On week 4, the lovely Adam Oliviera from IBM was our guest speaker in our Professional Topics class. As the Senior Design Manager at Apple+IBM, Adam “leads product design for enterprise iOS apps powered by IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive computing services, to reinvent mission-critical work for industrial end-users such as flight and maintenance crew, miners, mechanics, and freight delivery.” Sounds impressive! His team is a large group of designers who work very closely with engineers on their various projects.
Adam’s career at IBM began 2 years ago, and he was super excited to be going to Apple (as he is an Apple brand loyalist). He went to his first design workshop – and said it was great; Apple is exactly what you would think it is, white, clean, glass, and the white boards are the cleanest you have ever seen, haha. IBM is full of really smart people. They are one of the largest vendors for the travel and transportation industry. He is often travelling and finds himself down in silicon valley as often as once a month.
Adam touched on the working environment at IBM. They have an extremely collaborative environment. IBM is one of the first, maybe the only companies right now that views its employees as remote workers. They can work wherever they want as long as they are in touch. Adam said that at any given time you could be working on projects from all over the world and because you are working with such a diverse team, there is not much point of being in an office from 9-5 .
IBM is going to become one of the worlds biggest design companies. Their mandate is to try to make sure at every level of thinking, they are all practicing design thinking. Every problem should be solved through design thinking. You can talk to a legacy system architect and they can speak fluent design. This is similar to how things work at Apple; everything Apple does is design centered.
Before he joined IBM, Adam went through several different careers. After he completed OCAD with an industrial degree during the early periods of computer graphics, he landed his first job as an art director with an office supply wholesaler. Adam mentioned how everyone was using pagemaker. His boss was an interesting character who he learned alot from; not only did he learn how to design, but he learned how to sell it aswell.
After working at a couple more places, he managed to pick up work from Rogers, Honda Sony etc, and then he started his own company. He co-founded a couple start-ups called Quizative, Blitzteam Games and currently has a new and exciting game in the works.
Adam began by telling us about a recent Fast Co. Design article he came across which he was intrigued by and wanted to share with us. Adam made sure to tell us that he sees himself as a futurist, not a pessimist. Here is his take of the article:
5 Design Jobs that wont exist in the future
- UX: AI (AUGMENTED REALITY): As Artificial Intellegance is already happening right now, with applications such as self driving cars, overtime we are going to see more dependance on AI, and it is going to be more publicly available. UX is going to evolve into the experience of how we interact with an AI device, such as in everyday thigs like refrigerators, stoves, etc.
- VISUAL DESIGN: MIXED REALITY: VR + AR tools such as Google Glass, Samsung’s Oculous Rift, and Microsoft’ Hololens, are going to become more and more popular and we as designers can actually design in these elements. We are no longer constrained to desktop. These technologies have come a long way.
- ROBOTICS (INDUSTRIAL DESIGN): Products like drones have seen incredible advancements in how robotics work such as in the sensors and processors. Adam mentioned that in the health industry, bionic limbs actually supersede our natural body limbs. Hugh Herr, in his Ted Talk about bionic limbs transforming lives, developed bionics that attach to the electronics in the muscle. The future of people with disabilities are soon going to become more superior than us, in that they will be able to hear better, see better, even feel better.
- CONVERSATION (COMMUNICATION DESIGN): With instant messaging now being the most popular means of communication, we are slowly going to start to see message bubbles in a chat setting with dynamic UI elements. Adam mentioned that travel is an obvious place to start because you can create an experience that is very much like talking to a travel agent. Interactive components that can fit in with the messaging interface will allow us to respond with richer elements. This type of conversational experience will be available anywhere.
- BIG DATA PREDICTIVE: Big data (top of enterprise computing), is the result of FEEDING DATA INTO INTELLEGENCE. When you think about big data, the simplest example is image recognition. Once you start multiplying the features, it can start recognizing more patterns such as the patterns of faces. Project analytics use patterns to predict things like crime and medicine. Adam told us that IBM owns alot of big data. They have purchased companies like the weather channel in the US, Twitter, big US medical imaging data company, and use all of their intellegence by feeding it into a super computer called ‘Watson‘. Watson is IBMS flavor of AI (cognitive computing), and it can be compared to Siri at Apple, but it is indeed more powerful, since IBM owns alot more data than Apple, This is what makes these companies so valuable is how much data they own. Here is a great Fast Company article about Watson for Business. IBM offers the public a free license of Watson for building things. An example of the outcome of this is a robot for kids and parents to talk about bullying. Adam also mentioned that he is currently working on a patent for conceptual UI. He made a reference to the movie “The Minority Report” with Tom cruise talking about that iconic moment when he is using Augmented Reality.
That last point about AI, artificial intellegence sparked a conversation about the ethics of AI. Adam told us how he thinks the world is pretty much on the fence and there is a lot of controversy over it. A perfect example would be self driving cars getting into an accident. At some point they would need to make the decision of saving the people in their car and killing the other car. Our survival insticts tell us to save ourselves.Does AI have a surival instinct? should it have the right to self preservation? Are they people? Do they have souls? All very interesting things to think about.
Adam was one of my favourite speakers in this class so far. He was insightful, personable and very positive and friendly. After talking with Adam a little more after his presentation, I thought of how IBM sounds like a place I would really love to work for.
Thanks Adam!
Laura
Adam’s Contact Info:
Email: aoliveira@icloud.com
Linked-In: linkedin.com/in/oliveiraadam
Personal Website: krinklestudio.com
Flikr: flickr.com/photos/oscillize
Laura Pellerin 