Episode 1: Learning from Tino Chow

Speaker 1  00:00

Jocelyn Bell, this is from ideas to impact, where students, professors and professionals explore the question, how do you change the world in creative ways, no matter what industry you're in? My name is Jocelyn Bell, and I'm the professor who teaches the human spark a class at Bryant University in which we delve into the sociology behind the overlap of creativity, innovation and a love ethic. In today's episode, you will listen to a discussion with Tino Chow when he visited the human spark class. Tino is the founder and CEO of giant shoulders, a strategic branding agency. You can find his bio in the episode description or on the podcast webpage. I have had a front row seat to the love ethic interwoven with the creativity and innovation of the giant shoulders team. So I was ecstatic that Tino joined us in the spring 2025 semester, when we opened our class to anyone from Bryant interested in participating in the discussion. Thank you so much to Bryant's Amica Center for Career Education for sponsoring his visit as part of the human spark goals, the students were learning how to interact with the guest speaker, so the questions asked during the discussion were primarily crafted by students before Tino visited, the CO facilitators of the discussion Were srivally Mike Quinn and myself. Please excuse. Please excuse the occasional clicks you hear in the recording of this and and the other discussions with guest professionals that came to the class this spring due to some technical difficulties, my laptop, rather than the rooms sound equipment, became the primary audio recording device. Well, I hope you enjoy hearing from Tino as he grapples with questions about the link between his military service and his creativity, how he defines his love ethic and some of the pressing questions in his industry.

Speaker 2  02:26

I think where I want to start is just to kind of tell you a little bit more about myself. I always feel like a three headed monster, kind when I enter a room, one of my heads is in operation. The second is in creativity, and a third in entrepreneurship. So kind of in the intro that you just gave. So I was in the military now almost, well more than 20 years ago, come in Singapore, and I served as a military officer. I saw firsthand what could operations look like? And I'm sure there might be some questions later around, kind of how that intersects with creativity, so I will answer it later. So my first head in operation, so I saw firsthand what good operations look like, why it matters, and also how this shapes cultures, and also shapes relationships, and obviously, kind of the natural next step in my career, going from military, I went to art school, I got my degree in industrial design. So just to split hairs for a second here, product design, industrial design, it's sort of different. It's a Venn diagram that overlaps quite a bit. So in product design. I got my iPhone here, kind of like, if you're a product designer, you look at this as like, this is what I designed, right? Because this is the thing that you use in industrial design. It sort of starts a couple steps before and a couple steps after. So we start asking questions around, how do you actually make the product? Is this? The set of questions that we asked goes a little bit broader than how it looks and how it works, but also production process, how this impacts costs, and also, after someone bought it, what's the experience kind of look like, and at the end of a life of a product, what's going to what happens. So industrial design really kind of taught me kind of more than just making something beautiful, but really about systems thinking, how do you go from point A to point B and beyond? So I graduated in 2009 so that was the last official recession that we had. So it was a midst of it. And by the way, if you're on a computer, you can literally just just Google, have the well, okay, this has been a mouthful, Google, Google's logo. Go look at Google's logo back in 2009 it is really ugly. If you can find a screenshot of like Gmail. So it is also really ugly, because Silicon Valley has not started hiring designers yet. And I would say, little bit envious, in a way, that was someone some of my students were right out of RISD. You can get a six figure job on Silicon Valley. So when I graduated, this didn't exist. Silicon Valley hasn't hired designers yet. And also design thinking was just very much in its infancy. So companies are starting to, kind of like to be aware of it. So in some ways, it was the worst time for me to graduate where there wasn't really any jobs out there. And kind of the the big companies that are creating these kind of amazing products and change hasn't really realized the power of design yet. So that's kind of when I graduated in 2009 so I was asking myself, kind of, what I'm what am I supposed to do with myself? What am I supposed to do with this degree? And so happened that a few of my friends at Brown University was asking a very similar set of questions, how do people find, how do people find the work that they love and create impact? So naturally, can we put together a conference? Because we went to Brown and RISD was like, Hey, can you teach us this? And essentially, the answer that we got is like, do you have five years to wait until we come up with a program. Also, by the way, show me that students want this. So instead of waiting five years because we were graduating, we decided that we're just going to put together a conference. And was a great excuse to invite our heroes all around the world who are doing really amazing kind of work. And a lot of them are kind of really entrepreneurial around kind of like bringing different ideas to market. Why not? It was helping the unbanked in India to cut to use kind of mobile banking. And it was like, I'm very much kind of an early, an early adopter of mobile banking. We had kind of, sort of designers who are building kind of bikes, kind of for developing, kind of nations where you can have a whole family on a bicycle, or you can transport goods. So that was kind of an insight, kind of for me, into, how do you apply the creativity that I love and fell in love with, kind of in school, with kind of real world impact. And it was the first time that I saw those two things come together. And also, by the way, I what I mentioned is that we put to that, put together a conference that was the first time that I've ever seen a business plan the Brown students that we collaborate with was like, Hey, do you realize that we can go out and ask people for money to do what we want to do. And I was like, never occurred to me that by putting together conference, we're asking for sponsorship money. We're asking people to kind of join the cause and kind of bring us, bring all these people to us in Providence, Rhode Island, so and that was what I did. And one of the things that I learned, kind of, during this three day event that we put together, is the idea that you can have the best product in the world, one that solves all of the world's problems, and you can have great marketing that tells everyone about this amazing product, but outside of a sustainable business model, you will never see the impact that you want to create. And so that was the underlying message that I that that really kind of caught my attention. And that was my aha moment. That was the point where I realized that this is the work that I really want to do. So for the last 15 years now, I've been working with innovators, helping them take their concepts, ideas, cut to market and simply put, as some of the companies that we work with, some of the innovators, they're really early stage. And some of them, they have their own intellectual property. They have the product, and they need to bring it to market. And one of the things we end up working with, no matter where they are in their journey, they are challenging some kind of status quo. They're going out and say, hey, there is a better way of doing this, and it's my way. Let me show it to you. So the first thing that they're gonna that they find themselves facing is skepticism. It's like, well, who are you? Why did you come up with this? And why should I listen? And then the other is, I kind of, once you break through, kind of the that initial skepticism, how do you build momentum? How do you bring people in? How do you build community around that idea, to grow it? So that's the work that that I've been doing for the last 15 years, kind of working with kind of different innovators and. The three headed monster that I am, kind of have very much kept myself sane, because a lot of times I kind of people don't want to be challenged. People don't want to kind of hear as like, oh, what they're doing is actually not enough, or there is more opportunity, or there is a better future, if you take the risk to take that one step, and sometimes it's just a baby step, sometimes a leap. So that's a lot of work I do have as a brand strategist. My job is to tell these stories. And you mentioned that I teach at Brown and essentially I teach engineers to tell stories, because a lot of the engineers who are doing research, they need money too. They need funding. They can be grant funding. How do you tell that story? Because, and this is one thing that I think a lot of us well, maybe kind of like I used to believe in, is that my work would speak for itself. But when you really think about an entrepreneur or even a researcher, you have to describe the work before you do it in order to get the money. So how do you do that? So that's that's a lot of work that I do today with really exciting refund companies. And I'm looking forward to your questions and looking forward to sharing more about who those companies on what they do.

Speaker 1  11:22

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right, I'm gonna pass it off to Michael, you got the first question.

Speaker 3  11:28

So you're in the Singapore, Singaporean military before you went to RISD for design, can you tell us more about that experience, and what is the overlap or bridge between military experience and your creativity. And then we're especially curious to hear how your military experience impacted how you got to this point in your career.

Speaker 2  11:49

Okay, that's a great question. Thank you. So anyone here have any military background or have family members who are in the military? Okay, so there's a few of you. So the place I want to start to answer that is that I think there's a lot of misconception, I think, in general, about the military, that we are just a group of people who are groups of soldiers who just follow orders. And I would argue that the most functional kind of militaries are the ones who have the most creativity, and it all comes down to kind of the way that the military is structured. So we often look at the military as a very top down organization where we all have a singular mission, and we all have our roles to play, and therefore we can execute on on a mission. However, when you kind of like, bring it down to the ground level, there's a lot of trust that is required. There's a saying that you know, the the performance of your of your team, really depends on how much you trust, kind of your your buddy in your foxhole, that do they have your back with no question asked. And there are these stories around, especially with a special special forces, one of the main criterias is, when not they would literally take a bullet for you. So let's see which movie was this one? Have everybody seen Captain America? Yeah, like the original kind of first one where, wait, what's his name, Rogers. Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers was picked not because of his size, because he was a little skinny kind of soldier, but he jumped on a grenade, and those are some of the trades that come makes for that's really undervalued, that kind of builds trust, because when you see that as like, Ooh, I want that person on my team, regardless if they are the strongest, the fastest, because they would be willing to protect their their team. So, so one of the things that you know kind of going back to kind of just this misconception of of the military, that it's all just top down, because in many ways, that soldier may not be trained to do that, but he understood the mission. He understood kind of that you can't accomplish your mission with no soldiers. So a job is to kind of protect kind of your your your team, your job is to look out for opportunities, look out for danger. And how do you move kind of mission forward? And this takes a lot of trust, and it's something that I think I've maybe so culturally, especially when I was in military 20 years ago. This is not a word that we use, which is vulnerability. To build trust, you need to be able to be vulnerable with one another. And I think I've, this is my experience in the military, where you kind of have these spaces where you just, like, hang out, get to know one another, you get to know people's background, the family, and, you know, comes, this is so you know, cover the middle. Three loves acronyms, and they put names on everything. So that's like, R and R is recreation, but there's a purpose behind it, and it's get to know one another so that you can trust each other in a battlefield, because you have no time to process when not. It's like, oh, is this person trustworthy or not? We are under tremendous pressure once a bullet flies, none of the politics, none of the anything of that that that sets you apart really matters anymore. You are in survival mode, and your training kicks in. So and this is kind of going back to how, how tie that to creativity is that the most well trained, kind of like military units, are the ones who know what to do under pressure, so that they have mental capacity to be creative, to solve the problem at hand, because there's no amount of training that would teach you and prepare you for every single situation that you are going to face. So it's especially coming in a Singapore military where I was, there was a lot of emphasis on problem solving and and collaboration so and this is something that I have had a lot of conversations with folks who have served in those in the in the American military as well. And I think how all of us share kind of this, this experience where the most functional kind of, like units always the most creative. So that's the I know that you have a long question. I answered maybe, like half of that. So gonna, you're gonna help guide me. You want to Yeah? Me to answer

Speaker 3  16:36

Yeah. Kind of the last part was, how, how did your military experience impact, like, how you got to this point in your

Speaker 2  16:45

career? Yeah, easy question, I know. I mean, how much time do you have? I think the the one thing that I would, and I'm sure count this is going to be maybe a theme, is the relationship between creativity and discipline. So RISD. When I was at RISD, the school is famous for students pulling all nighters. However, the quality of your work after an all nighter is always lower than if you have gotten rest, so, but it's, it's that myth of like, the harder you work, the better the outcome, rather than, you know, kind of taking a different perspective. And it's like, hey, maybe taking perspective, you have new insights, new approaches to kind of solve the same problem. So I will say how this is one thing that that has been a constant, constant in my career is developing systems and structure for the work that I do this. At the end of day, creativity is not just it's not really about where not you can get that one hit wonder and just try a bunch of random things, but it's really about how you can cut churn out. Well, I mean, since I'm using that analogy, churn out kind of hit after hit, like, what's the process that creates great or good outcomes every single time? And the more that you can create good outcomes, the more likely you have more great outcomes as as a result. So, so yes, creativity and discipline and how they come together, it's really how that has informed me. Yes, I

18:27

don't want to use but yes, can you just put me in

Speaker 4  18:31

the line? So do your students first? Definitely have questions.

Speaker 1  18:37

Okay, I will. I will make sure to put you into the line. But okay, all right, should I you have the next question

Speaker 5  18:43

from Singapore, you have lived for a long while in the United States. You have worked with companies that have global reach. So I have two questions. First, how does your personal international background influence your approach to design and leadership? And secondly, how do you successfully engage with and across multiple cultural contexts as you consult with different

Speaker 2  19:09

great questions. You guys are just there's no softball questions,

Speaker 1  19:12

no working through getting these questions just aggregate. I'm like, gosh, I have some great questions. I

Speaker 2  19:27

The short answer is that I don't know. I'm still figuring out a lot of this, but I'll give you an example of kind of a client of mine and a project that we did so and I'm fortunate enough to kind of work with kind of people from all around the world. And I had a chance to work with for a few years now, helping the Japanese government bring some of the biotech innovators come into into Cambridge, come out. Massachusetts, because there's a lot of biotech firms that potentially, kind of would buy the technology of partners. So we kept going in. I was like, I don't really know the Japanese culture kind of well. The person who was running the program kind of studied the Japanese culture and the Japanese language. Even though she was not Japanese, I asked her for some advice, and this was what she said, which was really interesting. It kind of like boggled my mind. Is that into Japanese culture, it's the responsibility of the listener to understand what the speaker said, and it's not the speaker's responsibility to communicate clearly. And then you layer that on top of these are mostly engineers and scientists, and they're already speaking their own language, and we're training them to speak in front of investors that talks about kind of like dollars and cents, and want to understand how they they can recoup their investment. And then on top of that, there is a language barrier, because English is not the first language. So that was a really challenging projects. And one of the things that, and also on top of that, is the cultural difference between kind of Japan and the US, where we just way more blunt and forthright in terms of like, Hey, who are you? We want to know you and Japanese people are not as forthright. So the the one thing that really galvanized kind of all of them, and it also kind of something that have reminded us, this is why we do the work that we do. Is it? It all revolved around an exercise where we are trying to extract their or help them tell their personal story. Firstly, they have never thought that they should or they could tell their personal story, but everyone who we worked with had an amazing story to tell. Now, whether or not it's that they were physicians, where they were in come in a situation where they could not help their patient, and their patient passed away, and it was a solution that was just so simple that nobody has ever implemented, or some of them are much more personal. Have around like they have family members who, once again, they try to help but they couldn't, or they see this injustice come in the world, and they knew that they had to do something about it. So that was the common language that we kind of formed. And was one thing that it didn't just inspire us, but the feedback that we have gotten is that they remember for the first time in years why they were doing what they were doing, kind of like why this matters, and I feel like how that's like storytelling became this, like universal language, even in the midst of kind of language barriers, in midst of like having to relearn how to communicate to a US audience. But storytelling became that one thing that we can all agree that we sat down a room, it just like gives us chills, because as we go around the room, it's like, wow, this is an amazing group of people. So I know I'm not totally kind of answering your question, but those are some things kind of learned, even just with this one experience that we had,

23:42

all right, back to Michael,

Speaker 3  23:46

what lessons can global brands learn from local communities when it comes to innovation and engagement?

Speaker 2  23:53

Really not simple questions. Great. Hmm, global brands. So typically, big companies are not great at innovating. That's sort of a general rule of thumb. I mean, there's definitely some exceptions, and typically how big companies innovate is by buying smaller companies, and then run the creativity out the door, and then they buy it the next small company. So this is something that I've been really curious about. Covered the rise of social media platforms like Tiktok. I think Tiktok specifically, and how, how trust is being built. So I'm a millennial, even though I'm a geriatric millennial, and kind of was looking at some studies and kind of reading. Around how, how does millennial build trust with brands? Versus Gen Z can build trust with brands and the things that come the the name of the game is building trust is not about like, how does the visual look? It's just a way to kind of shortcut building trust and to create, yeah, kind of basically create that connection, kind of emotional connection with it, with your customers. And I'll say that in some ways, the millennial brands often are, let me try and kind of pick up some that are that we can all relate to, like Warby Parker, okay, most people don't wear glasses, all right. Casper mattress, you guys familiar with those? Let's see what away the luggage brand, and when you if you can, like imagine, that brand is always very clean pastel colors has a very kind of clean esthetic. And that is kind of where, kind of millennials, kind of like, kind of find, in some ways, find comfort, or we trust brands like we want. We want brands to tell us, kind of like, what we should kind of believe in, or this is how it reflects kind of who you are, and that's the way to build trust, whereas kind of Gen Z brands are kind of ones that are a little messier, you know, kind of the social media content is less polished. It's, you know, it could really just be shot on kind of an iPhone or anyone's phone, but as real as a little grittier, it's more direct. So as we're kind of like looking at, kind of just like communication as a tool to build community, kind of like these are very different, like brands have very different what kind of different brands have different approaches to their community and understanding that is extremely powerful. And there was a survey done a couple years ago, and it based well, it made sense, but also made no sense, like some of the most not influential brands, but some of the brands that in this study, Gen Z kind of connected with most, well, a lot of fast food brands where they're breaking norm and like communicating directly to to Gen Zs, and was able to create a space for dialog, which was something that millennials It didn't, never worked with millennials, and apparently we don't like to talk to one another, but the way that we want to trust the brand as an authority that was completely different come with Gen Z. So to go back to kind of your question, if the goal is to build trust, then the question around this is like, how do you meet people where they are. And from some of the fundamental, I would say, kind of like from a as a brand strategist, the fundamental objective of a brand has two parts. One, one part of your brand is all about figuring out who you authentically are. Some, one way of us kind of saying that is like, what is your unwavering truth, or what's your unapologetic self? So that's part one of branding, like figuring out who you are and some and that's a lot of hard work, and this applies to yourself as well, kind of and also kind of big companies. So step one figuring out who you are. Step two is meeting people where they are, because you can be unapologetic all you want and have no impact. But where the impact comes is, how do you actually connect with your audience and with who you want to speak to? And I think how the successful brands are doing that so and when, when it comes to like, have big companies, one that is in the midst of bit of turmoil, kind of, right now is Nike has really kind of lost touch with its majority of its own community. There's some business decisions that they made that they thought that they have a big enough brand and they can bring everything online, and they didn't need the partners. They lost touch with the community and kind of what new leadership coming in to Nike. It's definitely a really interesting company to watch for next couple of years, of how, when a successful you're not got, to your point, do they connect with their community? Because, you know, kind of, Nike is one of those companies where you think of innovation, you think of kind of like this community following and strong brand affiliation, and they have lost it over the last five, kind of seven years, where you have like on running, even like new balances, like kind of eating into their market share. And Reebok is kind of making a niche comeback, taking some of that. Market share as well. So, you know, have not, not, not to say, kind of like big companies always have to buy small companies to innovate. But you know, kind of using Nike as an example, they would be an interesting company to look at for next two, three years to see how they react, because they have lost their market market share. So once again, not answering it. This is going to be a theme

Jocelyn Bell  30:28

that's fine as a theme before we shift into the next set of questions. I mean, we've touched on your military background, talked a bit about the global view and your thoughts on that, we're going to shift to a question now on related to one of the big themes in the class, love ethic. So we're looking in this class again at the overlap of innovation, creativity and love, especially that love ethic. And so we're learning from how different creators and innovators, how they go about their creativity, how they go about their innovation, keeping in mind this love ethic. And so Bell Hooks is one of the authors that we have connected with in this class, and she wrote that embracing love, embracing a love ethic, means that we utilize all dimensions of love, care, commitment, trust, which, interestingly enough, you did bring in that strongly already, responsibility, respect and knowledge in our everyday lives. So that is what we are grappling with when we're talking about a love ethic in here. And so I shift now to Quinn to ask questions.

Speaker 6  31:40

All right, solely so you don't create or innovate solely on your own. You have a team at giant shoulders, and you work alongside others to build a better world by design conference. So how does a love ethic shape how you work with a team of diverse people to come up with creative and innovative outflows?

Speaker 2  31:59

Great question. So love ethic is still a really new idea to me. So we had a conversation earlier. I kind of looked it up. And I think on what struck me kind of like in our conversation earlier was how a lot of those have a lot of the concept of love for essay was really in in my military experience, and there was sort of seven values, kind of in the same home military that we were basically drilled into us, kind of like the first day that we were there, and the last one was care for soldiers. And that was kind of the very much the kind of one thing that really kind of ties us all together and come and then we were joking about just how, when you really think about the military, how young, kind of like soldiers actually are, and when I look back, I was like, Wait, like, do I actually understand any of these concepts that that I've been taught that my mentors, who are also really young, I was a an officer at 18, and my commanding officer For my Well, one of my commanding officers was most likely 24 maybe 25 and was like, kind of giving me advice, like life advice that I still kind of look back. I was like, either he is like a genius, or he or he has absolutely no idea what he's saying. He just repeated something that sounds good. And one of the things come was this idea of caring for soldiers. And my CEO came to me, come once, like, Hey, do you know why, as an officer, you get paid more than than your, your soldiers, and then your, your NCOs, I was like, no, because I got more training and I basically outrank them, so I should get paid more. And what he said was a, you know, kind of you get paid more so that you can buy food and treat, kind of your soldiers? And looking back now, I was like, wow, that's a really profound kind of statement in the moment. I was like, okay, that's kind of weird. I was like, Sure, but this, like, idea of camaraderie, kind of trust that we just talked about and vulnerability is like, in some ways, that is kind of why we are kind of in a position of power that is your responsibility. And so once again, it's like, either he's brilliant or he's just, you know, just saying something that sounds good, but that was kind of how I think of that those experiences and like really informed why who I am today and what I do, and I think that and most of the leaders I work with have a growth mindset, and I don't, I don't know if y'all. Are kind of familiar with with that, and for the most part, leaders who have growth mindset kind of recognizes that they are only as strong as the team that they surround themselves with, and they know that they aren't the smartest people in the room. And I think I was just saying around like, how kind of a players, what a players attract a plus kind of players, whereas B players only attracts C players, because a players and folks with leaders with growth mindset recognizes that they only as strong as a team, so they want to hire people who are better than them. B players are typically kind of driven more by the fear that someone else is going to be better than them and take their job, so they end up hiring C players. So that's something. One thing that you're kind of bringing back to maybe kind of bringing in the idea of performance, of how those ideas can come in, and by the nature of taking care of your own team, and this is something that I've kind of just like learned have really early on my career, is like, have the more I take care of my own team, the higher performing that they are, the higher performing the organization is so that's kind of how I've been kept building on my team in my career, and also kind of recognizing that. And this is bringing another idea in that my mom have, like, instilled in me, kind of like at an early age, always can leave things in a better shape than you found them, and how that also influenced the way that I can work with my team. It's like people will be are transient, like, you know, when there's other opportunities that comes up, you know, have their time with the company, with the team is going to be up, but you want them to be more successful in the next thing. So how can I mix those two things together and create the environment for success? And, you know, and this is not just a, like, a comfortable environment where everybody's just like, kind of getting along. This does kind of involve a lot of pushing one another to be better, and I think you can't have that without trust and vulnerability. So that's the that's the environment that I found myself in, and the role that I played having a lot of in a lot of my career.

Jocelyn Bell  37:41

So before Quinn asks one more question, want to remind you, if you have any questions that have been popping up, you can use the QR code. I'll also you know, as people raise hands if additional questions don't come up, it's not like we don't have more questions. They had a lot of questions for you, so there are additional ones that will arise. So just no pressure if you don't have any additional ones. But just wanted to let you know. All right, Quinn, last of the curated question. All

Speaker 6  38:08

right, so AI is on everyone's mind nowadays. We use it. We talk about it in class. We hear about it outside the university. We obviously use it in many ways. So can you tell us one question regarding AI, or a project involving AI that has captured your imagination recently, that you would like to see students thinking about, I'm

Speaker 2  38:32

before I answer your question, I'm not going to answer your question. I'm curious. Coming with you all like, what AI tools y'all are using? Come now chat. GBT, okay, hey, any, any other answers? Google, Gemini, okay, cool. All right,

Speaker 1  38:55

that's it. Nothing else. Nothing else for music. Yeah, there's image ones to use, some like Spotify, as you're not directly using it, but Spotify creates like playlists for you in the algorithms. That is a use of AI, yeah, but interesting.

Speaker 2  39:16

So with the work that I do, so I have to typically kind of work in two in two sectors. Kind of one is in climate and ocean, and the other is in med tech and healthcare. And there's a lot of interesting applications and in both kind of the some of the most exciting ones are like, you know, kind of imagine that this was a, what, like 20, I can't remember, 20 years ago, we cracked the human genome for the first time, and it took years, got to do it, and then it was like months, and then it was weeks, and it was days and it was hours, and with a lot of these kind of eight. Tools. I can take that kind of set of information that is so dense, and you can actually kind of find biomarkers and find and figure out kind of different different types of drugs or or different cures for certain things are tailored to individuals. So the future of kind of medicine can be, could look very, very different, and that's actually really exciting. The challenge, especially in this country, is like how it is charged to patients, and the larger system that I'm not going to get into, but there's a lot of really kind of fascinating kind of advancement, kind of medicine specifically. And then to go to the more boring side of things, there's still kind of sticking with kind of healthcare is that there is a lack of, kind of nurses and physicians, kind of across the country, kind of right now, and we actually come my ops director was a former nurse practitioner. She got absolutely burns out and kind of wanted to stay home, kind of with the kids and raise the kids so and one of the biggest challenges that kind of AI is actually helping with is reducing a lot of the administrative need for nurses and physicians, and the promise on the flip side is that, yeah, you do a lot less paperwork. But the exciting part for a lot of them is to get back to the roots of why they chose their profession, which is to care for people, and as you kind of, kind of move up the ranks you care, you basically care more for people's paperwork and make sure that nothing, no one screws up so the insurance don't go after you and like you just create this burden that is almost unnatural for who they want to be and who they are. So I think those are some of the really interesting kind of applications come in healthcare that you should absolutely kind of keep an eye out. And also the last part of kind of like that that impacts healthcare is around finding and discovering new shoot, what's up? Penicillin was a class of drug, antibiotic, yes, thank you. So the way that we have been discovering antibiotic is literally by sheer luck. You know, that's how penicillin got, got discovered. And I can't remember the statistics. Was one of the one of companies I work with have had this on the slide is like, we haven't actually discovered a new antibiotic in like, 30 years. So using AI, you can now actually screen, kind of a potential candidates before, kind of doing actual tests, rather than, like, I'm really trusting, kind of like, once again, it's more luck than actual kind of like, you can fabricate, kind of like, where you find antibiotics. So that's another kind of way where AI could be really interesting and shortcut the shortcut and benefit cut the healthcare space. So, so that's that's on that that end, yeah, so personally, come in our company, we are trying to integrate, kind of like AI in a lot of the things that we do. So right now come, like many of y'all, like we're using chat, GPT Gemini, starting to come help us with with a lot of our writing, but one thing that we are exploring is actually starting to apply this with I'm sure some of you have heard of like AI agents, where they act essentially on your behalf, with a set of rules and set of parameters. So one thing that literally, I was trying to figure this out this weekend, and I realized that I really suck at coding, so

44:09

AI can help you with that. Now that is true.

Speaker 2  44:11

I don't understand the parameters enough to guide the AI to do what I want it to do the challenge. But one of the things that what AI agents can do is to replace a lot of the repetitive tasks that you might be doing. So one of the things that that I a big part of my job is to do business development. So I talk to a lot of people, and I would say a third of the time I don't remember who this person is that booked a 45 minute call on my on my schedule, and often times I back to my call. So I don't really have time if I, especially if I forget. I haven't done the research on who this person is. So I'm just kind of building this i. Um, AI agent, whereas, like, they just have access to my calendar, it would essentially just use chat GBT as like, Hey, what is this company? What's its size? What are some of the key metric? Who are they? What are they trying to achieve? And just give me a summary before every call. So it does half of the research, kind of for me once again, like, how sometimes you have to be a little bit skeptical on the results that chat GPT gives you. And I always ask for reference, of, like, where do you find this information? Give me the link, but it gives me kind of like half of the research that I need. Just in case. I'm heading into an into meeting. I'm like, I literally don't know, and I'm good, it's almost like the relational equivalent of like,

Speaker 7  45:44

hey, remember, hey. So

Speaker 2  45:50

how are you doing? And then you spend like, half your call trying to figure out what this person is, while you're like, cyber stalking them on the side, is this the person? So those are kind of some things that we are trying to kind of implement, like, once again, it goes back to process of, like, how does this actually speeds up a process? So we're looking at building, kind of like AI agents for certain things, and also with, like, scheduling meetings, you know, kind of simple stuff like that. But it does actually take up a lot of time, a lot of back and forth and and also some of the business processes where, you know, kind of, it doesn't require a lot of skill, it just requires a lot of time. So those are the ways that we are applying AI now, and it is exciting in the short term. It will be interesting to see, kind of what it means, kind of for the industry, kind of longer term, because a lot of the work that we do is very research based, like, we're short cutting, kind of like weeks and weeks of work into literally minutes. So like, one example. Quick example is we do a lot of interviews and we have a lot of transcripts. We no longer have to hire somebody to transcribe. And also, now, with all these tools, we can now ask for summaries. So for my our best practice at this point is still to read through everything and use use AI and chatgpt as a way to cover our blind spots. But in some ways, like chatgpt can ingest information so much faster, kind of as a human. And I think that it doesn't replace human intuition, that, you know, reading body language, reading kind of like the person you're talking who's like, is this skepticism? Is this actual truth? How do you tease those things out? And sometimes, as a creative like, well, I have a gut feel, and then now we go back into the data. Now I have a partner to chat with around like, hey, is this true, that I'm feeling this, that this is what I'm coming out from these 50 kind of like interviews. This is the pattern like, what do you think? So that's kind of the way that it is. Definitely kind of exciting. It helps shortcut to work today. It'll be interesting to see, kind of like how that is going to change, especially kind of our industry, the creative industry, come in the future. Thank you.

Speaker 1  48:22

All right, I'm opening it up to other questions. I know Professor Coleman, you had a question on deck, so we'll start with you, and then we will open it up for other students.

Speaker 4  48:34

Okay, first of all, I just wanted to give you

48:39

some context

Speaker 4  48:41

of who I am, good, random person. I'm in the history, literature and art department. I've been really interested in Professor Bell's class, so I'm very glad to come. I teach a course called arts and creative industries, and I have four students here. Students, raise your hand, yay. So thank you for coming. And I also teach a course on graphic narratives. So when you were talking about storytelling, I think that that's a key, like visual storytelling is becoming more and more important. And I'm trying to not only teach graphic narratives or comics or graphic novels. We get students to produce stories. So that's the most exciting part for me. But I'm also a huge fan of better world by design. I've been to a couple of them. I have a T shirt that's like the 10th Anniversary I forgot to wear it, but I'm a huge fan. So let me get back to question you were talking in the beginning about you need a sustainable business model, and what we're talking about now in class is art and community. Um. Um, and I don't think students are as familiar with product design and all of that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about sustainable in terms of environmentally sustainable, like you look at all the stages of the production, then you have the thing, then what happens to the thing after that? Because that's often where there's a lot of problems. If you talk about, say, the iPhone, you know, there's terrible stories about children who are taking them apart, and there's poisonous ingredients and stuff. So how to think about products in a more holistic way? And I was trying to remember the name of an essay that I once taught. Oh, it was thackera. It was called in the bubble. Thackera talks about when you talk about systems theory. So he looks at the whole cycle of a product, and he talks about how, you know you're not only just making a beautiful object, but you got to think about what happens to that object. And I just wondered how that might play a role in your design process.

Speaker 2  51:15

Yeah, that's a great question that no easy questions. Yeah,

51:20

yeah. Yeah, I

Speaker 2  51:23

maybe you can reframe it. And this is my own opinion, my words. I think that's something that might be maybe harder to relate to. It's like this top down view of a product life cycle, because you assume, like, I feel like, how this is maybe kind of the difference between like economists and behavioral economists, where like economists just like assumes that everyone is rational. And when you look at a product life cycle, we always, kind of like, have maybe sometimes, like, we forget the nuances of, like human life, or like us, how systems, a human system, kind of works, and the quirkiness of that. So as a designer, kind of like looking at these systems, it's, it's great to look at the top downs like, Oh, this is what should happen. This is what should happens, is what should happens. But in real life, the should never, oftentimes, doesn't become reality. So one way that I've been reframing, reframing this, even with some of the work that I, that I do, and I literally just launched a new conference to two weeks ago, around kind of ocean data, we focus more, I know, kind of just focusing more on incentives, like, what are the incentives for people to do? But take, take certain actions, regardless of their moral compass. I think this is one of those things where I kind of realized that, you know, you can have a set of moral standards, like, I feel like, in some ways, like when we talk about environmental sustainability, when it's easy for us here in a developed country to almost have the luxury to talk about That, versus a developing kind of foundation where there are kids, or kind of like families who are using the very pan to cook food with to melt, like toxic chemicals, because by extracting that, they can now come make a living. So it's definitely so the way that I've been kind of like approaching this, this kind of way of thinking, has been around incentives, like how what brings somebody to the table? And I'll use the example of the ocean data conference I put together, where we were trying to bring together the scientific community with a governmental policy kind of community, the startup community and the corporate community. And the my explicit goal, even though kind of it would take me years and years to kind of get there, is like, how do we get from a us and them, kind of type of relationship to at least shifting the language to we should do something, because there's a lot of kind of finger pointing right now, it's like, oh, the corporates aren't doing this, or the corporates have or insurance are the ones with the money, and they should pay for this, and the government cover. And the scientific community say, hey, we need more data to fully understand kind of just where we are. So we look at the system and some kind of taking this experience and overlay on top of what you just said is, I come, what are the incentives for the different players come within that system? And even if, you know, come to iPhone, I'm the user of the iPhone, kind of like, what's what's my incentive? Versus like, what's my responsibility? Like, what are my incentives? And how can we align as many of those as possible to the design decisions that that you make? And just to wrap up that this thought and this idea is that, because I was, I came out of industrial design. Industrial Design sort of bifurcated and had, like the traditional product design, that's a design thinking and also UX user experience design that came out of product design, came out of industrial design. So this is something that I've been teaching cover at RISD and Brown is like you can good user experiences get people to do what you want them to. Great experiences kind of aligns their values, kind of with, well, actually, their values. Hmm? Yeah, it well, yeah, great experiences aligns, kind of their incentives come with with their values to build a lasting relationship. And I think when you have kind of user experiences, and I think how apples are great examples, like how you can look at it. Look at the experience of each of their product. We're not software and hardware, and it's a great experience, but that helps build the relationship that you have with the brand that almost at a point where, if you use an iPhone and you use a Mac, it's like, well, no matter what they come up with next, I know that will be on quality. It will have a similar kind of experience, and we trust, we trust them. So, yeah, so going back to kind of like that user experiences, like once again, how do we kind of go from kind of, what should people do to how can we align with their incentive? So that's my that's my advice. Come late on how to think about it. Think about a life cycle, because I think I'm with all lot of great path thinkers around this is like it always some come somehow come across more like this is what should happens, but in reality, it doesn't so. So how do we align incentives to encourage people to, kind of, when I was do the right thing, or kind of do a thing that kind of leads some sort of natural child.

Speaker 8  57:32

Simple question, where, like, exactly in Singapore, are you from? And then also, like, what was your childhood like?

Speaker 2  57:39

So if you don't, if you don't know much about Singapore, Singapore is very small. So you think that we're in the smallest state in the US. Singapore. Land mass is, I think it's a third or quarter of the size of Rhode Island. So it is a very small place. So it is a city state. So in some ways that I'm from Singapore, Singapore, like, when I fill in forms, like, there, sometimes I repeat three times was like, Okay, what city are you from Singapore? What state are you from Singapore? What country are you from Singapore? So that's how small Singapore is. And the other kind of way of demonstrating how small Singapore is, is that I was trained. I did a lot of training with the with an artillery. The joke is that you can fire around an artillery round from one end of the country and miss the entire country of Singapore, the entire land mass of Singapore, and that's a long way of Singapore. So to answer your first question, I'm from Singapore, Singapore, so, and I actually grew up in Hong Kong. So if you have read the news, especially the last couple years, kind of as a lot of social unrest and kind of China has very much kind of like long story short, taken over Hong Kong, and it's quite heartbreaking. This is no longer kind of really the home that I kind of grew up in. We definitely don't have the same freedoms anymore, and it's all very subtle, but yeah, I mean, kind of growing up, I was fortunate enough got to have parents who believed in creativity. There's the also, this is a bit of a joke, kind of in income, more of a hierarchical kind of Hong Kong culture, being an entrepreneur and being a creative is very, very low on them. On any parents list, the top thing that the top profession is being a doctor and then kind of being a. A an engineer, and you're not, and then it's lawyer, if you're not smart enough to do those things, go to Wall Street and make a ton of money. Like, that's the hierarchy and all the way down, and maybe it's like janitor, and then it's like design, and then it's entrepreneurship. Like, it's sort of like kind of a cultural thing as like, well, do much more. You're expected to climb a corporate ladder rather than going out and, kind of like challenging the status quo, go ask questions. So I'm very much a black sheep, and that's why I've been here for 20 years. So

Speaker 9  1:00:41

my dad was actually stationed in South Korea when he was in the army, and I remember him like, telling me a lot about how, just like, the culture and tradition is like very different. And even though he wasn't there for a while, just the culture shock is still pretty big. How did you kind of, you're almost like the reverse. How did you kind of adjust to the culture change is how like traditions here are very different to get to where you are now,

1:01:08

yeah, yeah, that's it. I was,

Speaker 2  1:01:20

I did a project with a with a nonprofit that helped immigrants, especially refugees, kind of resettle in the US. And the board was made up of mostly immigrants, and kind of a lot of them are come now, like I'm VPs of companies, and like they're successful and powerful people, and the project that was working on with them was actually helping them rename the organization and something that came up. And once again, kind of like the work that I do come with branding, it always starts with stories. And it was like, how you relate to this work, kind of like, what's your personal connection? And one of them, kind of like fully described the experience of being a immigrant. That I never thought about until that point, is that you become a foreigner no matter where you go. You become a foreigner when you go home, because you have changed enough when you go home, it's like, oh, you're not, you're not, although you're from here, but you are not really from here. And as an immigrant, you'll always feel, in one sense or another, a foreigner. So I think how that's the way that that best sums up, I feel like with the maybe not culture shock anymore, but just the need to just being a chameleon, kind of between the two cultures. And if you've ever heard a Singaporean speak English like we have a thick accent, so I'm not great at accents, and I do slip back into it when I'm in Singapore, like we because it's such a multicultural kind of place. We borrow words like English borrows kind of like plenty of languages, and I think in Singapore is more extreme. We borrow Hindi words, we borrow Chinese words, we borrow Malay words, because they're just certain concepts that just that that's harder to communicate, kind of in English, or just different in English. So I kind of find myself kind of falling back into those patterns, kind of when I'm there to kind of like communicate, but yeah, just becoming comes just a chameleon. And definitely some sometimes like I'm not feeling like I belong anywhere. So,

Speaker 1  1:03:42

okay, we are going to shift to final thoughts. Is there anything that has come up that you would like to share? You're like, oh, actually, while we were talking, while we were thinking, I kind of wanted to hit this point or, Oh, this is a question I wish had been asked that I would have loved to have answered.

Speaker 2  1:04:02

Mm, I'll take a second to think about this.

Speaker 2  1:04:11

I don't know. I mean, we covered quite a lot, from kind of military, kind of to create, you creativity, how those things overlap too? Yeah, love ethic is definitely, I mean, I'm new to it, and then kind of realizing how, just like the thread of in my life, especially kind of like building teams and building people up, like how that factors into my work. So I learned a bunch of stuff and,

1:04:44

well, I, you know, just, I really love what you had to say about leadership.

Speaker 4  1:04:52

I wish in our administration all of the precepts that you talked about leadership. But, you know. Related to that on the flip side, how do you deal with arrogance? Because especially with designers and scientists. So my brother, who I love dearly, has a PhD from MIT, and, of course, I love him, but there's this shade of arrogance that comes in in this profession. He does biotech and, yeah, how do you negotiate

1:05:25

that? Yeah, I'm

Speaker 2  1:05:28

glad that you brought that up, because I think that's something that we haven't covered. And I think how building high performing teams can require certain arrogance, certain arrogance from each of the team members who believe in themselves, their skills and their opinions, and when we look for creatives, and also, kind of, just to give you a little bit of insight and into the business that that Bell, in terms of Chinese shoulders. It is a creative firm where we don't hire any creatives in house for a couple reasons. One is that the creatives who I truly respect and want to work with have all gone freelance. They have gone through the churn come in New York, and was like, hang on, I work 80 hours a week. I love the work. I don't often love the clients. Don't love how I'm treated. I can make more and have control of my time by going freelance. So I try to convince a bunch of my friends who can join me full time, and even when I can pay and afford them, they all turn me down, but they want to work on their own terms, and they want to kind of freelance, kind of for for us. So over the course of a year, we work with roughly kind of 20 freelancers. Some of them are kind of writers, illustrators, kind of creatives, or designers, animators, kind of web developers. So we have a good bunch of kind of people that we can draw from. And one of the things that kind of early on, kind of my career, kind of building teams, is like, I want people with with a level of arrogance or ego, like I've not too much like, but they need to be able to defend their work and speak up for themselves and cover as a cover as a rule, how we always put kind of our creatives, no matter how Junior they are, in front of a client, like, Hey, it's your idea. You get to have like, presented, we'll always back you up. Like, we'll back you up. We'll prep you for the meeting. We'll back you up. So I think I'm just creating those kind of opportunities I think have allows us to show and not tell that we respect them. And when it comes to kind of like having, needing to kind of make a decision together, like our expectation is always that the team comes prepared to present their thoughts and ideas, and they expect kind of a discussion. And this is one part of training that I got at RISD, which is the practice of critique. And you almost kind of got to train to the point where, you know it's not personal. Like, I think how that's the part where I think when the the the the ego kicks in, and it feels like it's personal, then usually at that point, like you're not really listening anymore, and you're not trying to you're not no longer trying to get better. So I think that's that arrogance, but I think there's also that mutual respect that we try to kind of like build, and that we're there ultimately to make each other better. And that is sort of typically the culture that we try to build, oftentimes at the end of the day, kind of like the client who pays for it, like, kind of, sometimes they just don't want to do certain things. And it's like, well, you know, that is fine. Like, you can kind of lose the battle, kind of, but win the war, as the saying goes, like, how do you pick those battles as well? And that's, I feel like, kind of, that's a big part of role, the leader, come in this situation of, how do you cut temper, constantly, ego, to move kind of things forward. And ultimately, I think, as a creative something that I have to learn and relearn is kind of the the lesson of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good, because or else, like nothing ever gets done. Value get never gets created. So where is that line? And we try to push each other to get, obviously, closer to closer to perfection. But when do we stop? So anyway, so hopefully that answers kind of some, some of your questions in terms of, yeah, I want ego, but also kind of we need to have that we. Show respect and that we are coming in to learn from one another to make each other better.

Speaker 1  1:10:10

Thank you again to Tino for joining the human spark class this spring, and to the amicus center for sponsoring his visit, and to you for listening, hope you join us again as we journey from ideas to impact you.Episode forthcoming