Building as a Creative Act: A Designer's Mindset for the AI Age
Session Overview
Engineering and design are often presented as separate disciplines, but what if the line between them was always more porous than we thought? As AI collapses the distance between idea and working product, builders are gaining a new kind of reach: the ability to shape not just how something is built, but what it becomes.
This talk treats the designer's mindset as a key ingredient for that work β finding real human needs, prototyping to learn, and caring how something feels to use as much as whether it functions. Through examples from emerging technologies and products still in the making, we'll look at building as a creative act.
Key Takeaways
- Why the line between engineering and design is more porous than it appears β and how AI is closing it further.
- How prototyping to learn, not just to ship, changes what builders are able to discover.
- Why caring how something feels to use is as critical to great products as whether it functions.
Speaker
Savannah Kunovsky is a Managing Director at IDEO, where she leads the Emerging Technology & AI business. She helps the world's biggest tech and electronics companies, and its most interesting startups, figure out how people will live with the next generation of AI, robotics, XR, and new hardware, and she specializes in bringing new products from concept to market. Before IDEO, Savannah co-founded Moringa School, a network of tech education schools across Africa that has graduated more than 20,000 people into the technology workforce, and worked with relationship psychology researcher Dr. John Gottman to apply emotion AI to mental health. She began her career as a software engineer. She has spoken at SXSW, the MIT Media Lab, and Harvard, and her work has been recognized by MIT, Forbes, and the World Economic Forum.