ep. 39: Talking Design Innovation with Jordan Harvey, CEO & Founder of Remote Control
10 min read
Last week, we explored the history of design innovation, and the lessons it can teach us about how we build artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. This week, we bring design innovation to life with emerging technology design leader Jordan Harvey. As a designer and futurist, Jordan has been building bleeding-edge technology for over 20 years, in domains such as extended reality, robotics and AI. He is the CEO and Founder at design technology company Remote Control (RC), whose portfolio includes partnerships with Meta, Peloton and Apple. He’s also an Adjunct Professor at his alma mater, the School of Visual Arts in New York.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Jordan, bringing design research to Persona - RC’s new product that reimagines how we interact with AI, moving us beyond text and voice interactions. When innovators might be rushing ahead, experimenting with the latest technology solution in search of a problem, RC takes a different approach.
I sat down with Jordan to learn more about RC’s design innovation, “walking the walk” of human-centered design, anticipating future markets while staying grounded in technology capabilities and business realities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talking Design Innovation with Jordan
How would you describe your approach to bringing an idea to life at RC?
Jordan: I have four pillars for what makes a really solid idea come to fruition: usability, functionality, economics and aesthetics. Usability is more of the user-centered perspective. Functionality is more of the engineering perspective. It’s already a juggling act between these two - which one takes precedence when you’re designing a solution?
An idea also has to be logical for business. You can’t just have a wild, aspirational idea with no grounding in reality. Now, if you're just concepting wild ideas, sure - jot “What Ifs” in your journal. But not if you're trying to actually make things for people and get it out to the world. I’m always trying to reflect back - is that actually going to survive? Can we actually make that?
The last pillar is aesthetics. Aesthetics is like feeding your child higher quality food - if your product is beautiful, it can have a better chance. Aesthetics create an emotional engagement to your product.
In your recent iHeart radio interview, you described the core mission of RC as “illustrating the future of creative applications in technology”. How do you balance anticipating industry trends with a user-centered perspective?
Jordan: I think those two are closely linked. I like to follow technology development. I read a lot of MIT publications, take MIT courses. Most recently, I’m an early adopter of the Vision Pro, Looking Glass, Rabbit R1. I’m interested in these technologies because they’re flags in the ground for where we might be headed in five to ten years. There's some predictability to it.
Going back to the four pillars, if you look at the economics, you can make an assumption about how far these companies are willing to invest beyond the boundaries of that first generation technology. You can then make a general assumption about what the potential product might include in the next two to five years. Next, triangulate that with research on hardware, AI research, and so on. 2018 to 2019 would have been a great place to look to see what’s happening now with transformers and generative AI. Then, brainstorm what's possible at the end of them on a five to ten year spectrum, and reverse engineer by holding those ideas against those four pillars. How would you logically reach that idea in 10 years?
Look at IMUs [inertial measurement units] inside early VR headsets. They were pretty terrible, but it wasn't hard to see where that tech was going. There were also these tiny cameras in your phone. You could see how those would fit on headsets and provide much better quality, like room tracking. Also looking at the two options at the time - Inside-Out tracking and Outside-In tracking - logically, Inside Out tracking is going to take precedent. Outside-In is cumbersome. I need to set up all these cameras around my room. If you can just do it on the device, it's much easier for the user.
Let’s talk about collaboration when designing for the future, especially when AI is involved. You have design functions - including research - working together with machine learning engineers and research scientists from the start. A lot of HCI research papers talk about this model being increasingly important when building for AI. What are your thoughts?
Jordan: I think that it’s not just becoming important - it’s been important. People in the industry are becoming more experienced with this level of psychology in product development. When we were talking about building productivity apps for mobile phones, the psychology was, “How can I help someone do a task?” It was straightforward - does your solution allow them to do the tasks or not?
Now, especially with AI involved, we’re asking: “What are their goals, how are they going after them?” You’re looking at a product as something that integrates in their life, going beyond tasks. That in itself dictates that before you even start your project, you better start researching who that person is and knowing who they are, knowing what they need and don’t need. What are the tools, products or services that they use and why? And that's research - that's the start.
I think previously, the habit has been, “I have a really awesome idea, let's go make it.” I like that mentality too, because it gets stuff done. But one of the reasons we started the way we did with Persona, with a group of people across functions including research, is because I'm not willing to risk a ton of logic on a wild idea when we can, quite simply, just go research it, test it and figure it out.
I feel what you described are unique aspects about how RC works. You prioritize research, this constant interplay between usability and feasibility, and this cross-disciplinary collaboration from the get-go. Are there other unique aspects about how RC approaches design innovation?
Jordan: One key aspect is thinking about the solution as a system, and then designing a system that's going to work. That’s a big part of why design research was very important with Persona from a system perspective. We're going to need to validate, and the validation is going to have to be very, very precise. If design research isn't in that room from the very beginning, they're not going to have as intimate of an understanding of the metrics that we started with and why we made the decisions that we did, to really validate when the time comes. Right now, validation in a lot of product development workflows is cheated: “We validated, but only validated through these things that we know work and we know are having positive results”.
Saying, “let's not include that or look at that evidence, we went this other way because we just spent a ton of money” is also a big problem. You should never be thinking about solving the problem by how much money you spent. You should be looking at your decisions asking, Did that make a better product? You also need research in the room for those conversations to have a good reference on whether or not you made a good decision.
I’ll add that good decisions are different depending on who has to make them. A good decision for engineering is different from a good decision for business. And having experts take ownership over those decisions is important. I don't need to know all the decisions you made. You're the expert - tell me the outcomes. The decision outcomes will ladder up to the person managing the project, who should be looking at the entire scope of work from beginning to end, trying to make the best decision for the product.
One More Thing
Before we wrap, I’ll ask the classic design research question: Is there anything else that we didn't talk about where you're like that you wanted to share this but haven't talked about yet?
Jordan: Yes, I’ve got two ideas to share. The first is that we need to find more ways to put the underlying AI systems in the hands of the people - let them use it and benefit from it. In the VC world, there's still so much investment going into infrastructural products and not consumer products. We need actual consumer products to become usable and show value. ChatGPT is a great start.
Now, a lot of people have really valid concerns about AI and its implications. We can connect this to loss aversion, which has evolutionary roots. I read a paper in a book called Future Science: Essays from the Cutting Edge years ago. There was an essay on testing whether humans’s fear of loss evolved from primates. They found that chimpanzees show loss aversion in the same way that humans show loss aversion. What does that mean for product design?
It means that when an innovative product and technology comes out that changes the world, people are going to be afraid of it. We have a stronger subconscious reaction to losing something than we do to gaining something. We’ve seen marketing play on this reaction: “Buy one, get one free! Ends tomorrow!” It’s this idea that if I don't get this now, I'm going to need it tomorrow, and I'm going to lose more. If we can get people to see that what they’re losing doesn’t hold as much value as what you could gain, would they adopt it?
What’s the second idea?
Jordan: It’s breaking down the idea that technology innovation doesn’t support your experience in nature. We've gotten into this idea of unplugging. Now, I like unplugging, and think we need it. But also consider how GPS has prevented thousands of people from getting lost in the woods.
One of the things that I love about Rabbit R1 is that you can see a path for everyday people to point a camera at something and ask, What mountain is that? What plant is that? Can I eat that and use that in my cooking this evening? Thinking about how technology can enhance your experience in nature, rather than take you out of it. It’s open territory for someone just to build a whole company around innovative technology that services just that market.
Takeaways
Jordan brings a forward-thinking, human-centered approach to design innovation at Remote Control - an approach that has helped guide successful partnerships with some of the biggest names in tech. Key takeaways for teams designing at the forefront of emerging technologies include:
Four Pillars to Guide Product Design and Futures Thinking: Jordan shared his Four Pillars for bringing design ideas to fruition: usability, functionality, economics and aesthetics. Striking a balance between these throughout your development process is key. The pillars can also be lenses you apply when anticipating potential technology futures, helping you identify more probable directions.
Foster Interdisciplinary Collaboration from Day 0: From project outset, Jordan builds a cross-disciplinary team who can help represent and cross-pollinate each of the four pillars. For instance, on a recent AI project, design research and ML engineering were in the room from project outset, along with representation from design, product and business. In particular, including design research from Day 0 provides both a solid human-centered foundation and full context about what to test during subsequent concept validation to drive impact and reduce risk.
Human-Centricity and Feasibility Can Harmoniously Coexist: Designing emerging technology solutions, especially those built on AI, requires both consideration of how the solution will plug into people’s ecosystems to create value and making sure the system actually works. The former requires thinking beyond solving for a particular task, and instead, understanding goals, context and motivations. The latter requires exploration and testing what’s possible with technology. To do this, include experts - such as design researchers and ML engineers - in your process, who can deep-dive on these considerations and collaborate with each other.
It’s worth mentioning that there’s another entire episode’s worth of insights from my conversation with Jordan - in particular, about his design career journey, and lessons for designers interested in working on emerging technology products. You can look for that in a future newsletter on design education at the start of the Fall semester, when I return to teach Introduction to User Experience Design at UC Berkeley. In the meantime, a huge thank you to Jordan for sitting down to chat - and for this episode’s hero image!
Stay tuned for more episodes that delve into the past, present and future of Design Innovation, to help us build more human-centered emerging technology solutions.
Human-Computer Interaction News
MIT's Day of AI Curriculum: The MIT initiative Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education developed a"Day of AI" curriculum to empower K-12 students to collaborate on local and global challenges using AI.
Exploring the complex ethical challenges of data annotation: A cross-disciplinary group of Stanford students examine the ethical challenges faced by data workers and the companies that employ them.
GenAI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content: A study published in Science Advances examined the causal impact of genAI ideas on the production of short stories in an online experiment where participants obtained story ideas from an LLM. Results supported an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty.
Is your team building an emerging technology product? Sendfull can help with customer discovery, concept validation and building a product evaluation plan. Reach out at hello@sendfull.com
That’s a wrap 🌯 . More human-computer interaction news from Sendfull next week.