David McGaw, Design Strategist for Google’s Deepmind

How do you know things and make sense of the world?

Specifically, how do you seek information? And which sources do you turn to? With these seemingly straightforward, but actually quite complex questions, David McGaw (MDes 2007), began his work as a designer for Google.

He joined Google’s user experience research team nearly a decade ago, initially working on Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that moved beyond simple query responses to create two-way conversations with follow-up questions and additional context. David wanted to understand how users truly wanted to interact with it.

Using queries—specific requests for information from databases or search indexes—as a method to gain knowledge is a very recent development. The way you used to learn things, David says, was by reading a book or by talking to wiser, more informed people than you.

David authored an internal paper at Google to help colleagues explore questions of epistemology, or how we know what we know.

As we’ve transitioned to learning about the world via computers, we’ve trained ourselves to type in queries. David’s team was trying to introduce new and more natural ways of interacting.

“It turns out it works better if people just talk. At length,” he says. “You’re trying to get people to unlearn their ‘use a computer’ skill [and] just talk to it like a person. The role of design in a tech-forward innovation world is more about, ‘How do we connect what you’re building with how people behave?’”

These humanist inquiries led David to his newest gig at Google: working as a design strategist on DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence lab.

Back when David studied ancient history at Yale University in the 1980s, he ran a letterpress print shop, working on a 100-year-old press. Though he wouldn’t formally study design for decades, he considers the work a crucial part of his design development.

“The intersection of design with the mechanical process to execute it was a fascinating junction,” he says. “How do you make information clear and interesting?”

Google recently conducted a global study on how people prefer to work with AI and how they expect to interact with it in the future. It found that participants’ mental models were struggling to catch up with how rapidly the streams and formats of information were developing. And at its core, the issue was how users view and approach these highly complex and interactive information sources.

What is AI—is it a tool? A collaborative partner? An apprentice that one mentors? A relationship one develops?

“You shouldn’t have to master skills or have to prompt an AI, you should train an AI to be a good partner to you,” David says.

That broad idea seems simple, but the implications relating to products can be profound. For AI to be used to its maximum potential, David explains, it needs to be more akin to a bond that is developed.

“We’re used to using technology in a push-button way. But if AI can help you in more abstract ways, it requires working with it in a more abstract way. So you have to have a better expectation of the rhythms of the interaction,” he says.

This reimagining requires more than traditional research approaches.

“You’ll find a lot of folks who come to the role of [user experience] researcher through the science of human research, the study of human thought or behavior. But you’re not going to find a lot of Davids,” says Julie Anne Seguin, a fellow user experience researcher at Google.

One big challenge for AI developers in every company right now, David says, is figuring out how much an AI tool should explore the context of questions before arriving at its conclusions. AI tools that answer questions with follow-up questions will give better answers but can be more annoying for users.

“It’s still about these large systems and how technology and culture and people interact,” David says. “We get to decide, but I think it helps to have people who understand the cultural aspects as well as the technological aspects, and the implications of how they come together.”

David became a designer in a roundabout way. With a history degree from Yale, he later served as a campus minister with the interdenominational Campus Crusade for Christ at Harvard University.

ID’s MDes program initially appealed to him as a way to gain skills for his intermittent graphic work. But he soon discovered the discipline’s larger context of problem-solving and fell in love with it.

He worked at McKinsey & Company for years, as well as several smaller design firms in the San Francisco area before being approached to work at Google.

Throughout it all, his faith and humanist beliefs have grounded him.