Meaningful Work with Marina Gorbis

Kristin Gecan:

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from IIT Institute of Design about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. I’m Kristin Gecan. This week, I talk to Marina Gorbis. Marina is the executive director of the Institute for the Future, a place where business executives, policy makers, nonprofits and others use foresight and futuring techniques to make better long-term decisions. For example, it could work with the Institute for the Future to anticipate and be able to plan for a worldwide pandemic. In fact, Marina worked on just such a project years before COVID hit and, now that the pandemic is real, interest in futuring has spiked. But what is futuring and how does it allow someone to predict something like COVID?

Futuring is systematically drawing on data, analyzing trends and using that information to not only imagine different scenarios but, also, make them real so that you can plan for them. As Marina and I discussed, these approaches are interwoven with design and world-making. And ideally, they’re used to actually inform decisions about what we do, how we live and what we make.

Marina Gorbis:

What should we be making? That’s an interesting question. What I’m focused on is building the enterprise’s structures for creating and getting things done that are more equitable. That’s my focus. I just learned that business is the most popular undergraduate major. And what we’re teaching people and, as a result, what they’re making, are the businesses that maximize for shareholder profits. We’ve been doing it for a while and what we’re seeing are the results of that which is increased levels of wealth inequality, income inequality, racial disparities, all of that and I feel like there have been a lot of conversations about changes in work and economic inequality and a lot of solutions have been around. “Oh, let’s train people for better jobs. Let’s train people, let’s upskill people, let’s give them more education,” with the idea that there are these great jobs out there that everybody can get.

So, if we all become computer scientists or programmers, there is this great life ahead of us. And the reality of it is that somebody needs to be doing all kinds of work. I don’t think we’re lacking for work, there’s care work and now, we have a shortage of nurses and health personnel, we have shortages of teachers. But all of this work is not really well-compensated. The largest employer in the country is actually Walmart, 2.2 million people are working at the Walmart with an average salary of something like $20,000 a year. It’s hard to imagine that that’s a livable salary and it’s a livable wage but somebody needs to do this work. And I’m all for education and upskilling and it has huge benefits for society, for all of us, for individuals but it’s not a solution or, by itself, not a solution to the huge and vast inequalities that we’re seeing.

And basically, we’re in a period where work is no longer the means of distributing prosperity in this country and economic security. Most of the work that people are doing is insecure, it’s not sustainable for many people, it’s stressful, all of those things. So, I’m really focused on how do we create the enterprises, defined broadly, business arrangements or other ways of creating value that are more equitable and more democratic.

Kristin Gecan:

So, can you name some examples of the types of things you’re looking at?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, cooperatives of some sort that give people workers ownership over their work is one example. Community trusts where something is owned by communities and not individuals and the purpose is to enlarge community wealth and, in turn, also increase people’s economic security is one example. ESOPs, employee stock owned companies. It’s anything that gives those who contribute value and work to creation of something where they have a stake in that of some sort, not just being paid the minimal wage or below that, but they have also a larger stake in the product that they’ve created or service.

Kristin Gecan:

Is this in reaction to the gig economy or the shrinking benefits for many workers?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, it’s partially in response to that but this has been happening since the 1970s. We have waves of self-contracting, outsourcing that was enabled by technology. You can’t outsource work if you don’t have these networks over which you can communicate, it’s changes in our legal understanding of worker’s rights and it’s in response to that. But lately, the uberization or explosion of gig work is the latest iteration. So, it’s waves of changes that are legal, regulatory and technology that basically brought us to this place where work has become so inequitable.

Kristin Gecan:

And so, at the same time that you say you agree with the importance of education and how necessary that is, I think what you’re also saying is that the answer to the ills of inequity, at this time, education isn’t an answer to that but the answers lie more in what? In systems or in-

Marina Gorbis:

In the structure and regulation-

Kristin Gecan:

In the structures.

Marina Gorbis:

… of corporate forms, basically, that we have now. You, now, can have a company that hardly has any employees and that’s extremely profitable.

Kristin Gecan:

Right.

Marina Gorbis:

And so, it works for investors and probably for executives who own shares in those companies but it’s not distributed, it’s highly concentrated. Yes.

Kristin Gecan:

Right, right. So, looking at the future and how you might expect types of work to change or not, you mentioned some healthcare positions and, maybe, these will not be changing so much. I guess I’m still wondering about the types of skills you might see being needed for future roles.

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, work is already changing because COVID forced us into rethinking a lot of ways that people work. We’re talking about the Great Resignation. If you’re in that position where you can have that choice and decide that you want to pull out of work, people are changing their working arrangements either hybrid or working from home. You hear people saying, “I’m never going to go back to the same way I worked before.” It just gave us this moment to rethink why are we commuting. Some people, two hours a day. Is it really worth it? Personally and from an environmental perspective also, is it really necessary? And in some ways, we also come to appreciate being in the same place together and missing that in many ways. So, there’s lots of different ways in which people themselves are rethinking their connection to work and what is the role of work in their lives.

So much of our identity has been tied to our work identity. And, if you don’t have that, what other identities rise in importance in redefining that? So, there are lots of different ways in which work is being transformed and I think that COVID has allowed us and, in some ways, exacerbated that. And in terms of skills, a long time ago we did some work on the skills of the future and some of these skills are the same. It’s your emotional intelligence and ability to work with different people, ability to work remotely and collaborate, ability to work with media and understanding different forms of media. We talked about computational intelligence, we’re working with data more and more and it was information. And it’s not so much about programming skills or being a trained programmer, but it’s really ability to understand them and operate in the world of abstractions and data and using these intelligently.

So, all have those skills. I’m not saying that education is not important. It’s very, very important. And a lot of importance is its actually public value. We know that people who have college education are more tolerant, they’re more engaged in social issues, they’re able to process information better and we’re in this world now, we’re just bombarded with information including health information. Reading everything and research about COVID and what to do. It’s a lot of data and statistics. So, there are better health outcomes for people who have higher levels of education. So, it’s not about that. It’s just that, in many ways, education by itself and degrees, in particular, by themselves, maybe 60 years ago or 50 even years ago, you’ve said, “Okay, I’ll get a degree and my future is assured. I can have a middle class existence.” Now, it’s not so clear that that’s the case.

Of course, you’re better off going to college and getting a degree for all these reasons and for societal reasons. But the connection to say that education or degree, by itself, will ensure your economic security, that connection is fraying more and more. So, here in California, something like 15% of people with bachelor’s degrees earn less than $15 an hour and that number has been increasing. That’s the reality of it. That education, by itself, is not producing these expected outcomes in terms of economic security.

Kristin Gecan:

Right. Futures work has seen a resurgence or a spike in popularity with the pandemic and you mentioned how, in one of your projects, I think maybe years ago, you had anticipated such a situation. But I’m wondering, in your work at the Institute for the Future, how would you characterize your interest? Are you interested in making a preferred future or in preparing for plausible futures? How do you think about future versus futures and the work that you’re doing?

Marina Gorbis:

I think it’s a bit of both. Obviously, when we work with future scenarios and look at drivers of change and go through the process, there’s plausible scenarios or futures that we are interested in. And, for some people, that’s where it ends. It’s like, “Please help us develop plausible future scenarios,” which includes some positive and some negatives. “Help us prepare for that.” But we also are interested because the future is not something that’s given, it’s malleable and it’s largely shaped by the actions we take and what we can imagine and what we would like to imagine. A lot of our work is also imagining these possibilities. We have a saying that’s actually on our window at the institute when you come into the institute from Jim Dator who is a political scientist and one of the prominent thinkers and futurists. And it says that any plausible statement about the future should, at first, appear to be ridiculous.

And, if you go back and you think about some of the things that are happening today that seemed unthinkable probably before, you realize that you have to consider these unthinkable things. And also, maybe some of the things you imagine that seem unthinkable are, actually, what you want to build and really engage other people in that conversation. The narrative change is a big part of it because the future starts in our imagination. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t create it and you can’t make it. So, even technology things appeared as science fiction. Our cell phone and other kinds of things, somebody imagined that this is possible. So, imagination is a big part of it.

Kristin Gecan:

So, then, how do you think about the difference between futuring work or maybe it’s very, very similar? But what’s the distinction? Because I think you had mentioned that you found a distinction between the type of work you do in futuring and design work.

Marina Gorbis:

I think there are a lot of intersections and some similar tools and techniques. To me, one of the big differences and a colleague who came to the institute talked about it. She was working in China and there’s a lot of pollution. And so, there was a company she was working with that was trying to create some, basically, technologies to help people protect themselves from pollution so they invented this sensor that you put on windows. And so, if the pollution is greater indoors, you open the window and if the pollution is greater, air pollution outside, you close the window because there is a difference. And I thought, “Wow, that explains the basic difference between traditional design thinking and the future thinking,” because we would come in and want to explore why is there a pollution in the first place? What are the causes of that and look systematically and systemically at the larger issue.

And so, a lot of the futures work is trying to unpack systems, complex socio-technological biological systems, not taking the conditions as they are but, really, looking at larger systems and what systemic changes you can make and want to make at that level. But as I said, we teach futures design which has a lot of elements of both and I think, increasingly, I would love to see designers question some of the systems for which they’re designing.

Kristin Gecan:

How do you think of design? How do you define design?

Marina Gorbis:

What I understand design to be is understanding the needs and desires and limitations and designing best possible product services for that, for those conditions. So, to me, my intersection with designers is there’s some similarities in terms of doing ethnographic work, deeply understanding user needs, conditions and then designing to fill those needs and those specific conditions.

Kristin Gecan:

So, thinking about that in the work that you do and going back to this scenario, I think you had said that there was a project that had imagined some respiratory disease or pandemic. I don’t know if you can paint that picture for us a little bit more of how that came about, that you were anticipating that crisis in some way? And if you could characterize at all when you arrived there, that this was a possibility how people responded to it?

Marina Gorbis:

That particular project from 2008, we were looking at identifying what is the key critical risks that we’re facing as a society and that was one of the risks that was identified. It came out of the work we were doing on zoonotic diseases. So, zoonotic diseases are diseases that are transferred from animals to humans. And, if you unpack that domain, you take several trends together. So, we’re encroaching a lot more on wildlife territories, we’re building in places where, previously, humans did not interact so much with animal life. So, there is more interaction with that. There is more communications and more air travel. We’re basically global so it’s easier to transmit things between those. We’ve seen the beginnings of SARS. These epidemics started to become global, in some ways, and we’re focused on that.

So, you take all of those conditions and it’s easy, or maybe not so easy, to envision that scenario of something transmitted from animals that, then, easily transmitted globally and you’ve got an epidemic. That particular project, what was interesting about it? So, we created this scenario and, actually, a kind of assimilation. So, one of the things that’s really hard about futures work is it’s hard for people to imagine something that they haven’t experienced yet. So, these very detailed simulations are the best approximation that we have. So, we had people actually living that experience. We had people sign up as game participants and they participated in that scenario and shared their experiences and it was really interesting. I think Jane McGonigal who actually designed this simulation with the help of others at the Institute, we were reflecting on that, how much we learned from that simulation at that time.

For example, the fact that the hardest thing for people to let go off would be the social occasions, like rites of passage. Weddings, birthdays, celebrations—that was the hardest thing for people to let go of and, as it turns out, that’s exactly what happened in this pandemic. These kinds of things that we learned from people actually living the experience. There was a lot of people who are organizing various kinds of mutual aid, food distribution. There are groups created to support each other. Again, we’re seeing it in this pandemic how much mutual aid and people, neighbors supporting each other and coming together, how much of that happened. We actually even saw misinformation happening. Things about masks which is interesting. We’re looking, actually, at some photos from San Francisco during the flu pandemic and there were similar anti-masking demonstrations as we’re having today which is really interesting.

So, yeah, these simulations, they make it much more real and tangible the kind of future that, maybe, we’re trying to prepare for or shift in some direction and that’s exactly what we saw in that simulation that we did in ’08. It’s unfortunate, though, that on the larger scale as a society, we don’t act on those learnings but they’re there.

Kristin Gecan:

Yeah. Do you think there’s a possibility, given everything that’s happened, that more of this work will be taken more seriously or adopted and used?

Marina Gorbis:

I hope so. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and it’s almost like you have to look at what are the incentives we have as a society to act on things that are not immediate. And, unfortunately, so many incentives that are built in, whether it’s in politics or business or other areas, they are just very short term. Politicians, they think about next election. Businesses, it’s shareholder profits. It’s other institutions and we’ve been thinking a lot about how do you put in these incentives for longer term? Understanding that people need to deal with crisis and it’s absolutely essential but extending what incentives can you build into these systems to think a little bit more long-term? So, for example, there’s been a long-term stock exchange that has been created and that’s one interesting idea, it’s on the margins. But these imagine creating, giving incentives for longer term stock price or other ways that you can extend that.

So, it’s really about how do we build those incentives. And in crisis, we always respond and we start. I’m not surprised that the futures is so in right now. And, if you think about when we were started in 1968, it’s a very similar environment. A lot of change, war, Vietnam War, a lot of technological changes, civil rights movements, a lot of social upheavals. So, at that time, there was a whole network of futures organizations that have started. So, in a crisis, we tend to respond but then, unfortunately, amnesia sets in and we go back to the usual way of doing things.

Kristin Gecan:

Right. And it’s also that situation of immediacy. People will be forced to respond to certain things and not forced to respond to others. So, in your research, you focus on the future of work and on value creation. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by value creation and what that work looks like?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, we expanded the definition. First of all, even in terms of work, there are certain things that we count as work and other things we don’t count as work. A lot of “women’s work” is not counted as work but we wouldn’t survive without it. And so, we’re trying to separate wage work and what is being paid for and value creation. And value creation, particularly artists, for example, you can argue they’re creating a lot of value and they’re making environments better. Going to museums or art exhibits or other things or listening to music improves your health but people are not necessarily paid for it. So, we’re trying to look at, broadly, what kind of … Wikipedia, for example, there are lots of people contributing to it for free, they’re not getting paid.

So, you can also say, in some ways, we all work for Facebook because they’re taking our data, they’re taking value from us. And so, we are looking at what are the ways in which people can create value beyond work but also through work. So, we like that definition of value creation as opposed to paid work. And a lot of public resources, libraries, for example, they create tremendous value for people but they’re not necessarily something you pay for.

Kristin Gecan:

You mentioned this simulation that you did for COVID. And I wonder if there are other design skills that you use regularly in your work?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, there’s something we call artifacts from the future that we create, oftentimes. So, the artifact could be anything. It could be a journal entry, a day in a life from somebody living in that future. It could be a product or a thing or a service. It could be a physical artifact or digital but it’s very concrete. So, it’s something that makes you ask a question like archaeologists who dig into the past and they ask questions like, “What kind of people were using this? What were they using it for? What were the contexts in which they were using it? Why?” So, it’s the same thing. It’s like archaeology of the future. You dig something up and you ask questions like, “Why would somebody want that? Why would somebody need something like that? Why would you build? What kind of people? What kind of problems were they trying to solve with this? What kind of issues was it creating? What’s the context in which this was used?”

Kristin Gecan:

And are those used to cultivate possibilities or to better understand potential situations?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, the purpose of these is to make something that’s abstract. I can tell you about trends that are happening or drivers of change but they’re very abstract. But the artifacts from the future make it very tangible. So, it’s like, “Okay, if you lived in this world, this is what it looks like. These are the objects you would be surrounded by.” So, it’s about that. It’s about taking something abstract and making it into something much more tangible.

Kristin Gecan:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I asked Kenneth Bailey about this, I had, actually, just interviewed him this morning as well. And I asked him how he thought about the difference between futuring and world building. So, I wonder how you think about that?

Marina Gorbis:

I wonder what he said. [inaudible 00:27:29] ask you that. World building is a new word that’s like metaverse and it’s all of this coming together. I think they’re very much connected. In world building, is that more concrete. It’s about building something in the world and futures is a piece of it. So, I think they’re very connected. To me, world building is much grand, in some ways. It’s what futures leads to on a grand scale, maybe. It’s more concrete and tangible but they’re connected. Futures, to me, it’s a process to getting to world building.

Kristin Gecan:

Yeah-

Marina Gorbis:

[crosstalk 00:28:19]

Kristin Gecan:

… that makes total sense. I think you’re thinking similarly. He said that he likes to think of his work as world building. I think you are in sync in so far as they’re very much related and the one might lead to the other or, hopefully, does. So, getting back to the future of work and what that looks like in equity and preferred futures. We, here in the US, still focus on measures like GDP, other countries have started adopting other metrics like gross domestic happiness. I wonder what your thinking is on that  and what changing to different metrics might do for us in order to move in a different direction or change our value system or—

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, I think that it is a long process. We have this theory of change that there are several catalysts for change. One is narratives, you change your narratives. You bring in new evidence, so another lever is new evidence. We’re doing a lot of myth busting, at this point, as a society about a lot of things. About work, around equity, even origin of this country. So, new evidence, new rules which is very much part of the work we’re doing. Is to think about, “Well, what are the impediments to creating more equitable enterprises? What are the policies, either regulatory or cultural changes, that need to happen, or other kinds of things?” So, new rules, new evidence, new stories and new capacity.

This conversation, what I said about the business schools, there’s no school you can go to to learn about equitable enterprise or everything you teach in business school is about of traditional corporate structures that are optimized for shareholder value. And the interesting thing to me is that it took us, probably, from 1950s where some of the theories, economic theories, neoliberalism and some of the basic ideas were introduced in, mainly, academic settings to the Reagan era where it became dominant underpinnings of our economy and society and we’re still living that. So, now, we have lots of different groups that are questioning that and coming up with different ways of looking at things like changing GDP, for example. Well, GDP was invented before 1950s but just changing narratives and changing understanding and doing some myth busting about what this economy does or doesn’t do.

So, I think it’s good that we’re all working on these things, there’s coherence to that. For example, the idea of universal basic income, that seemed like a crazy idea just a few years ago. LA just announced it’s yet another city that is actually introducing universal basic income for 3,000 families and there’s been so many cities that have, basically, stepped up and are doing it. And that’s going to change because it’s a demonstration and it’s visible, it’s going to change minds, it’s going to become something beyond. And that’s what I like about Kenny’s work, also, it’s demonstration and making something visible where it’s no longer that alien. The idea that, maybe, as a citizen, you deserve to have support, independent of who you are, what you do.

So, these kinds of ideas, I see them coming together at some point but it’s a process in some ways. What we’re going through in Washington now with the new bill and infrastructure, I see it as a battle between new narratives and old narratives about the whole notion of social infrastructure. It’s expanding the idea of what infrastructure is and why it’s worth investing in social infrastructure and not just physical infrastructure, alien idea to some people. Taxing billionaires or the top, top, top billionaires seems like an interesting idea. I don’t know where we’re going to come out but you see these battles between old and new narratives. But it’s probably going to take a while, hopefully.

Kristin Gecan:

And you mentioned this idea, I think you have a name for this project that you’re working on with Equitable Futures and I’m forgetting the name of it. What was that called?

Marina Gorbis:

Equitable Enterprise.

Kristin Gecan:

Equitable Enterprise Initiative, okay. And as we think about the Great Resignation, how do you think that that is tied to issues of equity?

Marina Gorbis:

I think there was multiple thing about the Great Resignation going on. So, part of it is, as I said, it’s COVID. People are tired, people are stressed, they just need a break. A lot of people are not seeing meaning in their work and they’re changing that. Some people are deciding that they can reduce their consumption and trade time for money and deciding to do that. It’s highly unequally distributed, so a lot of different motivations but I do believe it’s also a form of resistance. There is this group called the Nap Ministry which is based on ideas that, particularly, Black women deserve sabbaticals and time for rest, that they’ve been overworked and they see it as an act of resistance, disconnecting from work. One of our fellows has started a fund or is trying to start a fund to, basically, invest in Black women to give them sabbaticals and rest. Very similar to universal basic income idea, but with specific population in mind.

So, there are lots of different things going on and I do believe that it is a rethink and where it’s going to go. One thing that’s, hopefully, giving some power to workers more to negotiate for rights and organize in different ways. One of the things that historically has happened, a lot of researchers and academics have written about that the plague, basically, ended feudalism simply because so many people died that there were not enough workers to work on feudal estates. That, in itself, gave workers a lot more rights. And it’s unfortunate to think, obviously, a lot of people have died, a lot of people have chronic health conditions as a result of COVID and something we’re going to be living with for a while and it’s not over.

So, I think, really, we’re going through this period of rethinking our relationship with work and our identity as workers and, hopefully, it will also give people more choices and more power to engage in the kind of work that they find meaningful, that is bringing value to them and their communities but remains to be seen.

Kristin Gecan:

In thinking about the future of work, what’s the prevailing thinking? Given what we talked about before about the fact that certain roles will likely be needed far into the future but people clearly have expressed this need or desire for meaning in their work. I just wonder if that has come up? Well, as you mentioned, it is a trend finding meaning in your work and how do we deal with that?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, and we think about meaning in our work as high, I don’t know, knowledge work, contemplating or whatever. Think about our lives, we clean our homes because that’s part of our obligation as families, as communities and other things. So, I think most work can have its meaning if it’s done in the right context. If you feel like you’re doing something that’s part of your obligation to communities, whether it’s picking up garbage or it’s cleaning streets or doing other things, I think there is meaning in all of that work. It’s just that people have not felt that or, maybe, some do but, as a society, we haven’t valued that work.

And one of the interesting things is, now, we call them essential workers and there is rethinking of what essential work is and, maybe, essential work is not in PR and advertising and financial whatever you do, but the most meaningful work and the most essential work is that kind of work. Is taking care of people, is about cleaning streets and other things. But unfortunately, we haven’t connected that essential work to actually paying people for that work, so that they can live those dignified lives. We started thinking about, Kenny’s, for example, this idea of public kitchens. What if you rethink infrastructure and start thinking about what infrastructure you need to build for wellbeing? What would it look like? And it would probably involve something like, maybe, public kitchens and public libraries and all kinds of other things that we don’t think of as essential and then, that would give meaning to all kinds of work.

Kristin Gecan:

In the work that you do, you’re obviously thinking about equity, we think about in design. The original way to think about design was to create something that was viable, desirable and feasible. And now, we’re adding the question of sustainable, equitable and just. How do you think about, particularly in the future, how organizations can ethically make things that are desirable at the same time as being just?

Marina Gorbis:

I think that’s a really important part of it. And earlier, when we were doing work on platforms and positive platforms, people who are designing these software and these systems, they’re not just designing technical systems, they’re, in fact, designing social systems. And so, we created this ethical OS guide which is to help product designers, in particular, to think about what we call risk zones. So, when you’re designing something, think about what is the implications of this for health, for equity, for all of these. It’s actually quite remarkable how very simple technological things that are being designed into our systems that are, oftentimes are invisible, how much impact they have.

You can design for something that, basically, makes it addictive. You can design and put things, little tweaks that make it more addictive, which we’re finding out most of our social media platforms are excelling at, unfortunately. But how do you design to give power to people who are using the platforms? I think designers increasingly and, particularly technology designers, but others, they really need to be thinking about the social systems and understanding the larger social systems into which they’re designing.

The unfortunate thing is, most of the software designers, that’s not what they’re trained in, that’s not what their education involves and there are very few schools that do that and, probably, IIT is one of them, where you think about these larger systems. But then, it’s a question of who has the power? What’s the incentives and who is the power structures that allow you to think about those issues and whether it’s compatible with the market forces that are out there? And that has to do, again, with the structure of the enterprise in which these designers live, what they ended up designing.

Kristin Gecan:

Yeah. So, I wonder, because I understand you are originally trained as a social scientist. So, when you think about this and the example that you’ve given of these technology systems or social networks like Facebook and others that have been able to create certain incentives for people to keep pressing the button or whatever it is that they want to incentivize. Do you have an opinion on what the role of behavioral science is in making things that are ethical and desirable?

Marina Gorbis:

Yeah, obviously, we know a lot from behavioral science and that’s what’s being used to develop some of these, both great and both negative, platforms and technologies. I think there is a role of applying these things ethically and thinking about it but I also think that there are limitations in terms of if you’re designing something for commercial use, there is, obviously, a drive right to design that something that profits trumps everything in some ways. So, there’s also a role for regulation of these kinds of things. So, people design within the parameters of certain systems in which they live which are established from outside.

So, things about, for example, making things less opaque, requiring people to disclose some of the algorithms or making them more visible, creating oversight over them, all these kinds of things are some levers that we have that need to be activated outside so that you design within certain parameters that are, basically, more transparent and more equitable. So, the starting conditions are important and, a lot of times, those conditions are not set by designers, they are operating within a limited sphere. So, I wouldn’t put all the burden. You can be designing the greatest things in the world, but you’re operating within a system that’s shareholder profit driven and speed and competition and other kinds of things. So, I think we need to focus a lot on these external criteria and defining within which parameters you operate.

Kristin Gecan:

Thank you to Marina Gorbis, a 2021 Latham fellow at ID, for joining me today. You can learn more about Marina and the Institute for the Future on the IIT Institute of Design website, id.iit.edu/podcast. Please subscribe, rate and review With Intent on your favorite service. This is a new show and your support really helps. Our theme music comes from ID alum, Adithya Ravi. Until next time.