Is AI the answer to the mundane sea of sameness in brand design?

Can artificial intelligence free us from the sea of sameness? Design veteran Olof Schybergson tells The Growth Agenda how AI can unlock creativity to help supercharge human-centred design.

Design veteran Olof Schybergson says companies should be exploring how to use generative artificial intelligence to “minimise the mundane and maximise the humane” when it comes to brand design

The digital-led commoditisation of brands and experiences has created a sea of sameness, however, artificial intelligence can help unlock the creative possibilities to change this.

That’s the view of design veteran Olof Schybergson, one of the co-founders of the iconic design and innovation firm Fjord. Mr Schybergson’s career has involved him working at the cutting-edge of design and technology; from CD-Roms in the late 90s to the dotcom bubble – and burst – through web, mobile, and now AI.

Mr Schybergson has a deep understanding of the importance of people’s relationships with the physical and digital worlds and how brands can help empower those experiences through their services.

“Good design is about understanding customer needs, expectations, behaviour trends and so on, and then shaping solutions that match or exceed those needs and expectations. So it’s both understanding the customer and then executing against it,” he told The Growth Agenda on a recent rare trip to Sydney.

“If you look at the most valuable and successful companies in the world, all of them are customer-centric and all of them have technology at the core.

“I think it’s strange that more companies aren’t saying, ‘What’s the key to success for these companies?’ and ‘We need a bit more of that’. When you add design you almost always improve and add value – both business value and human value.”

The Finnish design expert was in town as part of his role as the chief design and product officer at Accenture Song. Mr Schybergson sold his agency to Accenture in 2013, and has worked within the group ever since, ensuring design is a core element of the consultancy’s integrated marketing services business.

The importance of design thinking to drive business growth is a crucial element that Mr Schybergson believes is too often overlooked, because of the siloed departmental approach of businesses.

Fjord founder Olof Schybergson

“Design should not be a bunch of designers who sit in the corner and design stuff, and then magically, good things happen,” he said. “You have to have design as a central and collaborative piece that infects and impacts all aspects of the business.”

He said, the importance of human-centred design was most apparent from its absence in the current market, where brand experiences all looked and felt the same.

“We are all talking about the concept of fluid experience right now,” he said. “But, whether it’s your app or the in-store experience or customer service solution, you’re probably at the point where you have invested a lot, but you’ve only managed to reach parity because everything is good. It might be functionally complete, but emotionally it’s a bit devoid.

“So, how can you add more joy, and more personality? How can you minimise the mundane and maximise the humane? That’s an interesting design challenge, and it’s not about everything being consistent, because not every moment has to look and feel exactly the same.

“One of the reasons for the commoditisation, or the sea of sameness today, is that everything has become very similar. You look at design patterns and experiences across the industry and things just feel very samey. I think that’s a really interesting opportunity, because, yes, things should be coherent, simple, seamless and as invisible as possible. But, let’s also go deep in the moments that matter and let’s not trivialise and make everything exactly the same.”

Mr Schybergson attributes the issue to our obsession with data, algorithms and testing which had created established patterns and starting points for processes. He pointed to the travel category and the standard approach of booking experiences, which all started with the same boxes for dates, destinations, and number of travellers, for example.

Another example he gave was Netflix, which determined the content to create based on people’s viewing habits – but he argued, “You don’t get the David Lynch, weirdo-type of stuff as much anymore”.

“We’ve created a commoditised world, but we haven’t, for the most part, stopped and said, ‘Do we actually need this? Does the customer want this?’

“What if we turned that on its head and made something that was more like a human conversation? With technology, we can do that, but most companies are still stuck with the linear, mundane, traditional process. They are not asking, ‘How do we turn your family holiday dreams into something special?’”

It is no surprise that Mr Schybergson is leaning into AI, which he believed presented designers with a wealth of opportunities, well beyond the efficiencies. However, he said the true value of the technology was in its ability to “unlock creative possibilities” and “do all sorts of magical things that we couldn’t do before”.

But, he said it was crucial that designers explored and experimented to ensure the tools and experiences drew from human-centred design approaches.

“Organisations are really hungry and keen to understand how to use AI and gen (generative) AI but the conversation goes into the technology very quickly, and you have to pull it back to, ‘What are we trying to do here,’ and ‘What is the experience that we’re creating?’ That is the key to arrive at something good and interesting, because it’s a technology-enabled solution.

“The most obvious and simplest use of AI is to do more of the same old stuff. So we take the old stuff, we digitise it, then we make it more effective and cheaper, with the help of AI, of course. But that’s not very interesting.

“What is interesting is imagining new experiences, new businesses, new ways of interacting, and so on with the help of gen AI. There’s this old, [Marshall] McLuhan quote: ‘We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us’. I do think it’s very important for design to take an active role in getting ahead of the curve, rather than just executing against someone else’s ideas or commoditised AI patterns.”.