interface? What led you to explore this field?
As the builders of the future, we are told that what we invest our time in today creates what's next for the children of tomorrow. What is the number 1 thing that today's design thinkers think about differently, and what are some things that may lead to bad experiences?
This is more of an open-ended question. As robots and software continue to interact with humans, such as pizza shops that automatically create pizza, restaurants without servers, self-driving cars, and pilots, human-to-human interaction is replaced for efficiency, consistency, and less interactivity. As humanity continues to find ways to boost Customer Experience (CX) with automation, what's the future that's waiting for us? Do people want consistency and efficiency over interactivity at all costs? And how can the young generations shape the future of work for a better experience for all? What are your thoughts?
Optimism and honesty lead to positive outcomes. Similarly, the purpose and the design of a product don’t mean that the product, when adopted, will be used for the same reasons that it’s designed for; hence you can point to the many stories revolving around Facebook or cup to filter boiled pasta water, what are some of your strategies to collect constructive feedback?
One of the most exciting aspects of predicting the future is that we always think and forecast what will happen but do not focus on what won’t happen. What won’t happen depends on what the innovative and entrepreneurial minds choose not to do in the next few years and where the people do not want change to happen. Given that the world is investing a lot of time and money into the metaverse, it opens new doors for Human and Computer interactivity. New user controls and new ways to experience the world of computers. What are your thoughts on this, particularly around a future where everyone is wearing a helmet and sitting on a couch can be both bright and dark?
Transcript
Alp Uguray:
Welcome to the Masters of Automation. Today's guest is Joy Mountford. Thank you very much for joining me.
Joy Mountford:
Thank you for inviting me.
Alp Uguray:
Joy is one of the woman pioneers of technology. She's an internationally recognized leader in design, particularly human-computer interface, user experience and interaction design. She has built and led the world-class design innovation teams at Apple, Ford, Akamai, Yahoo, and Interval Research. Designed interfaces for various systems including for airplane cockpits, computers, the web, consumer electronics, musical instruments, and toys. Some of her work like you may know QuickTime, AppleSearch or Macintosh Finder. She's the inventor of over 28 key patents, granted in multimedia and human computer interaction. She focuses on enabling technology for artists in music the visual arts and movie making as well.
Her collaborative work in art and technology uses new techniques of generative data visualization. She created the International University Design Expo, which has touched the lives of thousands of design students for more than 20 years. And she has given and invited to presentations at the top conferences in the field. She received the Women in Leadership Award in 2019 and received the SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award and was elected to CHI Academy in 2012. That said, again, it's a pleasure to have you and have the time to speak with you and also ask you my questions today.
Joy Mountford:
Thank you.
Alp Uguray:
So thank you very much for joining. So those are the... To kick things off, so as a pioneer in your field, how did your journey begin that led you to explore the human-computer interface and then what made you to explore this field?
Joy Mountford:
So interesting question. My undergraduate degree was in cognitive psychology and then I was interested in moving overseas and I thought America was a very positive country, very happy people. So I applied to go to graduate school in America and they had this program in aviation and I thought, "Well, what a fun thing. I could learn to fly." And so I applied for that program and that was called, in those days, man-machine systems. It was also attached to a subprogram called Aviation Research or Aviation Psychology. So I got a scholarship to go to the University of Illinois to study that. And when I got there, people asked me how long I'd been interested in aviation and I said, "I haven't. All I'm interested in is actually coming to grad school in America. And I thought flying might be fun, fun because it's a complicated machine and it would be great to be able to learn how to do something difficult."
So then I learned how to ride horses and I thought, "Well, learning how to fly higher, faster would be better than just a horse." So I moved to learn to do that in America in the middle of the Midwest. So we called it man-machine systems. And I remember thinking that was kind of little bit old-fashioned in those days. We also called it human factors. So I thought it'd be fun to be a woman in that domain and make it more human as it were, and more interdisciplinary.
Alp Uguray:
That definitely needed a name change.
Joy Mountford:
Right. Yeah.
Alp Uguray:
And so as we build the builders of the future, we are told that what we invest our time today really face what's next for the children of tomorrow. Based on your research and what you've seen in the past and what you see today as well, what's the number one thing that today's design thinkers think about differently or maybe poorly? And what are some things that may lead to not so good experiences?
Joy Mountford:
Well, I think that basically, we come back to sort of what I call the simplest things are still the hardest. So I love listening to my product managers saying, okay, we're turning it over to you to just make it simple. And they think we have a magic wand to just wave over something and it suddenly becomes simple. Making things simple and/or easy to use is probably the hardest challenge ever. Making things complicated, it's actually very easy. So if you don't actually think of the basics as in a human has to use it, you can get overwhelmed with excitement based upon what technology does and you become enamored with the actual excitement of, gosh, it can do this wonderful thing. And there's two basic caveats. Is that something people want and can they actually get the value out of that wonderful new thing that you are so excited by?
And if you go back to basics, if you think of something like a hula-hoop, which is this sort of big round circle that you waggle around on your hips, I think that's one of the oldest toys in the world. Let's say it's hundreds of years old, if not thousands. Why would it be interesting to waggle something around on your hips? Imagine the product description. Circle, put around hips, waggle. Well, it still stands the course of time. People still like doing it. So you have to think of our products today do hundreds if not thousands of things. Do people need this extra bell and whistle that you're providing them?
So the basic things that people forget are still the basic things we need, which is do people want this? Do they care about it or are they delighted by it? It never changes. People don't want, they don't go to sleep yearning for yet another feature in some word processing program or a feature in a file sorting program. They go to sleep thinking about how can you make my life easier and simpler and simpler is the big catch and the most difficult holy grail to achieve.
Alp Uguray:
That's very true. And I think we see that in the products around us that they always take off with solving the problem but not solving the problem simply and then sometimes create more problems.
Joy Mountford:
Well, people haven't changed basically ever and technology has. So technology has to adapt to humans. And we have some fantasy that people are going to be adapting and learning. They learn new skills, but they don't actually fundamentally change. I mean, their head doesn't get bigger, their eyes don't grow, their mouths don't change. That sort of basic sensory capabilities are still the same. And we seem to think people are going to be able to grow more eyes and ears and mouths or something or extra fingers. As far as I've known, that's never happened. So we have to adapt the technology to the human and not vice versa.
Alp Uguray:
I think that's the one area I believe sometimes they try to add maybe even with Metaverse and [inaudible 00:08:10] as well to [inaudible 00:08:12] in the Metaverse [inaudible 00:08:15]. And for you, so when you were at the human-computer interface at Apple, what were some of the experiences that you had? Because you were very fundamental in actually building the experiences that they still leverage today. And then you've seen how people perhaps not being able to adapt the technology very early.
Joy Mountford:
So it's an interesting sort of retrospective story because now, people can laugh at these stories, but when we first did, for example, QuickTime, people didn't believe you would ever see video on a computer because all video did was basically show pictures that were still. So when we first showed video, we had to label it with a little stamp on it that said... A little icon that said video. Didn't say... Sorry, it had a little icon that had a video image on it. And now, you don't put an icon on it because we all know that when you see an image, you could click on it, but we had to label it as click because there's video, because people didn't expect that. And when I first remember demoing it to various vice presidents, it was a very small, probably, what, one inch by one inch icon.
And they said, "Well, that's ridiculous. No one's going to use something that's that small." Because people in their imagination cannot believe technology will ever get fast enough or capable enough to provide the horsepower that's necessary to provide in a full screen video or something. So they thought of it as just this tiny little icon that was worthless. However, you had to have a vision that says, imagine this is capable enough to do a movie. So I did a panel once that said, when computers are TVs are computers. Because I thought, "Well, TV could be on a computer." And people always told me all my life, "You're crazy, that's not going to happen." So it's the change isn't got to be about people's ability to imagine computational Moore's Law effects without changing humans. Humans can obviously see big images like in the movies, they can process them.
It's just a question of what's the computational capability of the box you're looking at. So that's the sort of Apple-ish story because we tried to show visions of what the future could be. And also with voice. We did lots of early voice recognition work. People didn't think the computer would ever be capable enough of understanding people talking to a computer to have enough memory to be able to store the, let's say, speech templates or whatever back so that it could be recognized and have a call it conversation. Now, it can do that. You can argue whether it's conversational enough to represent you and me talking, but we're getting very close to it. So remember, the Knowledge Navigator [inaudible 00:11:25] we did in 1984, people... Or was it '84? Or something like that. People said, "Oh, that's impossible because the guy's talking to an agent who's a speech agent."
Well, we have Siri now. So early signs are there, but sometimes your human imagination is not able to encapsulate that and see what the possibilities will also enable. And together, when you put all of these things, including gesture, we're just beginning to encounter gesture as a viable thing in, let's say, the Metaverse for example. Gesture, when I talk, I find it very hard to talk to you without using my hands and I'm not going to use them just on the keyboard, for example. It's natural for me to wave at you as if you can understand what I'm saying. But that's part of speaking is waving my hands around at you. So I think we're going to become more multimodal, which is always how people have spoken and communicated with each other and not just through pointing and clicking. That's hardly natural human activity.
Alp Uguray:
Then it does limit the interactions and the communication that we can have across the multimedia device. And it's very interesting because the people are sometimes against change and there'll always be naysayers and the non-believers because they don't want to change themselves as well, adapt to that technology. So I like to [inaudible 00:13:13] question because we see that a lot right now within the automation space, especially as robots and software and humans interact with each other in the landscape of, for example, pizza shops, [inaudible 00:13:29] you'll go and you'll order pizza and will automatically create the pizza and give it to you or restaurants without servers or maybe the self-driving cars as well. So for taxis that are self-driving.
So I think at some portion, the human to human interaction is very valuable, it creates the bond between us and the strong bond, connect. And then sometimes that is, from company's perspective, that focus on more on efficiency, consistency and sometimes less in productivity may sometimes lead to bad experiences. So as a humanity continues to find ways to do, boost, sorry, [inaudible 00:14:17] customer experience with automation, what is the, do you think, feature waiting for us? Do you think people want consistency and efficiency over interactivity at all costs?
Joy Mountford:
I think it comes down to the task you're doing and the timeframe that you're looking at that task. One thing I think has been solely underused is the power of audio. We keep trying to use vision for everything. And no, vision is terrific. We all love a good movie and all that, but the best way of improving the visual quality or perceived visual quality is to improve the audio of the movie. So that makes people think the visual's better. And the work we do in audio is relatively limited as interface specialists. We are now beginning to use, let's say, spatial audio, but it's been undervalued. We did a sonic finder the first year I got to Apple and when we stopped producing it a few years later in the finder, we were asked what happened? What's up with the quiet finder? So people default to assuming the audio is very loud, but if you put it in the background, it becomes very useful to people because as I said earlier, we're multimodal, but we also need to use multimedia, which actually means more than vision, it needs sound.
And the other parameter is tactile. Now, we have not even scraped or scratched the surface of tactile feedback. So it's a very evocative feeling. So if you're in Metaverse and you're touching people, I mean, let's say, you're reaching out and you and I touch each other, we need to feel that we've touched and it can't just be bonk or something that the computer says. It has to be something that you feel. And we have not even thought of how to provide feedback on our fingertips yet. Now, we can do that with many suggestions about how Apple's very good at doing that with an iPhone, when you move into certain areas, it'll go... Little vibrations. And that's all you need to give a sort of evocative connection with another person. So when you ask the question about what sort of applications we'll do using virtual reality or whatever, I think it's to do with using things that we can't do successfully today such as big tasks, planning tasks, collaborative tasks.
But it has to be associated with using feel like planning garages or architectural spaces or something of that nature. But I think we overpredict what we're going to do so it becomes virtual reality for everything as opposed to select the things that should be used for. And I also think there are subtle things like voice. The phatics. Phatics are missing in almost all voice connections. You and I communicate a lot with uh, pauses, noises. And almost none of the voice agents use those noises to help us feel that we're engaged in a communication. So while I'm talking, you can go, "Mm-hmm." Which helps me know you're still listening. I don't know of any real voice agents that do that. They literally think of voice as just voice and not phatics. Phatics are important. So I think the thing that we should be doing is opening up all the channels for input and output and we're still sort of halfway there. So I think that will be a big phase in the next 10 years, let's say.
And also, computers are kind of dumb. I mean, remember, they only give you back what you put in. I had a project with the students one year about design a computer interface that makes you laugh. I've never laughed at a computer except in utter frustration. And some of the answers you get now from whatever your speech system is sometimes mishear you and give you some funny comments. But mostly, that's sort of error, not actual sense of humor. So people say, "Well, I hope that the skin will look real." I don't think that I care that much that the bot has a good face. I care about whether they have a sense of humor. And I would be happy to work with a bot that actually has a sense of humor. I don't think people are working on those human qualities that I would love to be engaged with.
Alp Uguray:
Yeah, that's very interesting you say that. And then I've been checking some of the generative AI technologies as well, and there if you're able to write a few sentences and write your blog post but also there's a chatbot interface that speaks. Also, the art portion about it to generate imagery can be interesting. So in a way, if those two combined and fed maybe into the computer and then AI can start generating those humorous comments on the spot, it can be much more interactive [inaudible 00:19:54] like a digital assistant, but-
Joy Mountford:
Well, I think that's the key here is that we're basically lazy as people. So we'd like the hard stuff done for us. So let's pretend you're a designer doing endless Figma screens. I don't really want to keep hand doing numbers of versions of screens that need to be done to make a product, let's say. So the computer should be super easy for them to do that, but we have to give it enough knowledge where we know when to get involved and steer it to the next level of change. And I think we are yet to do that. So let's look at autonomous vehicles, which I worked on for a couple years at Ford. The worst combination in driving, people say, "Oh, a car can't do that." The cars are really good at doing autonomous driving despite the fact everyone argues they don't. But they do. The problem is when you have drivers with driverless cars and the combination is a disaster because a car that's autonomous is way more cautious than a human.
So it slows down, it does all the right things, but drivers who don't have autonomy start to try and intercept the autonomous car, and now, you have a really chaotic situation because the autonomous car's being perceptive, seeing the situation and I'm rushing to the office trying to cut off other cars in a crisis mode and then I get into a pickle because I caused the accident, not the autonomous vehicle. But the autonomous vehicle, you can blame for causing it because he slows down, she or he slows down earlier than a human. And that's the same as when you have any AI system running with a non-AI system. So let's say I have a generative algorithm working with one that's not generative. It's the clash of those two worlds that I think is going to be very challenging for humans to coexist with. And I don't know how you manage that.
Do you put a green light on when it's generative, a red light on when it's human? What's the co-mingling of those two worlds work? I think it's very interesting to do that. And then the other part is it's like pilots and co-pilots. The world of flying was also torn with that because co-pilots will land a plane much more effectively than a human. But people in the plane do not want to have the plane landed by a non-human, although it's safer. It's exactly the same story with cars. However, there's always that one story, Sully Sullenberger or whatever his name was, that landed the plane, big hero. And so they say, "Well, that's why we need a human because he's a great savior." There are occasional great stories which save the human at the end of the day, which tell a great fable for all pilots for the rest of their lives.
People love a good story, they also love a hero. So I don't know how to argue effectively, but I do know that we will have to legislate these things in the future. I think insurance and legal matters will come in to be way more relevant than we thought. And they're very difficult right now in lawsuits because who wants to be the manufacturer of a car that caused the death of a child? No one. And that legal battle is about to start in sincere situations.
Alp Uguray:
And I [inaudible 00:23:36] once the widespread adoption start to occur, then we would, I think, start to see more of those outlier cases where human saving or maybe even robot saving [inaudible 00:23:49].
Joy Mountford:
I agree.
Alp Uguray:
... savings.
Joy Mountford:
I mean, thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers. And that's the fact of the matter. And autonomous vehicles will save those people technically from being killed. And that's the biggest killer of people on the road is people who are drunk, not autonomous vehicles going out control. Sorry, but it's sad because people don't want to know that. But this is all... It's very interesting, I think, dialogue because it does get into legal and political situations that we're now voting on, which means that the world of design is going way beyond what we thought it was going to be involved with. I mean, ethics I think, in design is now a very interesting question. We can argue about is this a representation of an orange? Is this a true orange? Did you represent it as a cherry that should have been called a lemon? We can talk about those things. Now, we're talking about cars who, let's say, it's a Ford car with a Lamborghini sound. Is that ethical design? I don't think it is, but I'm not a lawyer.
Alp Uguray:
And who makes these decisions as well at the end of it to enforce new principles that can adapt?
Joy Mountford:
Well, and I don't believe that any university... I'm involved in a big project right now about standardizing education across the world right now on what we call a design degree versus a computer science degree, et cetera. And what are the core things we need to teach for, quote, "designer students"? And I can tell you, Northern Europe is different than, let's say, Brazil. It's different than America. And these questions like ethics are not even on the agenda for these classes because in order to be a class that's approved, you have to have typically several years of the teaching material that's been approved. So education lags behind in relevance because of the approval from the deans and the universities and the curriculum, et cetera, et cetera. And our students are coming in. I mean, I have interns every year of my life over many decades and they're still wholly, miserably unprepared.
And the unpreparedness comes from them not looking at what relevant questions are out there because the curriculum is not vastly not relevant. But the other thing I want to make a plug for is students don't know how to read and they don't know how to write. So when you ask them to do a summary, they're not really sure what you want them to do. And it's becoming almost beholden to every single worker now or manager to teach the most basic skills. I mean, I have to write outlines for people to say fill in information under these headings, which is something I don't think I would've ever expected me to do, let's say, 30 years ago.
Alp Uguray:
I think there's the education also let's be a bit more focused on functional skillset and then that have an opportunity [inaudible 00:27:23].
Joy Mountford:
It's the T problem. So people are sort of almost so thin on the top now that you're not sure what they're good at and there's no depth. So you're fumbling around saying, "Well, what are they? Is this a dessert or is it an animal?" It used to be what type of animal? And now we're saying, "Is it a food or is it a species?" You're struggling with naming it at all.
Alp Uguray:
And I think that really poses another problem because the current students are going to be the future founders or future [inaudible 00:28:03] of products. And once they have that ability to create, then will they actually start to focus on the ethics of how that product can impact or what would be the legislation should be around the products that they build. And then we see that even happening today based on some of the products that are already out there. I always found fascinating that in different parts of the world, the technology has different reactions to it. And I'm curious some of your opinions around this as well, especially...
So there's a small example, right, self-driving cars. I think driving in the US is very well-structured. The roads are cleaner, the roads are... I think people respect laws a little more than the other. But in the other some part of world, there are motorcycles that rush around and go through. So do we in some ways want AI to be the perfectionist [inaudible 00:29:15] that follows always the control principles or do we want it to also adapt to the place and location? And I'm curious some of your thoughts around this for self-driving and beyond.
Joy Mountford:
Well, I think you're asking an incredibly useful and difficult question, obviously. So let's think about one example that fascinates me now is the way they're managing COVID in China. So apparently, I don't know because I haven't been to China to do it, but they have a color sticker that is with you and it monitors whether you've been in contact with people who have COVID, right? And it changes color. So when you want to travel, they look at the sticker and they say, "No, you've been in touch with people who have COVID." Or not, and then you can get on the plane or not. If you've been in touch, you have to be quarantined for a week or I don't know what it is, this week, but it used to be two weeks. So what that implies is that you're being monitored 24 hours a day.
So the person who told me this is from China, he is Chinese, he works for me and has for the last five years or so. And I asked him, "Well, do you know what that implies is you're being monitored all day long?" And he goes, "Yeah." So I said, "Well, doesn't that worry you?" And then he goes, "No." So if you asked an average American the same question, you know the answer. They would say, "Of course." Of course that worries them. Of course that's not appropriate. Well, the question there is... Well, there's many questions.
Well, the risk of COVID may be worth it for some people and if I had the choice to opt in or opt out, then I might want it or not. But the choice for the Chinese people is no choice. You're either in or you're out. An out means not in the country. Doesn't mean out of the COVID sensing. It means you have no choice. But people in China have a different assumption of control, like you say, AI watching you. Well, it's the same as the government, let's say, in their particular case or obviously, they're using other sensing technology too, not just the government, but it depends what you're brought up with. And you can argue that about certain rules that we have about what books you're allowed to read now in school. I don't know what is a slippery slope?
Are we going that way currently in politics? Yes. Are we aware we're going there? Maybe. How close are we to the same sort of thing that other countries have and do we all want it? Probably not, right? But that's because we were brought up with something the other way. And I don't know whether you... I mean do I want a robot monitoring my house? Which I pretend I have with Ring Bell or whatever it is. I mean, yeah, because I think my house is valuable and I don't want someone coming in. But then, you can also say, "Well, now, people have got access to knowing where I am all the time." I think people need to understand the choices and I think we're now in a society with our own belongings, with our own security, with their own privacy issues where we have to be more knowledgeable about what's implied by those, what we're giving up to know what we're getting back. And I don't think it's clear to the average person.
So I'm working on a project right now to try and make those things clearer. Now, the problem with that is do you trust what I'm going to tell you? And I don't know how to make a company trustworthy versus not trustworthy. People believe Apple's trustworthy, however, you can look at things they've done and say it wasn't trustworthy. You can do that probably for all companies, right? I don't know the answer, but we know what the values are that people have and I don't know how you establish that. I don't know at all. Good luck to someone who pretends they do because people are fickle and they're also buyable. And if you're not a person that's got enough freedom to make choice by money, you're going to get sucked into doing things and get money for giving up your privacy. And that is really depressing to me because that's not what I certainly want in society. But I don't know how I will endeavor to take myself into that kind of situation to make the world a better place. I don't know how you do that.
Alp Uguray:
It's a very tough problem. It's a very tough problem to think about. There's the element of being the source of truth. And then it's very tough to convince them about even though it is the truth. And also, the shaping of that product or service or whatever the interface is based on the demands of the society and what people want. Actually-
Joy Mountford:
But they change all the time too.
Alp Uguray:
Yes, they do.
Joy Mountford:
Sorry to be annoying, but you say when you're a teenager you don't want any of it. And then when you get older, you have your first child, you go, "Oh, my God. I want lots of protection because I don't want my child killed." So people, that's the difficulty. And you don't know when you actually cross the threshold to change. I think that's what's also hard.
Alp Uguray:
That is very true because the main users that you built the product for is also adapting and not changing over time and [inaudible 00:35:27].
Joy Mountford:
And that's why we'll always have a job because people are fickle and they also change and they grow and they will always be that way. I don't think there's going to be a time where you and I are static. So that's what's exciting about interface design because there's always going to be there. And every little thing that you design, everything you use has to be designed. There will never be no designers in the world. Things are not just going to pop out designed. They have to be done and crafted by designers.
Alp Uguray:
And we talked a bit about students and the universities earlier. Do you have some advice for those students to be careful about? I've given the current working climate about what is required as functional skillset and maybe creative skillset and maybe even adapting some of the skills that AI brings to the table as well. How do you see that part?
Joy Mountford:
Well, I think since I've done the Design Expo, I did the Design Expo for over 20 years. I watched what happened over 20 years. And I assume that past can only predict the future, which is that every year, every... Every year's students told me, and they're from around the world, Brazil to China, Japan, Europe. So say it's pretty international. Every year says, "You've never seen this before." Which is absolutely completely not true. And then the other thing they say is they come up with the technology of the day and since 1970, it's been AI. So today, we are saying AI again and we're now maybe at turning point to make AI real. But AI is not new at all. And every student, like my current interns say, "No, this is real AI." So they add a word like real or very or true or whatever it is to something.
By the way, the other one is VR. We were doing VR in the '70s as well. So I think what's important is not to complain as an old person that the young people don't look at the older work, which I do. But I think what's important is can you learn from the mistakes? So it's not to do with look at this old people's work, it's look at what worked and what didn't work because things did work in the old world and they also did fail. And if you look at failures and successes, that will determine somewhat, if not mostly, what continues to succeed because people don't radically change in 20 years. I'm still alive. So you should just point out to the... First of all, there's now become some classes now in the history of HCI or CHI, however you want to put it, to tell students that because it is useful to learn things because you can see what didn't work and what did work.
So that's one thing, I think, they really are solely needing to do because it'll speed up your creative path. It's not that it slows you down. Actually speeds you up. Because as I say, children don't learn to walk just by saying walk. They learn to walk by falling down. So you will only learn if you make mistakes. So making mistakes can also be learned by reading what other people's mistakes were. So everyone always wants to just succeed all the way through. I think it's the first to fail that will succeed. So the professors need to learn how to mark failure with an A grade, not mark success with only As. So I think those are sort of cultural things. The other thing is that they get, As for a tool they've learned. I'm an A program in Python. Well, whoop-de-doo, by the time you're a manager in a company, Python will be obsolete. So why don't you learn how to do mobile apps or whatever, not Python or whatever the tool is, right?
Because whatever tools we used when we were growing up are not used, not even heard of now. So be aware that that will be true for you too. So don't be a tool snob because everyone comes to me say, "Oh, I only use C++ I'm not a C program." It's like, oh, there's a big difference to C++ and [inaudible 00:40:44]. So I think those little barriers that we make protecting our knowledge is sort of stop it. And I think tools are just a means to an end. You need to say what the end is that you're trying to learn. Are you trying to learn mobile computing or are you trying to learn what people do with mobile computing? Because mobile computing in of itself is not a philosophy of life. We obviously use computing in mobile situations and we always have, even if it required us to wheel a computer to the device, right?
Alp Uguray:
I agree with you. And then we talk about the focus on the functional skillset and people also be influenced by that, a focus on functional skillset. And also sometimes when we take an iPhone for example, or when we take some other products and applications that we took them for granted without knowing actually what efforts, failures and successes went into building that. So it's extremely important to understand and learn from what actually brought those technologies to today and so that we feel better future [inaudible 00:41:54]. So that's it. I want to thank you for joining us. I wish we had more time. I can keep going for hours. I had the opportunity to speak with you. Thank you very much for joining once again. My session was very insightful and a great discussion and then definitely, a lot of topics that resonate to the professionals today, but also to the students with universities for adapting to these skillsets to continue to build the products of tomorrow.
Joy Mountford:
Well, thank you. It's fun doing these conversations and I love helping the younger generation get there faster because we need them and we care about them doing their jobs faster and better. [inaudible 00:42:45] Thank you very much for your time.
