The List
October 1, 2024
3:37
S3: Trailer
In this introductory trailer to With Intent Season 3, hosts Thamer Abanami and Albert Shum introduce themselves as this year’s Latham Fellows at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. They share their excitement about co-hosting the podcast and reflect on their 15-year professional partnership, including their collaborative work on a broad range of design projects and their previous podcast, The Design Vault. Their longstanding relationship sets the stage for insightful discussions on design and its impact on society.
The hosts outline the themes and focus for the upcoming season, which will explore designs featured in ID’s list of 100 Great Designs of Modern Times, published with Fortune magazine in 2020. They will delve into topics centered around innovation, responsible design, social impact, and scalability. By using notable designs as a backdrop—such as Zipline’s drone-based logistics platform (2014, #69), Massimo Vignelli’s New York City Subway Map (1972, #28), the ClearRx prescription bottle redesign (#36, 2005), the OXO Good Grips Peeler (1990, #6), LifeStraw water filters (2005, #53), and the Raspberry Pi computer (2012, #54)—they foster deeper conversations about design principles and the unexpected insights embedded within these creations.
Transcript
Thamer Abanami:
I guess we should tell the listeners about ourselves. Albert, yeah?
Albert Shum:
Well, I feel fortunate. I’ve had the chance to work with you. Wow, it’s over 15 years.
Thamer Abanami:
A long time, yeah.
Albert Shum:
And it’s, it’s been exciting. We’ve worked on digital and physical products. We’ve had so many design conversations. And my background is in product design, working from startups to companies like Nike to large technology companies like Microsoft, where I had the opportunity to really explore the frontier of new technology and scale products for millions, if not billions, of people. So it’s, I’ve had an amazing journey.
Thamer Abanami:
Yeah, I got to join you for part of that journey. I think we both ended up at Microsoft and worked together. And before that, I studied Business Information Systems, and for a lot of my career, did a lot of interdisciplinary work across design, engineering, and business, and worked on things like Windows at massive scale, and things like Windows Phone and Xbox.
We also worked on a lot of bleeding-edge tech incubations where we really can’t talk about the details, but we got to work on kind of everything, didn’t we?
Albert Shum:
Probably the area that we worked on most is this fuzzy, fun, and ambiguous space. What is it like? I feel like that’s the fun part, but it’s also the—well, some people would call it frustrating, but I always took that on as a challenge, trying to figure out what the problem is, yeah.
Thamer Abanami:
I think that’s one of the things that I appreciate about you, and why we’ve worked together so well, and why we continue to work together. We really love ambiguous problems. We really love to solve things that are massively hard at a big scale. So I’m excited to talk about the designs, and what we’re going to talk about in the season. There’s this list that the Institute of Design developed called the “100 Greatest Designs of the Modern Era,” and it’s published by Fortune magazine. We’re going to be using these designs as a backdrop for a deeper conversation about design themes like innovation, scale, impact, and more. And each of these designs we’ll be discussing has embedded in it a big question or unexpected insights that we think would be inspiring for anyone interested in design, engineering, business, or impact.
Albert Shum:
This season, we’ll be discussing Zipline, a drone-based platform company that’s disrupting the field of autonomous logistics, focusing on the delivery of healthcare products. It’s an inspiring story of a startup that started small and is now expanding across the world.
Thamer Abanami:
We’ll also be discussing the 1972 New York City subway map by Massimo Vignelli, a map that was both a massive design success and had influence for decades to come, but it was also a functional failure. There’s a really interesting story and huge lessons around that.
We’ll also be talking about ClearRX, which was an inspiring reinvention of the prescription bottle.
Albert Shum:
We’ll also be discussing LifeStraw, not only as a revolutionary product design, but really rethinking social impact and how you create the right balance between business and doing good.
Thamer Abanami:
We’ll also be discussing the OXO peeler, a lesson in universal and inclusive design that still has so much to teach us about how to design for the future. And finally, we’ll be talking about the Raspberry Pi—how a $35 credit card-sized computer changed the landscape of education and technology, and what lessons we can learn from it. We’re also fortunate to connect with the faculty and staff at the Institute of Design, and also hear from other expert voices who helped us research and develop the season. You’ll hear from CEOs, designers, and much more. We’re really…
Albert Shum:
…excited about the season and hope you’ll all join us.
Thamer Abanami:
Stay tuned.