Design Mind frogcast Ep.50 – Welcome to the Simulation Mindset World

On this episode of the Design Mind frogcast, we’re talking about the creative process at a time of synthetic data and AI-powered simulations. To do this, we’re joined by Jason Severs, Head of Design for frog on the East Coast in North America.

Jason is a self-identified ‘skeptical optimist’ when it comes to engaging with new tech, which is an approach he brings into all aspects of his life, from his work with teams at frog, to his own art practice, as well as to the many IoT devices in his home currently in various states of connectivity.

Listen to the podcast episode below. You can also find the Design Mind frogcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

 Episode Transcript: 

Design Mind frogcast 

Episode 50: Welcome to the Simulation Mindset World 

Guest: Jason Severs, Head of Design, frog East, North America 

[00:09] Elizabeth Wood: Welcome to the Design Mind frogcast. Each episode, we go behind the scenes to meet the people designing what’s next in the world of products, services and experiences, both here at frog and far, far outside the pond. I’m Elizabeth Wood.  

[00:24] Elizabeth Wood: Today on our show, we’re talking about the creative process at a time of synthetic data and AI powered simulations. To do this, we’re joined by Jason Severs, Head of Design for frog on the East Coast in North America. Jason is a self-identified skeptical optimist when it comes to engaging with new tech, and it’s an approach he brings into all aspects of his life, from his work with teams at frog to his own art practice, as well as to the many IoT devices in his home currently in various states of connectivity. Jason recently wrote about what it takes to design intelligent products that people actually love, focusing on the Rabbit R1 as a use case. You can find the link to his piece in today’s show notes. But first, let’s jump in. 

[1:08] Jason Severs: I got into design, kind of by accident. I moved to New York in the early 90s with the goal of being an artist, and I kind of fell in with an interesting crowd that was playing around with technology and doing things on the web. I started to learn about these interesting, sort of philosophical crossovers between how people perceived machines and how people interacted with machines. And I learned sort of the first concept of the idea of a user, and that really fascinated me, because I think a lot of the things about the art world that really bothered me was the distance from the audience. It felt kind of isolating in a way, and I like the idea of doing something that had a direct purpose in people’s lives, and that’s really the first thing that drove me into the design. 

[01:49] Jason Severs: Hi Jason Severs, I’m the Head of Design for frog on the East Coast in North America. When you’re working in design, you’re essentially working in a mode where you’re making tools and or processes or services for other people to leverage to accomplish a task or a goal. When I came to frog, I immediately saw this intersection of what I originally had come to love about hanging out with all the technologists early on is seeing machines and individuals come together to create a new kind of experience in the world. I thought that was super fascinating, because I’ve chosen to be a designer by profession. It’s almost, I would say, more of a lifestyle choice, in a way, something I’ve lost a little bit of track of, is like, what, what does it mean to be human? No, that sounds strange, because I’m a human being, and I live in the skin of a human being and the thought processes of a human being.  

[02:41] Jason Severs: But I guess from a more scientific or academic perspective, whether it’s like going deep on somebody like Daniel Kahneman and understanding like, how people build choice architectures in their day-to-day lives, or understanding like a Sherry Turkle and really going deep on like, how technology is changing the way we relate to each other, and how that changes our emotional states and changes our perceptions. We can get into, like, a philosophical and sort of academic postures with those things. But I feel like we’ve lost the discipline as, you know, as a design industry, we’ve sort of lost that thread a little bit. We need to get back to it. So, I think for me, it’s getting back to that more empirical connection, in some ways, to what shapes human beings and how we move through the world. 

 [3:29] Elizabeth Wood: The evolving relationship between human and machine is something Jason thinks about a lot. But of course, as he’s seen in a lifetime of engaging with new tech, just because something’s novel doesn’t necessarily mean it has staying power. 

[3:43] Jason Severs: I would describe myself as a skeptical optimist, because, you know, over the years, I think I leaned more towards energetic optimist or naive optimist. I guess you could say I was anxious to get new technology. So, the minute I saw a piece of new technology, I would go out and buy it, or, like, you know, ask someone if I could come over to their house and use it if they owned it. And it was terrible when IoT devices started coming out, because, you know, like, my house is full of connected light switches that are not working very well right now. So, I introduce a lot of new technology into my life and my family’s life that sometimes doesn’t always work. And I think the more I did that over the years, I became more skeptical of things, like, I understand like, how to evaluate a piece of technology now and know whether I want to bring it into my life. And I think that skepticism is good because it’s given me sort of an evaluative framework to see past the selling points of the technology. 

[4:41] Elizabeth Wood: This appetite for new technology is what caused Jason to become so fascinated by the potential of the Rabbit R1, an AI-enabled device unveiled at 2024 Consumer Electronics Show. 

[4:52] Jason Severs: If you haven’t seen one of these things, it’s an AI device. It’s bright orange. It’s got a little screen on it and a little dial on it, where you can sort of rotate through a menu of options when you need it. But most of the time it’s a microphone and a speaker with a screen on it, and you’re meant to sort of carry it around in your pocket. And when you, you know, walk up to something, you can point the camera at something and go, “Hey, I see this concert poster. Is there another show happening? And can you buy me a ticket?” So, like, you can get into this easy mode, and it will carry out actions on your behalf, but it’s all meant to be about the context of where it happens in the world, and not to take you out of that context, so to make that as seamless as possible. So, when I saw that mission, I was like, oh, that’s super fascinating.  

[05:37] Jason Severs: But once I started to use it and realized that it was trying to replace too many core mobile functions, the purpose of a mobile device in your life, I wanted to go back to the sort of sense of being more focused. And it got me thinking about what makes a good product. And for me, like the first thing that came to mind was intimacy, this idea that a product, it can draw me in, because it gets me focused on one or two things, and then I start to build a relationship with it. You know, good software does that. A lot of good devices do that, you know, just basic things in our house do that. Like, if you’ve got a toaster that works really well, and you look at it and you like the way it looks, and you like the way it functions, and it doesn’t break, and it heats the bread in the right way, and all that kind of stuff. You build a little relationship with it. You start to have like, this back and forth with it. And the minute that back and forth becomes problematic, you know, whether the hardware breaks or whatever, or the software becomes too complicated, then you, you stop caring, in a way, about that thing.  

[05:39] Jason Severs: And because this is a device that you talk to and then it talks back to you, I think that’s the interesting part about where intelligently enabled devices, whatever those are, in our lives, as we start to build intelligences into these things, we have to be aware that their level of intimacy can go up, and we can really lean into that idea of we’re building a relationship with this thing, because it does have aspects of intelligence similar to ours, or almost a lot like ours. That’s the new part of design that we need to start considering, is that relationship building piece. Because it’s not just about helping people get over the hurdle of a function, you know, giving them, onboarding them into an app, giving them the right sort of setup manual, walk through and all that kind of stuff. Now it’s like a conversation. It’s a relationship, and being aware of that, I think that’s where it can get really exciting. 

[7:34] Elizabeth Wood: For Jason, a critical aspect of building this relationship is giving the user a real reason to come back that goes beyond replacing similar functions and features from existing products. 

[7:45] Jason Severs: So, when the R1 launched, you know, it let you do a couple of core things, right? You could order food with it. You could play music with it. You could, you know, call an Uber with it. But again, like, those are things that are already accomplishable, but they’re not necessarily things that are intimate. You know, music can be intimate, but I think we already have a relationship with our streaming platforms right now, to some extent. You know, we get invested in our playlists and, you know, social and other things through our music streaming. So, like, having a device negotiate that is not really necessary.  

[08:18] Jason Severs: So, I started to think, well, what are the things where you can be more intimate, and it’s about development of you as an individual, and how this device could be more of a companion for you. So, I started thinking back to the idea of the modes we are in in our daily lives. So, like, you know, some for me are like fitness, you know, cooking, reading, listening to music, making, you know, art, whatever. These are all things that, like, I love to do in my day-to-day where I have a—I’m in a sort of deep, sort of posture of self-reflection. Why can’t I have something that goes on that journey with me? So, I thought it’d be interesting to sort of give a provocation back to the Rabbit team to say, why didn’t you focus, like, there’s so many things you could reclaim and help people reclaim in their lives that a lot of these technologies have sort of stripped away.  

[09:07] Jason Severs: And my first thought was reading, you know, like, I have two teenagers, and the way that reading is not a part of their life, no matter how hard I try, and they’re sort of getting there now, but the way that reading has been stripped away from us. Why can’t we use technologies to reclaim these things, and why can’t we design this thing to actually be specifically for that reason, like, why can’t we make it just about reading? Why can’t we make it just about tending to my plants? Why can’t we make it just about sitting around in my house and listening to analog music?  

[09:39] Jason Severs: The point I’m getting at here is, as we start to layer intelligences into things, we have to stop thinking about convergent all-in-one devices and all-in-one experiences and start to spread that intelligence out into these different modes of our lives. I think this is the place where we’re at right now, where a lot of companies are going to rush to replicate the types of experiences that are in the marketplace today, whether that’s a mobile device or smart TV or whatever it is, and they’re not going to consider the true potential of these technologies, and they’re just going to try to slap it on to the old form factor. As designers, we need to go back and start to think, well, what is the experience we’re trying to create? Again, I think this is one of those real moments of reflection. 

[10:19] Elizabeth Wood: And as to how that applies to innovation, Jason feels a big part of reflection is actually about focusing on the future and moving into a space of speculation. 

[10:29] Jason Severs: The vision of the Rabbit, I think, was the R1 was for me, revolutionary, like the idea of a large action model, or the LAM, as they call it, the ability for me just to go out in the world and talk to a layer of intelligence, and it helps me complete an action in an easier and sometimes more meaningful way. That’s a really exciting idea, but the idea that we have to get back to focusing on what’s best for people we’re at that moment, and I think we can’t ignore that.  

[10:58] Jason Severs: So, like, the critique of the Rabbit is it’s playing the old game of mass market convergent technologies, where you’re trying to solve everyone’s problems all at once, when really you only have to help solve one problem and build a great experience around it. And you’ve got the right momentum as a business to move forward, and you’ve created something useful and meaningful in the world, you know, getting into that idea of speculative design. I immediately focused on a very particular use case that was personal to me, which was reading. And in today’s world, it’s very hard to read because we’ve, you know, it’s very hard to focus. There’s a lot of things that are distracting. And, you know, a lot of the times when I read now, I will use my mobile device to help me look up a word or, like, you know, a concept in a book. I might go to Wikipedia or something and try to use that second screen experience to augment reading, because that really is what reading has become today. Now we have a whole other added layer of information around that that can help us, you know, expand on what the book is telling us.  

[12:01] Jason Severs: So the idea that, you know, I’m reading, and then I have all these information sources. My first connection with the Rabbit, I immediately thought it would be really cool if this was just purely designed as a reading companion, like they went to market and they said, “You know what, Rabbit’s going to, like, change the world through intelligent devices, but we’re going to do it one experience at a time,” when we talk about, you know, the superpower of building intimacy with a product. Focus is one way to do that, like as a company, to focus in on something and not try to boil the ocean with a bunch of like, meaningless tasks.  

[12:37] Jason Severs: You could actually help someone reclaim something very important or learn something completely new, which is the skill of reading. Like, I’ll go even deeper and think about it from an accessibility standpoint, my daughter struggles with extreme dyslexia, you know, in the way that she uses Grammarly to write. How would this reading companion like, open up a whole new world of excitement about reading? Because reading for her is stressful, really stressful, and she works really hard to get through that, but this device actually could take on the characteristics of befriending her and being a helpful companion. But like, think about that as a design challenge that’s a super fun, really cool, really meaningful thing to lean into is, like, helping people. You could even focus it to people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, and the device could just be about that. I know it’s not a mass market, but it’s meaningful, and other people will look at that and go, “Wow, that’s super powerful.” 

[13:32] Elizabeth Wood: We’re going to take a short break. When we return, Jason will share more about his approach to designing intelligent experiences. 

[13:41] Ian Lee: Hi. I’m Ian Lee, Design Director in frog’s London studio and leader of frog’s convergent design discipline. Convergent design looks across digital product and service domains to unite organizations and enable next level customer experiences. Check the show notes to get my full report on convergent transformation. Find out why innovation can’t be forced through old silos, and why real transformation takes convergent design. 

[14:10] Elizabeth Wood: Now back to our conversation with Jason Severs, Head of Design, East frog, North America. 

[14:16] Jason Severs: Convergent devices, for the most part, have been very multi-functional, whether that’s a laptop, whether that’s a smartphone. Let’s say you bought a new air fryer. It has a lot of software capabilities built into it. Or if you buy, like, a smart oven, you can, you know, press a button that will cook a chicken for you in a specific type of way in a specific amount of time. That is a sort of convergent interaction, because you’ve selected from a whole menu of options to tell this tool to focus and do that one thing for you. But what’s interesting now is that with AI, we’re stripping away those menus. We’re stripping away those sort of catalogs and hierarchies of functionality.  

[15:00] Jason Severs: What I mean by that is like, when you open up Netflix, you see a list of options, and you have to navigate those lists of options, and the better the experience, the easier it is to navigate those lists of options. Now, you open up Netflix, let’s say they build in an AI agent into that next year, you open it up, and it’s just like, what you want to see is there, and there’s someone there, something there that’s saying, “Hey, Elizabeth, I just saw this really cool film. You should check it out. And here’s why.” You know it’s going to speak to you like a friend or a critic or whatever sort of posture it’s in, but you’re not going to be navigating and browsing through options anymore, you’re just going to have this layer that presents options to you, and sometimes just gives them to you. So, it’s going to be more responsive and adaptive to you.  

[15:51] Jason Severs: So, when we start to design for these things, we have to think more about the flow of life and the context of life, as opposed to, like, what’s the best way to help someone navigate this menu, you know like e-commerce sites. Look at how many options and things that you navigate through, and it’s a hassle. It’s a convenient hassle, but it’s still a hassle. So, if you start to think about a layer of intelligence that’s responsive and adaptive to you, that experience goes away. What’s in its place, like, what does an e-commerce look like if we have an agent, sort of helping us navigate the world and giving us all the choices, like, right there we don’t have to, like, decide anymore. It’s just there for us, because this helpful thing is giving us the options we need that are relevant.  

[16:35] Jason Severs: Does an e-commerce site become more of an experiential thing, where you’re looking at, like, really immersive videos of people cooking and enjoying food and or the products that you might be interested in. Like you’re not going to look at a list of tents anymore. You’re going to see people actually camping and talking about camping and talking about the things we’re using. So, it’s, I mean, influencers and content creators are going to love this stuff, because I think it makes them more relevant in a lot of ways. The bigger point here is that as you start to layer these intelligences into everything in our daily lives, how is every way that we navigate the world going to change? And I think that we’ve got to start trying to, you know, speculate about what those scenarios are, and start to plan for them.  

[17:16] Elizabeth Wood: During our conversation, Jason shared why he’s excited about seeing how AI can be more integrated into the creative process, in terms of using AI as a tool. 

[17:24] Jason Severs: I’m super excited about it. I think the biggest struggle as a designer or technologist, engineer, is the battle with your tools. Whether you’re using software or physical tools to do things, it is a lot about the negotiation of you as a maker and a sort of a provider or creator of a solution to get over the hurdle of what you need to do with these things to accomplish that goal. It can really lean towards the tool and the craft a lot of the times, versus like, what you’re actually trying to accomplish at the end of the day.  

[17:58] Jason Severs: So, I’ll build on that and say that where generative AI and other AI tools, whether they’re predictive, whatever form they’re taking, they allow us to get into a conversation about what we’re trying to accomplish. Because you can get into these conversations and the flow of that, it feels more like a dialog about the problem you’re solving, and I think that’s the interesting orientation that AI tools put us in is that they become more about us talking to each other or talking about human situations. And I think that’s, that’s the fascinating thing that we haven’t really been talking a lot about yet, is that if we allow these tools into our lives in the right way, we design them in the right way, they actually can be a catalyst for human behavior and human intellect.  

[18:40] Jason Severs: Once people get over that, that same hurdle or barrier we had when we first started talking to like smart speakers, where it’s like Alexa play, oh, wait, I can’t remember the name of that song. What’s the name of that song? And you get into these modes where, like, your memory sort of shuts down because you’re thinking about adjusting yourself to the way the tool wants to hear you, or where the speaker wants to hear you. And you’re not just thinking and speaking, and you know, and in that flow of intellectual thought. And when you think about AI as it, you know, one of its core properties is that it works actively to befriend us, to be friends with us. In some instances, sometimes it’s you know, whether the posture you put it in, it can be like, you know, be provocative, you know, judge what I’m saying, critique what I’m saying. Either way, you’re, sort of, you’re orienting that machine to talk back to you in a way that is conversational. And there’s a sort of, I think, a positive feedback loop that will start to happen there, as people are using these things, say, in a therapeutic context, where we kind of become ourselves again.  

[19:47] Jason Severs: Once we get over that uncanny valley thing, or that barrier of like, knowing that we’re talking to something, then that thing can adjust to my mannerisms and talk back to me in the right way it needs to in that moment. Because, you know, eventually. They’re going to decide to be confrontational, they’re going to decide to be caring, they’re going to decide to be friendly. We’re not going to have to tell them that anymore. We’re not going to prompt it. It’s just going to adjust in real time. It’s going to adapt in real time. I think when we get into that moment, that barrier of using a tool versus just talking about our ideas and how we feel, we’re going to go more into that latter category, and I think that’s where it’s going to get really interesting, and that’s where the data gets better, in some sense, because the data becomes more human.  

[20:33] Elizabeth Woods: And while data and design have long been hand in hand, Jason is seeing the intersection of these two domains playing out in entirely new context. 

[20:42] Jason Severs: As a designer, I’ve actually been working a lot harder to understand the role of data, sort of strategic nature of data, the architectural nature of data. To understand it, almost as a medium, in some ways, because I think if you’re going to design, let’s say you design a simulation about how an AI can work in a particular context, and you want to make that simulation as real as possible, you need a data source that can simulate how that’s going to be.  

[21:10] Jason Severs: Let’s, let’s make it simple. Let’s say you’re going to design a new intelligent device that sits in your living room, and when that thing comes to life, it’s only there to help you with your fitness routine. I don’t know what form factor it looks like, but you want to simulate the conversation and what’s happening when you’re working through say, like, let’s say you’re just trying yoga for the first time. That device, that intelligence, is going to guide you through the process of yoga. It may show you things, it may vocally coach you through it, but as a designer and understanding like, what data, and when we say synthetic data, it’s basically like representative data. It represents something as it could be. So, I now need synthetic data that’s about a specific type of person, what age they are, how much fitness they’ve done in their life. Have they had any injuries? What’s their body type like? Is one leg longer than the other? You know? What’s their space like? Do they have a small space? Is it a big space? Is it warm? Is it cold?  

[22:12] Jason Severs: So now you’ve got, like, data sets about environment, data sets about personality, data sets about physiology, and there are companies now that are starting to create those synthetic data sets so I could actually go and look at a catalog of synthetic data. And I know that my audience that I’m targeting is roughly, let’s say I’m targeting like, you know, someone who’s sort of transitioning into being a senior citizen. You know, I’m in my 70s, and I’m just starting yoga for the first time. I’m going to go and buy a data set that’s roughly like that, but it’s anonymous data. It’s something that people have created, you know, from a precedent of an individual, but a company’s decided to turn that into a product that another company can buy and then run into a simulation.  

[22:54] Jason Severs: So, as a company now, I’m not buying like, stock video footage of people, old people using, doing yoga, because I want to make a video of someone doing yoga. I’m like, now buying data that either helps me generate that video in real time with generative AI, or helps me do more predictive things with synthetic data, in terms of simulating what that experience could be, because I can basically just simulate that, watch a real time video of that interaction happening with that synthetic data going through there, and just make a decision as a company like, okay, it needs to actually be a little bit more like this. So, it’s a lot like game design in a lot of ways. So, you know, when I see my kids, they’ve grown up using things like Sim City, Sim Life, and The Sims, they really understand that mindset, how to build a simulation, have an idea about what they want to happen, and then watch what plays out.  

[23:49] Jason Severs: So, you know, Gen Z and younger, they’re all completely prepared for the simulation mindset world. And now we have all this synthetic data that’s starting to be put together that then becomes the stuff we buy as a company to then create that simulation. But again, like, think about how different that is. You’re not doing sort of like traditional design research and market research and consumer testing, where you’re like, “What would you like to have, and if we put this color on it, how would that make you feel,” that’s all gone. And the sort of traditional way we do software design, that’s all gone, because you’re just building the simulation, seeing what happens to them, making a decision on if you trust what the simulation has told you. So completely different mindset, completely different way of approaching product design, service design. 

[24:38] Elizabeth Woods: This emphasis on speculation can be a big tool in helping companies make decisions for the future, and it’s something AI has real potential to impact. 

[24:48] Jason Severs: You know, we call it speculative design, and sometimes it’s called future casting or scenario planning, but it’s this ability to look out, you know, beyond like five years, ten years, and think about what could be, in a way that’s possible or potentially going to happen, but there’s all these potential or possible or plausible futures ahead of us, based on the things, the trends we see today, but being able to project out and speculate about what could be. I mean, that is the heart of design anyway, because someone will come to us with a challenge, the challenge that companies come to us right now are a lot about workflow. So, they got these big cloud-based platforms they’re working in, like Microsoft Teams or Figma or whatever it might be, and they’re like, what’s the workflow for our company? Like, we have all these different types of ways that people work. We have these sort of roles and responsibilities that people fall into. We have these sort of archetypes or personas for how they work, now design the workflows for us so we can understand how to implement these tools in our companies.  

[25:50] Jason Severs: So, we’re always in this mode of like, well, what could be, right? And it’s based on what is happening now. But like, what could be means, how could it be better? So, when you’re speculating, you’re often going much further out on purpose, because you want to create sort of a decision space that lives five, ten, years out in the future. And you’re creating a bunch of those decision spaces, because then, as a company or an individual, using that methodology, you can start to think about how things are going to be in real life in the future, and whether you’re doing that more close in for something that’s going to get built next year or something that could get built in 30 years, that’s the sort of scope and scale that designers are always thinking in.  

[26:31] Jason Severs: I can’t speak to other companies, but for frog, future casting and scenario planning and speculative design used to be a normal part of our practice. We did it quite regularly, and it was because, you know, like ten, 15, years ago, a lot of companies were going through what would be called, like, a digital transformation, where they were adopting a lot of, you know, software as a service, cloud-based technologies, new big digital platforms. So, we were trying to help them through that transition. And now we’re in this mode, sort of era of design where those things have been figured out to some extent, some more widely adopted than others by certain companies, but now we’re just in this mode of building for those things, and we’re at this interesting turning point where a new technology has come around, and we have to start to speculate about what could be again.  

[27:18] Jason Severs: And I love getting into this mode, because now clients are coming back, because the future is a little bit uncertain, like it was much more certain five years ago. And everybody set up these big, sort of DevOps, and, you know, agile workflows in their companies to continually upgrade and, you know, software and customize it to their enterprise. But now it’s like, oh, what do we do? We’ve got these new things that are like, I think—what’s the guy who wrote Sapiens Harare? I never get his name right. I think that’s close. You know? He’s saying these things are uncontrollable by design. Fascinating provocation, because they are uncontrollable by design. AIS, but we need to embrace that, and that’s what I think scares a lot of our clients now, is like, well, what does that mean? What do we do with that and getting into a speculative posture about the future that’s once again needed, which is exciting. 

[28:09] Elizabeth Wood: And that’s our show. The Design Mind frogcast was brought to you by frog, a leading global creative consultancy that is part of Capgemini Invent. Check today’s show notes for transcripts and more from our conversation. We really want to thank Jason Severs, Head of Design East, frog North America, for joining us on our 50th episode to share his insights on convergent design in the age of AI. Find a link to Jason’s piece on this topic in the show notes.  

[28:36] Elizabeth Wood: We also want to thank you, dear listener. If you like what you heard, tell your friends, rate and review to help others find us and be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Find lots more to think about from our global frog team at frog.co/designmind, that’s frog.co. Follow frog on x, at @frogdesign and @frog_design on Instagram. And if you have any thoughts about the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at frog.co/contact. Thanks for listening. Now, go make your mark. 

Related content:

• Convergent Design in the Age of AI: A skeptical optimist speculates on what the Rabbit r1 could become
• Convergent Transformation: Building customer loyalty and driving growth