EP 121: Designing for the Future | Manuel Lima
This week we talk about The New Designer: rejecting myths and embracing change.
Manuel Lima is an internationally renowned designer and author of three bestsellers that have been translated into several languages: The Book of Circles, The Book of Trees, and Visual Complexity. Named “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds” by Creativity magazine, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a leading voice on information visualization. His talks have been watched by more than three million people around the world and he has been featured in such magazines and newspapers as Wired, New York Times, Science, Nature, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Forbes, and El País. The founder of VisualComplexity.com and a regular teacher at Parsons School of Design, he has over fifteen years of experience designing digital experiences and leading product teams at such companies as Google, Microsoft, and Nokia. His new book is The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change (MIT Press, May 2023).
Episode mentions and links:
Book: The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change
Manuel’s previous publications
A Visual History of Human Knowledge via TED Talks
Six Principles for Designing Any Chart via Medium
Manuel’s restaurant rec: Asia
Follow Manuel: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Insta
Episode Reflection
This week, we explored common myths in personal, societal, and environmental impact in design. Manuel presented examples from his book, "The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change." We discussed the myth of perfection, the significance of failure, the myth of digital design, and the myth of objective certainty, among others. One topic that stood out was design systems. Manuel emphasized that these "very, very, very small-scale systems" lack ambition and urged designers to consider larger systems on a societal and planetary scale.
Plastics exemplify the challenges of small-scale design leading to significant long-term consequences. Plastic designs are built to outlast their short-term use by hundreds or even thousands of years. For instance, a plastic water bottle serves the user for a few minutes but remains on Earth for 10-20 times the user's lifespan. This raises the question: Should the designer prioritize the planet as the ultimate stakeholder or the fleeting needs of the human user? The concept of no neutral design is fascinating because it empowers designers to positively influence these larger systems. However, it's important to note that many of these effects may remain invisible to the designer, particularly in fields like healthcare design. The changes we make in healthcare design can impact someone's long-term health or prevent illnesses, but we rarely witness the direct moment when our design achieves its intended effect. The payoff may not be immediately gratifying, and there's no glamorous object to admire at the end. Manuel's call to action encourages us to shift our perspective, seek opportunities for systemic change, and be willing to adjust our expectations of scale, impact, and motivation.
Written by Rob Pugliese
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Bon Ku: Hello and welcome back I'm Bon Ku the host of Design Lab. It's a podcast that explores the intersection of design and health. You can reach out to me on Twitter at B O N K U on Instagram at D R B O N K U. Our guest today is Manuel Lima. He is an internationally renowned designer and the author of three bestselling books that have been translated into multiple languages. They are The Book of Circles, The Book of Threes and Visual Complexity. Manual is named one of the 50 most creative and influential minds by creativity magazine. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and he's a leading voice on information visualization.
His talks have been watched by more than 3 million people around the world. Manual has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, Science, Nature, Business Week, Fast Company and Forbes. He is the founder of visualcomplexity.com. And he is a teacher at the Parsons School of Design. Manuel has over 15 years of experience designing digital experiences and leading product teams at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Nokia.
He has a new book out it's called The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change. I highly highly recommend it.
Make sure you sign up for our newsletter that our producer, Rob Pugliese puts out every week. You can visit our website designlabpod.com to sign up for it. When we drop a new episode, you will get Rob's reflection and show notes.
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Now here's my conversation with Manuel Lima.
Interview
Bon Ku: Manuel Lima, welcome to Design Lab. I'm excited to have you on the show and talk about your new book.
Manuel Lima: Thank you so much for having me Bon, it's a pleasure.
Bon Ku: So your book is called New Designer: Rejecting Myths, and Embracing Change. And in your book what are some of the common myths or preconceptions about design that you challenge?
Manuel Lima: Interesting. So yeah, I think halfway way through, you always struggle a little bit with the structure of the book, right as a writer to package in the most effective way, for the audience. And so I struggled with that a lot. And then this idea of myths came into being, which was, I was already kind of talking a lot about, the notion of ideas that are really blocking designers from reaching their full potential, right?
Therefore, the notion of a myth that is somehow shackling designers, came about. And so the book is structuring three main sections. One is about personal impact. The other one is about societal impact. And the other one is about environmental impact. And I will start with the first myth, which is actually the design is perfection. And I talk about that in the, the first three chapters, right? All about personal impact because I really feel that you have to be better first as a designer, you know, know yourself, know your skillset. Again, deconstruct some of the myths that are holding you back. And then, you know, it's kind of like putting your mask first and then helping others.
Then you can actually help make society better and environment better. But focusing on yourself as a designer, as a creative professional is paramount. So, again, going back, the design is perfection. I talk about, this notion that design is all about creating the most perfect thing and how that is a cause of anxiety, of pain and suffering for many designers, and I try to teach them how to kind of abandon this notion of that design is perfection, right? That we no longer, have to attain to select such a high standard. It's all about creating many instead of one, right? embracing vulnerability, embracing, you know, failure . And embracing imperfection as, as he means to fight back against this myth.
Bon Ku: And I wanted to pause there cause I love one of your quotes about creativity from the book you say creativity can be a meandering, messy process that doesn't always end well. And I love that description of of creativity because I think me personally and other people think creativity is about perfection, but it's not.
Manuel Lima: Right. And maybe one of the, the reasons why we think that is that we only look at the end result, right? And we don't see the the huge cemetery of imperfections that to that, seemingly perfect solution. So I think that's a huge failure I think on on designers and creative professionals really talk openly about failure, about things that, again, the messy process that is for everyone messy, right?
But we don't talk about it. We just show, you know, the most, you know, again, the finalized piece in a portfolio. And we don't really, assume and talk openly about, that process what led to it.
Bon Ku: And healthcare's the same way where it's all about perfection and never failing, never getting it wrong. And, and I was inspired by another line from your book, you say, getting it wrong can be a creative catalyst. And I teach design to medical students at my school, in Philadelphia and we have such a hard time failing and getting it wrong.
I mean, we're, we're perfectionists. You know, we've like aced every multiple choice question test in our lives. We never get a B. We've always gotten A's, and failing is a little bit scary for many physicians. So why is it important to learn how to fail?
Manuel Lima: Oh, it's absolutely paramount. It's really the, the most critical thing you can learn. so when you don't fail, you get stuck to a single idea, right? So, and I see this happening, especially in the design community all the time, which is designers you know, it doesn't really matter how talented they are, they come up with this idea.
And all of a sudden there's also like this confusion of attaching yourself to an idea which is also wrong. And I talk about this in the book, like your idea is not yourself. Those are two different separate entities, right? So if your idea is being criticized or being attacked, it's not you as an individual who is being attacked.
Those are very things. But what often is that designers get overly attached to an idea that they could come up in the beginning. And from that moment on, it's basically confirmation bias. So they seek validation and confirmation that their idea is really good, right? And they get stuck in this loophole of like validation, self validation,
Bon Ku: sounds like a lot of startups that
Manuel Lima: yes,
Bon Ku: heard their pitches from.
Manuel Lima: it is very much human nature, right? So, There's certainly a process like that for many of us. But what's the, the worst part of that is that while you are in this process of like this loophole of like self validation, you are missing out on many other ideas that could be equally good, if not better.
So what I talk about in the book is that, and, and I, I actually practice this as a manager in many of the design teams that I've led. Whenever someone new enters my team, I want them to fail as soon as possible. I gave them a very easy task, and my purpose is that, is that for them to like get it wrong because as soon as they get it wrong, it's out of their system.
They don't have that sense of pressure anymore, right? And now they are ready to embrace alternative scenarios, alternative viewpoints. And that's is all about, it's not about sticking one, one thing. An idea is explore as many as possible, right, and explore as many potential, solutions to a given problem.
Bon Ku: Hmm. we could just talk about this failure for the entire podcast, but let, let's jump into some other
Manuel Lima: Right. Right.
Bon Ku: of design that you talk about. So, you work at Google before, and in your book you talk about the right shade of blue to indicate hyperlinks. Why did you bring up this example?
Manuel Lima: Well, I brought this up, this example, it's called the, the 51 Shades of Blue, scenario, which people can just like look it up online. There's a, a lot of documentation on it. I think it's a great example of excessive optimization.And it's an example where, you know, human creativity has been pushed aside and saying, Hey, you know, I, I know bass from my experience, from my, let's say, my 20 years of experience as a creative individual, as a designer.
What shade of blue we should actually use for this hyperlink specifically. And this happened, you know, I think maybe 15 years ago at Google. Instead of relying on a human to make that decision, they relied on data. Right. And they basically put out all a variety of different shades and they did AB testing and it was kind of an unconscious decision making right.
Bon Ku: What's AB testing for those who don't know?
Manuel Lima: AB testing is that he put two different versions of very similar versions of the same page or the same, you know, in this case it was a, the search engine results page, and you basically test the version that gets more clicks. In this specific case, they looked side by side, multiple different shades, right?
And the ones that got more clicks, the very shade that got more clicks of all of those shades eventually was the one that was adopted by
Bon Ku: Google
and, this was a big thing, right? They had like dozens of people working on this, right?
Manuel Lima: was huge. again, I, I think it's more, and I mentioned this case because it's not just Google, it's really a symptom of Silicon Valley about excessive optimization.
Right? About, measurement and quantification to a, a degree that I think actually block us. And I mentioned this in the book because oftentimes, What we see happening in those, those companies is that by wanting to measure everything, by wanting to have data for every single decision, well, first of all, it showcases a user version to risk, right?
And to failure, going back to failure. but I think it's, in a way, it's, removing every human from a, every single equation. also the, the another sort of pernicious, thing that can happen is it leads to paralysis.
Bon Ku: Hmm,
Manuel Lima: When you are obsessively measuring everything, when you need data to make every single decision and one single data point is not enough, you need to more data, more data and more data.
All of a sudden you become, it's called analysis paralysis, and I thought this about simply the book. You literally become paralyzed and uncapable of making any single decision because you simply have too many options to think about and to ponder.
Bon Ku: Mm. how do you measure, the, I guess, the effectiveness of your design intent or solution then?
Manuel Lima: Yes. I think in the end of the day, it's all about the users, right? Absolutely. But I, think it, it needs to be a balance. and I think we are losing the balance, right? Right now when it comes to human decision making. I think we are not trusting designers enough for them to make the decision and relying purely, solely on data to make some of these decisions.
And yes, some decisions are very critical to the business, and in fact, we need to validate them clearly we'd, user testing and, and user validation. But other decisions, minor decisions, just trust the people that have been doing this for too long. Because intuition is not just gut feeling, you know, intuition, ears and ears of experience and knowledge about what worked and didn't work.
And I think oftentimes we confuse the two.
Bon Ku: Hmm. So Chat.GPT isn't going to replace designers. Do you, would you say, because I, I get this a lot of like half joking of like physicians, well, of, there's this like intuition that clinicians have about taking care of patients, but then we're like, well, why can't AI just replace that if you feed the data of the patient's past medical history and all the current, clinical trials, the effectiveness of medications, can't you be just as good? But there's something about the years of practicing and seeing patients as art of medicine that this intuition that you have is not this gut failing is still based upon decades of experience, right. Of, of taking care of patients.
Manuel Lima: Absolutely. Yeah, and it's, you know, accumulated experience, by the individual and by the, the overall community. So Going back to your point about ChatGPT, I think there's also a bit of a lack of ambition, and I, and I'm talking this in, in one of the chapters, and, and I'd like to give the example of the word system.
So designers love the word system itself, right? But they use it at a very minuscule scale. The, they use it as a, a group of interface items or, or patterns or components, right? That's what the design system normally stands for. And when designers talk about, you know, thinking systemically, it's really about that.
It's about, one experience is consistent with the other. So it's at a very, very, very small scale and that really lacks a lot of ambition on the design of front. And curious enough, I think design systems are gonna be some of the things that, you know, AI will replace. At the earliest I would say.
Bon Ku: Like, do you mean? What's an example
Manuel Lima: Like interfaces, like we already see, like how easy it is for us to create an interface, like a new webpage, like that.
They take a lot of knowledge to create like a, a new webpage, right? And we already have a lot of automated systems that can put up a, a new page pretty quickly. Right, based on, you know, the millions of pages that are already out there, that exist, you know, in terms of like, what color should this button be?
You know, what kind of section should we, add it here? What kind of messaging should we have? So all these decisions, like it wouldn't take any effort for an, an AI to, to do
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Manuel Lima: but I think that's a good thing and a bad thing. Well, I think, actually, let me reframe that. I think it's all good things because to be honest, By AI doing that for us, it will force designers to actually think about other bigger systems that we need to pay attention to, which is our planet, our planet Earth.
Right? That's the. Larger system. And now we actually, as designers, as creatives, contribute to that much larger system and start creating things that might be invisible, might be forward-looking, but interesting nonetheless. And yes, you know, these might be a piece that's not necessarily portfolio material because it's intangible, Creating things like, again, I think service design is adding in that direction, but I think the future will much, much more interesting insights when it comes to creating invisible types of design solutions affecting the system overall society and environment at large.
Bon Ku: Yeah. Let's open that tab and I just wanna preface it by saying that what I love about your book is that there's all these historical examples and contexts and origin stories, and you really widen this aperture of design that it's just not about like these webpages, but you what you just said eloquently is about this system and, designers.
Design stuff and create stuff that lasts a pretty long time to outlive humans. So one chapter of you book, you talk about the most extraordinary design challenge and then you talk about plastic. So can you comment on that? Give us a little teaser on that. Environmental repercussions of design.
Manuel Lima: Yeah, so I actually, in the book, I really go often against the notion of user-centered design. it might seem counterproductive at times. and I go it in in different ways against it. So one of them is the notion that we are designing something for humans when we are not. And I mean that because humans are just transient users of whatever we are creating.
The end of the day, whatever it is, if it's a mobile phone, like a chair, it'll outlive that user's lifespan. So at the end of the day, really what we are creating is something that will live in the environment for centuries, if not millennia.
Bon Ku: Hmm.
Manuel Lima: And with that, it bears a huge responsibility on us to create something that truly has this immense lifespan.
Yet we keep focusing on this like transient usage by a single human, and it's very myopic, right? It's extremely myopic. And I think by leaving out this like much more extended lifespan of every single design solutions we put at, we are being immensely responsible because that's how we keep designing, you know?
And, and we are again continued putting out things into a vacuum of consequences. And we have to understand. So we have to first of all, expand the lifespan of, of our understand that that immense lifespan of, of our given design solutions, cause we're not creating for, the users, right? In that sense, we are really creating for the environment.
So the environment should be our ultimate stakeholder, not but the environment, right.
Bon Ku: that's why we should stop freaking designing with plastic. Right.
Manuel Lima: I mentioned plastic. Sorry. I did mention, so I give the example of plastic. Yes. I think plastic is an abberent thing that wasn't, you know, invented in, in many ways, but I think of all. Things that we have created that's really evil. I think the notion of a, plastic bottle is the worst, right? if you put a, a chart, almost like evaluating the lifespan of a plastic bottle and a time of usage, like how long it takes for it to be consumed, it's probably the worst offender we can think of in the sense that the time of usage is like, what?
Two minutes or whatever time it takes you to go down like a whole, bottle and it stays in the environment for like, Hundreds and thousands of years.
Bon Ku: it out outlives the humans that it was quote unquote designed for.
Manuel Lima: By a large stretch, it outlives its usage. It's usage. It's like what? Five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour a day. It outlives that by an immense number. So that when the designer's responsibilities should be the opposite. It should be about extending the usage and diminishing the lifespan. Basically the presence of that object in the environment.
Or if it's gonna last for too long in the environment, make sure that it can be recycled. Make sure it can be like reused in some other way. That at least it's giving, it's extending its lifespan, it's sending it the time of usage of that object in the environment at large. And by the way, we can continue talking about, of course, the responsibility of like industrial designers and things that are actually, creatives that are actually building physical things.
But I'm very clear about this in the book. Digital Will Save Us is another myth.
Bon Ku: Yeah. I love that chapter. can you talk, about that? Yeah.
Manuel Lima: Of course. I mean, there's this myth that somehow because we are digital designers, we're not contributing to the, you know, the environmental catastrophe that we see all around us when we are. I mean, Google estimates that every time you do a search on your device, it's the equivalent of lighting up a light bulb for like 17 seconds.
Bon Ku: Wow.
Manuel Lima: Now think about that just you alone, I mean, these searches you do a day and think how that can really add up to you know, energy conception and yet another example that I like to give is the cloud. We all talk about the cloud as if it's this sort of fluffy.
Bon Ku: net, zero
Manuel Lima: benign, you know, extremely benign thing that we just put it on the cloud.
It's so magical, right? How can it harm the, planet? It's spot in the cloud. The cloud is actually data centers, massive buildings that are consuming a huge amount of energy. And we have like all these servers creating a lot of heat all plugged into like, electrical, sources. It's, absolutely, I mean, the cloud is the equivalent of like the fifth largest.
If it was a country, the cloud would be the fifth largest country in terms of like energy consumption. So it's just mind boggling, right? And we keep treating these themes in a very light way. And again, like thinking that somehow we digital designers are not as much to blame as fashion designers or industrial designers.
Bon Ku: Yeah, cuz you say over and over in a book that design is not neutral and that designers have a responsibility. And I think of the healthcare space where I think it's something like 10% of greenhouse gases in the US is because of the healthcare industry. Cuz we have so much waste and I think there's a. There's a need there for how can we design responsibly and, you know, not just have this lens of design for the patients, but designing for the environment and the medical devices and products that we make. So I'm kinda curious to tap into your design brain of what are the implications or what are the, the role of design in healthcare?
I think it's massive. I think, well, , it's not one that normally, it's, at least it's not traditionally part of, you know, one of the, the areas where design is, is very active on. Right. I think that should change. Yeah. and that, it's mind boggling to me. , why it's not, it's often the largest industry in any country. You know, 18, 19, 20% of the GDP in the Us and like. I always go, where are the designers?
Manuel Lima: I know, I know. It's like, mean, I think it's a mix of like, there's still, , follow a lot of what's sexy in there,
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Manuel Lima: You know, from like advertisement to like the tech industry to like now the auto industry because it's you know, it's all about design and sexy and technology. So I think the healthcare has, has been sort of like left.
and it's of course now competing with a variety of different, you know, startups and, and whatnot. But I mean, from a user standpoint, again, like, I think it could be really, really absolutely groundbreaking if more designers were in the healthcare space. Because it could really change. And, again, not just design, but also go back to, you know, an area that's really close to my heart, which is data visualization,
Bon Ku: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Manuel Lima: and conveying, I think there's such a, a huge gap in terms of people understanding.
What's going on with their own health and in a way that's clear, understandable, and, and, and effective. And I think we could do so much more when you go to a doctor, when you have an exam done and like, how do you convey that clearly to the end user? Right? How can you actually get a lot of insight out of that experience?
It's still a black box for a lot of people. And I think that's, again, the responsibility of designers and, and a space where we should definitely be more active on.
Bon Ku: Yeah. I love this quote from your book. You say, seeing people as data points can be , particularly dehumanizing and that's why I just can't do, medical research, but with larger data sets, like I, I'm still a practicing clinician cuz the patient is the personification of their data, right?
It's a data, it's data with humanity and it, it gets me going, right? I can just look at a patient's blood pressure being two 20 over like a hundred. That doesn't mean mean anything, but I see when I see the patient with that high blood pressure coming into my emergency room and having like a headache from it, or, you know, having some signs of an organ damage then becomes like real to me.
it's humanizing.
Manuel Lima: Yeah, I think this element of like, Be more human, right? I think you, you use that like be more human when you're treating like data that it is about humans. I think that would go a long way. I think healthcare for sure suffers from this and we like charts so much. Cause charts give us this notion of like, measurement again, quantification and assurance of this myth, which is another myth of objective certainty, right?
Where that chart really play a key role there and healthcare absolutely. But I also go back to, you know, some of the major catastrophes we had, from Covid to like, you know, now the, the war in Ukraine. And, and now do we as a community convey that through by mean charts. We created all these charts and again, we plot all these humans on a, on a map, and immediately as whenever humans are plotted on the chart, It creates a distancing effect.
You detach yourself from them and also from your responsibility, right? And either you're creating like something in the healthcare industry or creating some peace, on a measure or on a major travesty that happened, and you wanna convey a sense of empathy or urgency or action. You cannot do that by the means of the charts that we are creating today.
So we have to evoke a deeper sense of empathy because at the end of the day, these humans are in pain or many times dying or have died already. Right? So how do we convey this like human aspect of it? How can data have a bit more human and charts themselves become a bit more empathetic? Right? I think that's a huge challenge for our community.
Bon Ku: Who's doing that? Well, I, I think of Georgia Lupi who does like, just a, great example of humanizing data. Do you have any examples of designers that you admire who, who do that Well, and it can be from your own work as as well, because I know you do a lot of data visualization.
Manuel Lima: For sure. I mean, I think there is, well, I would tell you two examples. One is, is called Depth of Processing. It's actually a, a cognitive phenomenon basically tells us that the more things we have to, showcase when it comes to like data and information. So not just text, but like if you have text images, maybe a questionnaire, maybe a video.
The more different mediums you, you add to that experience, the the experience will be and the easier it will be for you to remember that experience, right? It's not. Surprising. We are kind of multi sensorial creatures, right? So the more different ways we can absorb different type of information, the barrier we'll be at retaining them.
But I think a really interesting area of study is called Anthropographics. And these are people that are really interested in, in avoiding that, exact issue. of distancing ourselves from the problem by, plotting humans on a graph. And what they do is how can we, instead of a dot, can we represent that.as a single silhouette of a person can.
Even the layout instead of a grid having an organic layout. All of a sudden means like you, you actually connect with those people a bit better. So they're trying to explore all these techniques and approaches for you to convey information in a way that's more human, that actually is not as dense to sing as just again, plots as just thoughts on a chart.
Bon Ku: Yeah. Oh, I, I love that. I'm just thinking about the medical journals that, that I read of. Can there be a way to, humanize that data but also, de-identify it as well? Right. But I think there's, yeah. I'm just had a flurry of thoughts of how, how we could do that in medical
journals.
Manuel Lima: You should look it up. It's really interesting, actually. There was a paper that was released like, about a year ago on, on this, like with several approaches and techniques on, on not to do that better.
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Manuel Lima: moving forward,
Bon Ku: Your last chapter of the book is called Designer of the Future, right? And, and I like this quote, you say, "the designer future should be able to dream the impossible and show us where we could be going" and that's why I, particularly as a non designer or a fake designer, quote unquote, who works in healthcare, is that's what excites me so much about design because it's very optimistic and it challenges boundaries and it can lay a roadmap of how to get to a future state.
And I don't think we do that well in in healthcare. And I think, it gives me. Some hope because I was like, healthcare can be so depressing, right? Because it's so regulated, it's such a hard sector to be in. So is that too much for designers like , to be that optimistic? Tell us.
Manuel Lima: I think we have no other option rather than being optimistic. Oh, well of course that's easy to say. I do consider myself to be, at the end of the day, optimist. I really am. But I, at the same time, I, I think What else are we gonna be like, extreme, like pessimist things and, just think about it's gonna, the world is gonna end anytime soon.
Like, that doesn't leave us like a lot of hope. For at least hope for us to make things better and, and wanting to change things. So this designer of the future, you know, quote that you just gave. I think it's, it's interesting in the sense all of us designers, we are always working in the future.
We always. Thinking about something that not yet exists and will eventually come to fruition when it's done. So we always like one step ahead or multiple steps ahead oftentimes, but design can, of course, as we know, be very reactive.
This is what my competitor is doing, therefore this is what we should do.
So it's not really like forward looking and instead just reacting to whatever is happening in the present.
Now. I think there's a really interesting area study within design, which is speculative design. And I think, opening the door for like really look deep into the future of, possibilities and what we as society, as environment, right?
We could become and then design for those various alternative scenarios. I think that really puts us in this mindset of anticipating things that could happen. And I think that's a really interesting, again, area for us to be aware of.
Bon Ku: I love this example of speculative design. Cause when I first heard about it, I was like, what, what does this mean? These future states that are imaginary and why? Like, why is this an important exercise to go through? But I do a little bit of that in some designs and workshops I do for healthcare professionals.
I, I think about like, what does the hospital of the future look like in 20 years where we don't put patients in hallway beds? Where, the experience can be seamless and it could be actually a, a very humanizing experience of, of dying and recuperating from illness, but, it's a different lens that I'm not comfortable with or used to.
Like. how do you teach that or how do you embrace that speculative designer mindset when you're working with the team?
Manuel Lima: I mean, in a, in a way it's not as different as, you know, many of the workshops and design sprints, we sometimes might do as a team. Right. Oftentimes you, you've probably seen this, like we started with like, what if scenarios. What if, what if this didn't exist? What if we didn't have this or that constraint?
Right. So I think the notion idea of speculative design is taking that to a whole different level. Right. But I think from a creative that can be extremely liberating. Right. Because all of a sudden, well, and sometimes, we are just, frequently, conditioned by the limitations that we have around us, right?
Oh, we don't even see the possibility because there was no way it could work. But by removing some of these barriers, you open yourself to like, think about things that already exist in a very alternative way. And look for better ways of executing a given problem or, or coming up with a solution.
So I think that the opening of possibilities can be extremely encouraging and, come up with a really good solutions. And even if that's not the final one, right, it will get you a lot more material to work with, uh, when it comes to getting closer to that solution.
Bon Ku: Well, everyone who's a designer should definitely read your book. It it reminds me of,Victor Papanek's book and around kinda like social designing for social change. And what about non-designer? should they read your book? Can they, can they benefit from from it? Uh,where do you think about non designers when you're writing this book?
Manuel Lima: I mean, it's definitely geared more towards designers, but I, think yes. I, I, I think so. I think there's a lot of, like, within, as you, so I'll mentioned, I go deep into like history about human nature, right? About biases. So that is really, like, a lot of those things are truly universal traits and behaviors that all of us human share irrespectively of our, you know, work label.
So I think, yeah, I think there's also a lot of non designers that could benefit from reading this book, if nothing else. Understanding, you know, some of the challenges that designers actually go through, but also understanding how it can change. And there's also conversations about technology, of course, environmental science.
So I think there's a lot of things to that can touch various different types of interests.
Bon Ku: Yeah, and I think a lot about this in the healthcare space as the delivery of healthcare goes from analog to digital of the importance of design when. Thinking about the system that's going to incorporate large data sets, incorporate ai, it's the repercussions of design decisions in a healthcare space can impact millions of people more than just like that n of one that I see at the patient at the bedside.
So I think there's gonna be, it's, again, it's critical for us to understand, the limitations, responsibilities of, of design. And if a listener were to come visit you, where, where you're at, where would you take them out to eat?
Manuel Lima: Wow. I mean, I, I am fortunate, to be living in a city that is known for its culinary tradition in Lisbon, Portugal. So the food is here is remarkable. But I also consider to be myself a little bit like a, I lived in so many other places that I, I find culinary experiences, you know, from all over the world.
E immensely fascinating. I lived in New York for like 10 years and I, I love that about New York, how much you can go, you know, just eat all different types of foods all the time. I would actually probably take them to this restaurant called Asia. Which is, a really interesting Asian fusion with a, sometimes a bit of a Portuguese flare.
And I think it's a really good one because you can really have b variety of different foods and great seafood as you can always have in Portugal. but others are very sort of Asian type of, culinary taste. So
I would them,
Bon Ku: It's right there in Lisbon.
Manuel Lima: it's right there actually right there in the main avenue of, of Lisbon.
Bon Ku: Well, you know, as we were saying before we recorded Lisbon, Portugal is on my list, bucket list of places to go. So, when I visit I would love to get a meal with you there.
Manuel Lima: Of course, of course. And then we can go to the beach afterwards.
Bon Ku: Yeah. Well, thank, thank you, Manuel, for, coming on the show, and love your book. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Manuel Lima: Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.
Bon Ku: You can follow Manuel Lima on Twitter at M S L I M A and on Instagram at M A N L I M A. Make sure you buy his book, you can order it on Amazon. And you can check out his website, M S L I M A.com. Design Lab is produced by Rob Pugliese, editing by Fernando Quieroz. Our theme music was created by Emmanuel Houston and the cover design by Eden Lew. See you next week.
