Designing the Future
A Conversation with Seth Snyder, Senior Designer at Frog Design
Seth Snyder is a Senior Interaction Designer at frog San Francisco where he leads multidisciplinary teams building transformational digital and physical experiences for clients ranging from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. In his free time, he can be found in the park with Tux, his Boston Terrier, traveling the world on urban photo safaris, and researching topics like emotionally intelligent AI and robotics.
Seth, what type of work do you do at Frog?
Together with our multidisciplinary design teams which often include Visual Designers, Industrial Designers, Strategists, Filmmakers, and Design Technologists, I guide our client partners through the entire product development process. I see the role of interaction designers as being shepherds that tend to the user needs gleaned during research, which are then used to inform the entire design process.
More than any place I’ve ever worked, frog puts a huge emphasis on user research. This includes field research, in-home ethnography, and traveling all over the world to interview people to understand their pain points, needs, and dreams for the future.
What kinds of projects are you working on right now?
Well, as you know, a lot of our work needs to be kept secret until it launches to the public, but what I can tell you is that we have been taking on more and more work with both chatbots and physical robots, which have both been really interesting. We are also doing quite a bit of emerging technology work for early stage startups whom we often invest in as well through frogVentures, the division of our company that focuses on helping entrepreneurs launch new products, services and businesses into the market.
What have been some of the biggest challenges designing for chatbots and robots so far?
As with most design consultancies, at frog, we’ve designed and built thousands of websites and apps, and every type of physical product over the years, but chatbots and robots are so new, there’s not a lot of experience or best practices to draw from. For us, it started with defining what the deliverables should be for a conversational UI experience and for AI-powered consumer robots. We discovered that there is a huge gap in both of these spaces where many companies are just skipping over design altogether. Some companies have created platforms for building bots, but there is little to no consideration for user experience or visual design. This shows that there is a huge opportunity for designers to get involved.
We’ve been having a lot of fun creating what we call “Character Bibles” for chatbots — documents that outline the fictional backstory of the bot and define the parameters of its personality. A lot of our time is also spent creating interaction models for physical robots, bringing together motion, sound, and UI to create rich experiences that are exciting for people to engage with.
You’ve primarily worked at design agencies throughout your career. With the proliferation of large tech companies starting their own in-house design teams, how do you see design agencies evolving?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Design agencies certainly have had a lot of their talent snatched up by big tech companies that are starting their own in-house design teams. Startups are also hiring designers more than ever, making it difficult for agencies to retain top talent.
Something else that’s had a huge impact is all the design agencies getting bought by large consulting companies like McKinsey and Accenture. All of this is completely transforming the design industry and threatening our business on a daily basis. All this aside, I still see so much value in consultancies like frog, which is why I’m still working here. It’s all about having so many of the world’s best designers, strategists, and technologists all under one roof (or 15 roofs worldwide in our case) who can bring a combination of deep knowledge of user experience design, insanely high expectations of our own attention to detail and craft, and fresh perspectives to industries that often don’t get that luxury. This is a special recipe for success that has a distinct advantage over in-house teams that are bogged down with the daily minutiae of product upkeep and huge business consulting companies who are really just giving away design services to unlock bloated multi-year consulting contracts.
The benefits for me personally are also great — I thrive on working on a diversity of projects and with so many interesting clients all over the world. In twelve months, I may work on a wearable health product for a team in Detroit, a chatbot for a startup in the Bay Area, a digital transformation initiative for an energy company in Australia, a user research project for a Japanese Telco, and an in-home robot for one of the world’s biggest robotics companies. This allows me to constantly learn about new industries and technologies, test out new design tools, and learn from some super smart people.
So much of the hardware in the world is becoming software — just look at what has happened in consumer electronics. The latest phones and computers are little more than a screen connected to the internet. Considering that much of your work straddles the digital and physical worlds, how do you see these two worlds converging as we move into the future?
I believe people crave physicality. This will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. I studied and worked as an industrial designer before shifting my focus to interaction design and what I’ve come to realize is that “digital” is one of many ingredients in the palette of materials that you can choose from when designing an experience. Experiences are made up of physical ingredients (metal, cloth, plastic, glass, etc.) and digital ingredients (data, pixels, connectivity, intelligence, etc.). Every experience has these ingredients and it’s up to designers to use those materials to create the best experience possible.
As far as digital and physical design converging, I am very excited to see this happening more and more. While there are very specific hard skills that are different between industrial design and interaction design, there are also so many overlapping skills. For example, crafting a “design language” crosses both fields — one side focusing on how to communicate the brand and the functionality through the physical form, the other side using digital media to accomplish virtually the same goals. Conceptually, the more the skill sets are combined and the more industrial designers and interaction designers work together, the better. There’s a lot the two fields can learn from each other.
I think we often overestimate the major technological changes that happen over a few decades and underestimate the changes brought by small, ubiquitous technologies. For example, 30 years ago, experts predicted we’d have flying cars by now, but had no idea how much smartphones would impact our society. What are your thoughts on this?
I agree and I think we are seeing a similar underappreciated trend happening all around us with the relationships we’re forming with our virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to have a deeper relationship with our physical world. When our possessions have what we perceive to be intelligence, we’re going to think they care about us and that’s going to make us feel great, but it’s also going to give those things and the companies that make them unprecedented power and influence over us.
You may recall the PARO seal that came out a number of years ago in Japan. It’s a really simple thing — a stuffed seal that purrs — but there have been a ton of studies showing how successful it has been in bringing delight to people who really needed a companion. It’s just a fluffy stuffed animal, but people really feel a connection to it. It definitely doesn’t possess any real AI, but it makes you think that it cares about you and so you end up having a deep emotional connection with it.
I really want artificial intelligence to be used to enhance human relationships rather than replace them. With the robots we’ve been working on at frog, we’ve been exploring how they can enhance the relationships of the people they live with. For example, a robot could provide information about how everyone is interacting (or not interacting) together to promote better interactions amongst the household. So it’s not about you falling in love with the robot — it’s about the robot’s ability to facilitate relationships with you and your family members, making the living environment better for everyone.
How do you imagine working as a designer will change over the next 10 years?
A lot will change over the next decade, but there will be a lot that doesn’t change as well. For example, we’ve seen a wave of augmented reality technologies emerge lately, but the reality is that AR is not new. I worked on an AR project eight years ago and even then we were referencing research that had been done in the 1980s! Some things take a really long time to make their way through the stages of technological progress or the ‘trough of disillusionment’. It’s going to take awhile for these buzz-worthy technologies like AR, VR, and AI to take off and it’s up to us designers to create amazing experiences for these technologies.
With artificial intelligence specifically, my approach is to be very optimistic. Many people in the field think pessimistically, but my approach as a designer is to think about the world that we want to live in and to try to design things that point us towards that future. These technologies are going to make it into the world at some point and it’s up to designers to set an example of how we think they should be crafted and delivered in such a way that they improve people’s lives.
I see designers as a force for good in a world where things could get really dark with data privacy and over-personalization.
We need to make the world that we want to live in. To do that, we’re going to have to flex our abilities. Designers are going to have to continue learning new tools at a very rapid pace, as well as learning how to work with new disciplines of creative folks.
For example there’s a robot company called Jibo, which collaborated with dance choreographers to define the movement framework for their robot. They realized that dance choreographers have been documenting movement for a long time and decided to take advantage of this existing knowledge. They utilized this very old art form (dance) to inform a very new technology (robots) — I love this idea.
Say in the future that a team is designing a new type of robot. I would imagine that the typical design team would be made up of specialists that don’t all come from the technology sector. Instead, in addition to an interaction designer, the team might include a creative writer, an engineer, a sound designer, and a dance choreographer — this is the future of design.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to continue the conversation, leave a comment or message me @blakehudelson on Twitter. You can find Seth on Twitter and Medium as well.
