The article on TaiwanUS.net provides details for an event titled "AI Design Jam With Lovart + Panel Discussion," which took place on January 28, 2026, in Palo Alto, California.
Here is a summary of the event details:
Overview
The event focused on AI-powered design and creative collaboration, featuring Lovart.ai, described as the "world's first all-in-one design agent." It was intended for designers, founders, marketers, and creative technologists to explore AI-native design workflows.
Key Highlights
Fireside Panel: Featured industry leaders from companies like Meta, Eleven Labs, Zoom, and Microsoft (including Sandy Diao, Matty Shimura, Peng Zheng, and Yan Liu). They discussed how design thinking is evolving to become AI-native.
Live Demos: Showcased new features of Lovart that accelerate ideation and visual design.
AI Design Hackathon: A hands-on session where participants built creative projects using Lovart, either solo or in teams, with the chance to win a free annual "Lovart Pro" membership.
Networking: The schedule included time for food, drinks, and professional networking within the design and startup community.
Partners and Hosts
The event was co-hosted by:
MirWork: An AI Talent Intelligence platform.
Startup Island TAIWAN (SIT) - Silicon Valley Hub: An organization acting as a bridge between Taiwan’s innovation ecosystem and global markets.
The post was uploaded to the TaiwanUS.net portal by Hsieh Chin-kuan on January 29, 2026, archiving the event's promotional details and agenda.
AI Design Jam With Lovart + Panel Discussion
與 Lovart 進行 AI 設計創作 + 小組討論
時間：January 28, 2026 Wednesday 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
地點：299 California Ave, Suite 300 Palo Alto, CA 94396
https://luma.com/8zbigpas
Join us for an evening of creativity, collaboration, and AI-powered design with Lovart.ai — the world’s first all-in-one design agent.
This fast-paced AI Design Jam blends hands-on building, a fireside panel on AI-native design workflows, live demos, snacks, merch, and a chance to win a free annual Lovart Pro membership.
Whether you’re a designer, founder, marketer, or creative technologist, this event is designed to spark new ideas, encourage cross-functional thinking, and foster meaningful connections across the design and startup community.
MirWork is the world's first AI Talent Intelligence platform that connect professionals with hiring team.
About Startup Island TAIWAN (SIT)- Silicon Valley Hub
The Hub is a vital bridge connecting Taiwan’s strengths with global market opportunities. It links Taiwan’s innovation with international ecosystems, fostering deep collaboration between Taiwan and the world.
and fortunate and um make us really happy. Uh however, we need to do more um we want together with with our community more. That's why we're doing this this um events and this is a quick view of our product. We have because we are design agents. So we have a agent on the right side as how to interact with uh check uh I mean check GT or Venice and then on the left it's a canvas similar to Figma. So we got love by a lot of um designers because they love being able to work on the campus um and being able to leverage a agent the chatbot to help planning and all that does a lot of the heavy lifting of the design work. Um I want to quickly show you guys this um our website. Um I really really want to show it because this website is going to be deprecated in maybe within a week. Um when we first launched um this this website uh this design got uh loved by a lot of uh designers in the community because um a fun story um the name of our u because we were looking for a name that might sound a little French. So trying to respect all those you know great artists and um European style and we wanted to represent a real AI agent that someone would work for. So, it's supposed to be like a French kind of like fancy thing. And we um the idea in the beginning was that we wanted to leverage AI to empower all all the creatives out there. And everyone that has a professional skills or not, they're able to leverage all those like great um creative minds um that that that contributed to the development of creativity, art, and design. So our website if you um play play with it. So it actually has this interesting um motion. This is Lar. It's hiding behind all those great lines. And this is um I insisted to add a female figure in here. So uh we're going to have a new new design and new brand um brand identity coming up very soon. So if you like this, play with it until it's going to be deprecated very soon. Um, so I want to because we're going to do a live demo later, so I'm not going to spend too much time here. And I want to jump into our panel.
Oh, I forgot to mention um if you guys want to learn more um about us and um I'm sure you have been asked for your email address to sign up for Lar when we enter the design challenge you we're gonna our team is going to assign you a free membership for you to try out low bar. So if you haven't signed up we need you to to have an active account to be able to assign that membership. So try to do that while you are waiting on your phone and if you want to learn more about us and follow us on Instagram and X we post a lot of work there and again I'm Sylvia and if you find anything uh you have feedback about our product or any ideas to collaborate feel free to connect with me over LinkedIn or uh Twitter and love to hear from you. Um Maddie. So before we start our uh panel, um Maddie, one of our panelists and I let him do the intro. He wants to uh tell you about this amazing.
Thank you. So thank you so much for the introduction. Hi, my name is Maddie. I run the My full-time role at 11 is running the promo awards, which is our Olympics, film, music, videos, and games. We have time later at the end. I think we can show a little bit of video of it. Uh but we are the world's biggest AI film competition. We surpass runways, experimental audio, really anything that you could do because it's not just black and white. It's spectrum of work with a number of amazing sponsors from Google, White Dance, Adobe, uh you name it. when it comes to foundational models or companies really trying to show that we can be a united front rather than being the crab in the bucket who's tearing each other down since there's so much anti-AI sentiment. How can we show that we're together
for people a million dollars in free trials all these different sponsors $190,000 cash prizes and a variety of different jobs and really trying to scale it into something that could be as big as the appreciate you having me here today and um promo awards.com to see all of our winners from this past season. We have a little bit of a platform also register for our next season which is going to be even bigger and better you know by coding. We're going to building out an advertising division where people adirectly
with the brand where they're providing a brief where they're selecting their winners
that
Sure. I can play the video, too. It's a little bit of a recap from
So, this was all with footage from our winners across 25 different categories. Really outstanding showing. A lot of this long form content never does well. social media. We try to provide for all that
All
right. Thank you, Maddie. Um well so um I actually know a lot of film AI filmmakers they use for recording so we're trying to we'll see if um this creators from awards going to pick up our products. Um all right now panel.
So we have from Microsoft Sandy, Mandy and Tom. I will let each each one of them uh introduce themselves before we jump in.
for eight years
discussions
already. Everything that I do touches creative in some way whether it's videos or ad creative and really excited for today's conversation everyone I'm working at Microsoft and I'm also
consulting so yeah to join the panel today
right so our fireside chat um panel our topic today is creative agency and native world Um and actually before diving in I wanted to get a show of hands. Um how um what's everyone's role? I wanted to see any designers here
any product managers
founders
and who else? Marketers grow. engineers. Okay. A founder and engineer. Okay. Cool. So, we know the audience and so glad that I think designers still mix up the big chunk of this audience today. So, happy to really like involve everyone and um so at the end we're gonna have um time for questions. Um but today we want to still um have this conversation around um it's been a couple years since we um had this I changing interrupting into our world and and making a lot of changes and um of course last year the integ
partner to everyone. So a lot of probably a lot of experience um trying everything out and also from the panel and we're going to just dive in today. Um the first question uh I wanted maybe we're just going to go around everyone um or anyone that has like a strong opinion to want to talk about and we can also focus on that. So compared to a year ago, what part of your creative workflow feels the most structurally different today? And I wonder if each one of you can share a concrete example uh the moment where AI genuinely surprise you and really unlock something that you would not have have bothered doing before. Should we start with Okay. Yeah, I can get started. Uh I think the design industry has um embraced a huge revolution starting from last year and uh just like last week I met some friends design friends from Google and they mentioned have never they haven't used like pigma for and this is pretty surprising to me because like uh designers we we live on Figma for the past several years and we just open Figma to do everything from brainstorming from all the way to prototyping is always like and there are someone mentioned like they haven't Figma for a long while and to me I'm still like a mix and match. I use Figma. I use a bunch of web coding tools, but I'm still like doing design work as well. But I can see that there's a trend to move um graphics from like you are designing sketches or designing pixels on Figma all the way to like just web coded and and this is a big trend and I think it's going to be uh even bigger this year and also um for me I feel like the process from design to coding also change a lot like previously like we design things and uh we have like probably meetings with from the managers and we settle down the directions, the strategy and then we design ideas. But now it's like we a lot of times we just starting with web tools and we try some a lot of ideas and they also really help us to brainstorm a bunch of cool ideas. We have network and then uh we can handle over very quick demos to engineers which can save us tons of time. So I think the process really changed a lot uh from that linear process from design uh to coding all the way from like everything everyone just works together like designers can code coders can can design PM can do everything just like I feel things getting changed really quick and I can I'm still looking forward to see this year and I I can feel like there will be like more and more things happening and everyone is just like learning new new skills um understanding the new so
Yeah, I'll dive in with a quick story of mine as well. One of the things I've been most fascinated by is just how incredibly realistic a proof of concept of AI. You know, for example, one of the companies that I worked with about a year and a half ago is a company called Limitless. They've essentially produced a hardware pendant you can wear and records or it transcribes conversations of everything that happens around you whether it's hallway conversation with your significant other whether it's with your coworker and at the time that the company put together this concept we actually used uh simply the most basic version of GPT's image generation at the time created a prototype with just the tool itself spun up a landing page and basically collected tens of thousands of cash paid pre-order products from that experience. Now this is actually a huge difference from what we saw years ago. I worked at a company called Indiegogo which is a crowdfunding platform for many of the you know very popular consumer electronics that you know today like Oculus the Snapchat spectacles and the best cameras and so on and so forth. You know a lot of these hardware products have that origin uh with crowdfunding. But at that time you know when you had a founder or when you had a team who was interested in designing a production ready product you would have to pay industrial designers. You'd have to go through this process of spending a lot of money on the design process itself. And so you know now we have this team very not hardware native you know really never produced hardware in you know their their careers were able to take this product essentially creative design for it like a lot of orders for it and then produce it in the time span of the year. So I think the powers of generative AI, you know, really paint this stark contrast and it's really incredible how much uh realism the the proof of concepts can can provide and you know how much LLM empower us to consider many different variables and factors when it comes to building something that's traditionally very inaccessible like hardware.
For me, the biggest leap with AI was not the, of course, there are many technologs like this. It's the community because uh creators, especially filmmakers, are fickle. they're going to swap to whatever is and it's hard to have retention cohorts which is one of the most important
um and so you need to foster community in order to build where it's people often criticize AI as being this cold soul soulless or heartless thing but it's the shaking of hands it's seeing people face to face that authentic is how deals get done and also how these teams get made. So what we tried to do is put a lot of energy into that inerson element little jams and and one day hackathons because I think that's what's needed to bridge the gap where there is there is so much AI anti-AI sentiment uh but they're essentially the target audience. We're alienating people with this messaging of cheaper, better, faster disruption, which is a very silky value mentality, but it artists and creative mouth. So, how do you tangibly what they care about? How do you say that we're, you know, not trying to take away, but rather be more additive? I think that's
I think embracing AI and
a real trend that's happening and personal story I can share like two days ago I'm designing this feature
product um and then I was thinking this is a very magical test because they just the building blocks from our design system and then why don't I try with so I get access engineers code my advice set up the environment to do this return
components system and then I was able to like play around it like a real prototype instead of connecting or static box and then um I committed code and pushed my first PR uh the code and accepted connect with backend API. Um, so that's a real example that what took me a day in the past could easily like 20 minutes. Um, and we can as designers we can truly get into the details and lower the communication cost through different functions or addition. So it's really enabled almost infinite possibility. Um, updates. It makes impossible possible now and make those fast 10 times faster.
Cool. Love those sharing those ideas and thoughts. I just want to quickly um comment. I think um we're talking about
Yeah, we were talking about workflow shifts but I wanted to actually put it in a different way. I I hear a lot about the boundaries are different now like if you were a different as well before you are able to do more things by pushing the boundaries and trying to like trying to to like use the tools to something that you weren't able to do before and uh from from hearing from um both Sandy and and about how uh within different organization different teams they're really like leveraging AI to move faster and create more things. And from what Maddie said, I think the that the thing is really really true. We want to host events like this so that we can bring people to come. And actually um for the today's subject, we we uh originally were thinking about calling it design challenge, but I changed it to a design gym because I wanted to be a little more fun. So whether or not you have experience, you can come. I think those are the things that we're trying to do like in this AIA just as long as you have an idea you can try and uh the outcome will be very surprising and to p um point I think for designers they are they're actually like very very important now they they used to focus more on just designing things but now it looks like they can ship things so this is just very very very um um nice to see throughout last year. So, um I wonder what about um any frictions in your day-to-day work? Um in your in your real day-to-day uh where do you still feel like AI is still creating friction or limit limitations um when you're working? Um what's one capability that you wish AI would uh already have that uh or is better at today and what would it take for you to feel more confident relying on AI?
Um I think a challenge I'm facing is I don't know what I don't know. I mean AI empower designers
but like sometimes when the execution cost become so low the real question becomes like what do you want to make? So from this perspective AI is almost like a mirror. It reflects like who you truly are what you want to make different what you want to create for these worlds and Everybody is created internally just the right environment, the right tool to visualize that.
The biggest limitation I see with creators is not how to use the tools but why they should use the tools. So the intentionality behind uh using AI just as a gimmick rather than uh for a meaningful purpose. I think anyone can spend 40 80 hours watching a variety of YouTube tutorials and you can be as good uh as some of the top AI creators but the differentiating factor is beast. It's being able to create it's being able to say have that critical thinking and say have that output what you choose and what you throw away or iterate on and those skills take a lot of time to develop. It's not something that you can overnight and so that's why I think the those of you in the audience who may have those traditional backgrounds uh those are an incredibly valuable skill set. I think AI native creators like like you're saying you only know what you know um where they haven't faced some of these challenges just because they haven't been making because those doors haven't been open. So I think uh for people who want to be these creators studying what is makes I mean what makes a great story rather than just trying to or without paying homage to what got us to this point.
My challenge with using AI right now is that in growth my relationship with creative and design and all creative things in general is actually very data driven. Meaning that generally speaking I need the best tool to do the best job at different types of So, for example, if I'm going to run ad campaigns, I need a tool or I need some way to create creative that is purpose-built for IG reels versus Tik Tok versus YouTube. And unfortunately, you need a lot of context around what good looks like on each of these platforms. So, maybe not necessarily what I hope AI could do better for me, but one of the frustrations I have is that the tool the tool stack that we use in growth is very fragmented. I have a point solution for creating social clips. I have a point solution for generating ad videos, UDC style content, for creating graphic design, etc., etc., right? And so, if I have to meaningfully learn to use all of these tools, pay for each of them, and then figure out how I can export them and upload them to the same platform and systems, I mean, it's actually quite tedious to do so. And you kind of have to, you know, remember to do these things and then you also have to train other people how to do them. So there are tools that do it all. Like for example, you could reasonably use GPT or Gemini to do all the above. However, I do find that their performance and the data that I see around their ultimate performance actually does not um beat out some of these point solutions. So my my wish is that there would be some kind of consolidation of tools andor some kind of shared unified format across the data in these tools so that we could somehow stitch together these experiences just
I have a very similar uh opinion for tools with the several panelist. So I don't know whether people noticed that starting from last year there's an insane amount of coming out like Japanese uh last November and then it's like their coworker skills uh cloud code now and there's another one called cl just coming crazy mac I just feel like every tool can only be popular for one or two and then there's another fancier one coming out so that's the thing uh I'm seeing at the moment Um I have been uh talking with a bunch of my friends and people really like mention we feel like overwhelmed by the amount of the tools like you are starting with this one and then that that one coming out and it's suddenly everyone using that one. So uh to me I think the real challenge for the novel people is just really to find out the workflow that makes sense to you. Um so there are so many tools I have exploring a lot of them as well but just suddenly um gradually I realized that maybe some tools works more resonate with me. Some of them doesn't. So really think about like how what do you want really want to build and starting the project as soon as possible doesn't have to be something really really fancy to be on the app store. Maybe just like a small tool that can work for you. So starting building something is the most important part and through that process we'll figure out what is the best workflow for you and what's the best tool probably that works for you. So don't get overwhelmed and don't feel like fear of missing out. I think that's that's super common nowadays. That's something I learned during the past several months. I just stop chasing me. Um, another one is I think uh AI is still super inconsistent at the moment. So each time when I even use the same prompt, I got different results and it's uh it's pretty hard to keep things consistent. So yeah, I'm just trying to um like my solution is like to document a lot of things that I I use something that works, something that doesn't work and then uh really figure out like your own system and and also to really make it um get some outcome. I think that's the that's the part that's part and also challenge that I've been facing with. Thank you. I just wanted to echo everything that you said um said um resonates so much with me and um I'm hearing that ideas and intention are so important right now. Uh it's actually one of our um our values as well. We believe we're trying to empower and enlarge that creativity. As long as you have something you want to build, here's the tool and helping you with that. So really really believe that that's the power of AI and on the other hand there's so many tools out there and so many different workflows and I guess that's also why we built this agent because we're trying to really help you consolidate things and I'm sure this is going to be way for a lot of um startups are trying to figure out for different roles and u different type of work and how can we continue to consolidate things so so folks don't need to uh sign up for everything and we start learning that and I really like that idea from the end about not try not don't don't feel formal I think the best way to do today is to get your hands dirty and blow your heart if you have an idea if you have an interest and just um figure out there's a lot of tools out there um and you know you can start with love art anytime cool now let's get a little um a little deeper into the actual uh print work um your experience where and in your experience working with all those AI tools, where do you still feel very much in control versus where you feel like you're lacking AI to drive? I feel like we already tackled some of it, but I just want to hear specific points. Um, especially uh maybe what is the one creative position that you are not ready to give up yet? Start with the end. Um, yeah. Yeah, I think AI can definitely do good job for everything execution like when I give a pretty uh detailed and clear problem. It can just follow it. Um something else you feel like we should choice is like the the idea at big uh like the big direction the big picture uh as the taste as I mentioned. So um taste for sure everyone knows yeah taste is everything for now. But I have learned like what does taste really mean? To me, I feel like taste doesn't just mean like design or surface level like color animation. It's not just like that. I feel like taste is more like how you think of the product. Uh does does that product really solve the user's pinpoints? Um does it really have that market fit and also um just like the feeling like to know which one is better, which one is not. I think that's that's the taste. It's not just like design or or just like whether it looks good or not. I think it's like all the product thinking and sense there like you have to decide what is the pace means and I remember someone mentioned online like pace means um sensitivity plus standard. So sensitivity means like how you u receive like details like or do you feel this is good or that one is not good. How you really compare the products from this to that and standard means like uh what do you think is the how you define a good product or not? Like that's the standard and the criteria. Maybe people have different criteria criteria based on different like uh understanding but just like your if you own yourself has like a system for to really understand how does the product works. I think that's super important. Um so for me case is um definitely should be by ourselves like AI can generate tens or hundreds of like solutions for you but we understand which one is better or which one you want to choose. I think that's still something that AI cannot replace.
for some of the work that I do. One area that I right now fully trust AI to be capable of, at least in the creative process, is a lot of the pre-production workflows. So, for example, if I'm going to be taking a really long video, I want to cut it into short snippets for social media posting across different channels. I fully trust AI to kind of take that initial rough cut. Kind of takes it to the 70% But kind of the rest of the polish, the remaining 30% that I think is really going to help add that taste, that element of taste as well as branding and resonance with the customer, I find that I need to use my human judgment and exercise that understanding of what my goals are, my understanding of who the customers are and essentially have that additional fine polish at the very end of the process. So I think my relationship with using AI right now and you know what I find I trust AI with the most is kind of the I'll call it just broadly speaking the rough cuts so to speak and for me exercising that human judgment to uh complete the rest and the remainder with that that final polish that brings in that context that can be a little bit hard to bring in with a lot of structure
for me I I since there's so much context switching between When running the competition, you have to be uh running meetups, meeting with sponsors, um sending out a ton of emails, judging submissions, doing c customer support of angry competitors who, you know, that they uh you know, their submission didn't get viewed. Um, I wish I could automate automate more, but I a lot of it it comes down to the human nature to be authentic with people. So, I wish there was more that I could I could give up. I think uh the thing that I found was really helpful that saved me weeks of work is I do a lot of work in Google spreadsheets and using Gemini to buy code and do some really powerful things and I did a little computer science in college but not not anything to major degree and just being able to know what I want and describe in natural language has
For me, I think it's in control of AI and it is when I can um explicitly express what I want. So, it's good execution once you have the right piece of resource for it. Um, but the hard part is to being able to articulate what you want in a way that's
rightol
I think the learning curve is steep for a lot of people because it's very specific way like it the better result that is but um it's almost like information entropy that what's the bare minimum information you need to provide to it amount of contacts you can provide it to it to generate a good result and that's a very subtle
Thank you. Um I'm hearing I I I just heard a few like really interesting things. I really love how San Diego talked about relationship with AI. I think that's that's a very great way to and think about um what what the future will look will be like and um and the taste and the um um information the what kind of information I think it's also around the relationship that we do with with it and um I do think um in my experience um as a design agent we work with a lot of different kinds of roles and uh the the answer is very different there are certain areas where the u wants to drive more and wants to have more control but for for someone like me I don't have my background and uh I usually just start with my phone like oh I want something I want a brand asset for blah blah blah and that's that's like how I start so I realized there's just a lot of a lot of unknown to be and the relationship is going to continue to evolve and could be um as different roles and different at different time point there's more control and less u letting the AI drive but it could also change I be dynamic. Thank you. Um so next question I have um this one is very interesting. I recently read about um a a a white book that campa published uh it's called in 2016 in init by design where raw expressive less bullish outputs become the new and that is u basically AI is outputting everything that looks very very perfect but you can tell it's AI so adding that human qual becomes something that um at least canvas users and their research is trying to uh to exit. Um so I wonder our panelists uh what do you think of this? Do you buy that or do you think it's just action to generic AI looking content and this will not last?
Um I think it's the n it's actually related to the nature of how our model works and also the nature of human being is we have people who like human being naturally
whatever they want. But like the best part is like AI is kind of you can dedicate that partation part to to AI. Like designers used to struggle with this debate like should you name your layers? Should you name your files the final final version? Um joking about it. people never organize their browser tabs and messy desktop with all the files, icons, but for you. Um, and then like let AI do what's it good at and let us
point you brought up about human nature, how it's not always perfect, how it's both light, but it's also dark. You need to show those two sides. Uh, to have that dichotomy and also have that I think for AI film making. I've seen so many of the same types of stories of cyborg girl XYZ yada yada I want to see things that are more personal to the creator story where it's raw where it's authentic where it's talking about maybe their trauma and it's vulnerable that medium people where they don't have to ask for permission to get these homes that have both benefits and drawbacks. But um going back to the original question, I think it it has these human nature's thoughts of the art and the work should
it's interesting from a growth perspective. What we find is that imperfect by design is actually performance. So what I mean by that is one of the top channels that many of the companies that I work with use is called UDC or user generated content. And these are the types of videos or images that you see when you browse social media and it's, you know, a talking head video of somebody putting their cell phone up to themselves and they're reviewing a product, right? They're telling you all the goods and the bads, but there's something about that that feels very genuine and authentic. So to me, imperfect by design is actually a reflection of how people perceive what they trust and what they believe in, right? You know, I I think that some of us or a lot of us are we're kind of tired of being sold products. We're tired of being marketed to an sometimes that that polish feels extra disingenuous. And so I think that's where when we see AI content, we know that it's AI content, but there's also a part of us that realizes there's an orchestrator behind how this content came out. And I think because of that, you know, consumers or, you know, you and I every day when we see that, we just feel like someone's intending to say something to us rather than, you know, sort of this idea of imperfect by design. You know, we like user generated content. We like that organic reaction on social media. We like when we see that's really raw and unpolished because it feels like it's real. And I think, you know, applying this to this kind of thread we have around human nature, we want more real things. We want connection. We want to be able to trust the people that are telling us things. And so I think it all kind of ties together.
Yeah, same thing. Uh I totally buy it because I I I feel I already got tear to looking at as like I used to really enjoy notebook and it's such a powerful tool still is but I just feel like every time when I looking at for example generate the back or infographic for me it's just look so AI and I just feel so tired of looking at that again and I I just know just recently I just go back to my traditional way of watching video or reading book that is better um because because like I don't know I don't know what other people think because I feel like sometimes we don't need that much intelligence or efficiency See because um yeah notebook can generate like a summary in one minute for a book but it also get rid of your like your your plan to read a book that really resonate with the word. So to me um I already getting back to this trend. Uh so I think like everyone feel like uh like more effect like imperfect or more raw is better but just like the answer is like how how we really want to blend that human uh intelligence into that AI is that through prompt or is that through the model how does that work? So I think it's the fundamental question is like how we really want to make it happen or uh maybe we can have like human to to curate the output or maybe at the beginning we can have model to make it uh looking better. So I think there's a ongoing question um yeah but for me I kind of like already getting back to what I used to to um practice and I feel like it works much better. So awesome like resonates resonates with me so much. I think I'm hearing like human nature and what we believe in. I really think um everything that we do today is about self expression and that that part is so important to every human being. I believe that's what I believe in and using AI can sometimes be very um it could be very um loring to you know just everything output is like really fast and looking really perfect but what is the true voice that you want to deliver and share that's how you connect with real people and that's going to become in the AI days so thanks for sharing all those um those great thoughts and um I just want to add one more thing like this I tal to a a lot of designers on that and one question I asked is what do you think what do you think design is and this one designer told me she thinks design is about taking care of people so it's about relationship and what you feel create that actually makes the other person feel better and taken care of and that answer touches me so much and how design should be in the future same as what you said we can talk about we can like put a simple like uh imperfect by design to talk about that human nature but it's it's the reality is way more than that it's how we thank you for sharing so uh we have a last question for this run and we're going to go into a uh individual round very quick uh this is a fun question uh so fast forward two years what do you think will actually will actually win in green would be people with great taste. We already talked about it. Or people who know how to orchestrate AI tools in Asia really really well like master of AI tools. Um and would you where would you uh like what would you personally bet for your career and um maybe also skills that you think is important for the future?
Um I'll be honest like I can't imagine what will happen in two years considering the speed is developing. Um but I think uh just like how human think approach problems being able to have that level of clarity and thoughts that create is still question that it's so easy to do what you want to produce now the real question why you create
being able to structure that in a clear way to accomplish that goal. I think that was
I think it's useful to think of people as a product. uh looking forward two years I think those who are able to iterate quickly that's imperfect and focusing more on the tools and skills rather than you know in the context of competition rather than winning those who are able to project and have the experience to those and have a learning that they can just on two.
Well, I'm not the best person to get design career advice from, but I can share with you what I see with all the organizations that I work with, which is to Sylvia's question, should we be betting on building up our our taste judgment or should we be building up our skills and managing AI and agents and orchestration? I my answer and what I see in the most successful teams and individuals is actually you have to have both. Um, and the the theme that I'm seeing is that the most successful organizations are actually building teams of generalists. Meaning that if you're a person who tends to steer more on the side of being a taste maker, having those really, really strong opinions and judgment, you still need to be able to have the skills to some degree to be able to execute or at least understand how to execute with the help of AI tools and agents, right? And then on the other hand, if your main job is you're currently the executor or you're using the AI tools and agents, you need to be able to also straddle yourself across vision, across tastes, develop more opinion. And because these tools enable you to be more efficient with your work, you actually have more time to think about things like that. I would actually ask also add a third dimension, you know, from what I'm seeing as well. You know, in growth, I I started today's conversation by saying that my relationship with design is, you know, one that's imbued with a lot of data. I do think that data has to be third dimension because a lot of times the work that AI agents and AI is outputting for us we need to be able to validate whether or not that's actually working and you know we can tell ourselves like this is this is good right oftent times pacemakers do that we say we decide this is what good is but when you actually put it out there we have to see whether or not the data tells us that customers are reacting people are actually enjoying it reacting positively to it in whatever way that you imagine and intended so I think you know sort of this trifecta Um this ideal vision that I have is that you know the designers the creatives that we work with are a combination of people who have tastes who can orchestrate work with AI agents and can also use and understand that data to help iterate and continue to improve. Um so I have the similar feeling the same thing for sure like it not like people should have both taste and and the reactions. So um some of you you asked the second question about career right? So I want to talk about yeah talk about that one. Um so there are several things. First one is as I mentioned earlier like build something. So the goal for me this year is like to actually uh really have some like app in app store. So I'm working on that. So uh I think it's super fun for me to really understand from the end to end. So previously I can only design things but for now uh with tools I can also like try to learn like coding and really to deploy like my app to the app store. This is so surprising and it's really fulfilling uh for me. I've never experienced that before. So that's my goal like to really uh build s projects like uh you don't you doesn't have to in into like startup but you can have your job uh in the on your personal time. You can build something just for fun. You can make it for fun or you can even make money. I have friends like who um quit his job and become a like independent developer and he earns a lot of money just by subscription. That's also another way of living. if you you're interested in that. Another one I think is super important is like building personal IP. Uh because I I'm also a content creator and I I can see how important it is nowadays even that before because a lot of people they build products but the really problem is like how to get distribution how to let others know you have a product and to use. So, and I noticed like some like uh influencers they build products, they can get much easier way to to build their products and they can get it initiated really quick. So, um that's something I learned like um build something or even create a lot of content or something try like build your voice in the public. I think that's um super important this area as well. Awesome. So, sounds like taste is also taste and the ability to use both importance and I guess to look like if you're using a design agent, you can save your time do for doing the so you can have more time to do the coding by puting in more things, right? And to send this point, it's a lot of time taste is actually a lot of times is very subjective even though um there are you know certain people that's like trying to define it like there's apple taste, emotion taste, whatever but I think this is an area where um it talks about how people feel. So um so data that's essentially you know how everyone's reacting to whatever. So very very very great idea for us to think about and all right so we have a individual round and I'm going to try to be quicker on this one so we can have more time for questions and uh first one Sandy um question for you. So when creative becomes um actually when creative becomes um less expensive and actually cheap and abundant um sometimes something else becomes the bottleneck. From your experience so far what constraints or challenge has AIdriven design introduced to your growth?
That's a really good question and actually a theme that some of the other panelists touched on which is now that we have the powers of AI at our fingertips in the work that I do in growth it's very crossunctional general we touch design we touch creative we training we touch uh we ads we touch product etc etc and one of the questions that we have to honestly answer is you know what is worth doing because if you've ever been in a room with a growth person and you're brainstorming what a road map looks like you basically have a list of initiatives maybe a hundred or so then the next task is how do you prioritize it how do you impact size it etc what's really hard and what I see a lot of teams grow teams making the mistake of doing these days is saying that okay we can have infinite access uh to creative it's virtually costless for us to do so so let's spin up you know 20 variants of ad creatives and let's test them all or for SEO pages let's you know spin out a thousand landing pages all at once without really being intent entional about whether or not for example SEO is even the best growth strategy for yourself or whether or not all of those different ad creatives are worth testing because they're reasonable hypotheses around whether or not this is the right positioning for your audiences. So I think in some ways you have to be careful because AI can actually make us busy for no reason, no good reason at all. And I think that's one of the challenges that a lot of you know people in broker are going to have to reckon with as they're extending their creative powers across design videos etc. And then also how basically how to de developing that judgment and having that strategy rather than just trusting everything that's filtered by AI. So very very important. Thank you Sandy. And let's start with Mark. Um, what do you see like because you work with a lot of Sorry, Maddie. I'm so sorry. You work with so many creators and you probably uh working with more and more for your forward awards. Um, uh, what do you see creators doing today that actually builds audience trust beyond just producing more content or better remixes?
It's probably um like how do you think originality is evolving? So I think people often fixate on the visuals because you can make these amazing amazing cinematic shots. Often times people they're rolling the dice and they get this this shot that looks like it's out of Transformers and then the whole film around that one shot. I think what I've seen and what I think is is needed to get them to the next level is about sound design, thinking about editing and piecing which are I wouldn't say necessarily trust building, but it's these ways to make that experience much more
breaks. I think all watch movies, we've all watched TV shows and you know when you see something that's off, it really kills it. some of these these AI soft videos that go really viral um you can tell that they're AI for a reason, but I think that most successful are it doesn't matter if it's or not. It's just a great story. It's great
for all those.
Thank you. Um last question for P and Yan. Um so, when you start scaling AI assist design workflows across the larger organization uh what tensions or trade-offs show up first or what are the things that first uh start bringing
um I think actually to scale it in in the organization to me it's not about the technical part or how to learn the tools tools It's more about the mindset. I think we're in this paradigm shift. Uh people probably need to redefine their role or I've been trained in this way for 10 20 years industrially involved to highly divided and well defined occupation. Um and this type of um um mentality that fixed to this is what I do.
this is the film of this that's my um can can start to diminish. So I think the mindsets to encourage people um embrace explore and just try and see.
Oh yeah to me um to scale AI across big companies like uh I think the biggest challenge is alignment. So yeah our team has recently like really actively learning AI and you can you can immediately understand like how people learn things differently. Someone can build something overnight. Someone you know give up at the setting up. So it's like really takes us a lot of uh time and effort to make sure everyone really understand especially like for designers um we are intimidating by the coding interface. So a very fun experience very fun example like we have been learning cloud code recently and um uh yeah people you might know that cloud code starts from terminal which is such a normal place for designers for engineers probably you guys are so familiar with terminal but we have never used terminal before and my design design like team oh my god it's so hard I don't want to try that why we need like that so um I think the the thing is for the big companies like you really have to understand people have different levels of understanding uh and how to probably give them more motivation to get started because a lot of them still feel like working on Figma is pretty good. Why should we work uh like try the new stuff that is so hard? So really show the value and and also um we some like challenges or hacks on uh just get people like more I think that's that's really important as well. Um I wanted to just quickly add home what said happening in larger organizations actually
if Maddie and Sandy agree all trying to like cross the boundaries and trying to like build and shift I think I just noticed that they're very contra about um understanding people have different level knowledge level of knowledge about different
I think that's like something that I feel like we don't talk about as much. I I still believe in that like design work there because they love doing it.
The idea for marketers probably focus on how. So I I really think the future very diverse. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. So, we are actually a little low over time, but I still want to see if there are questions from the audience. Um, we can do
Thank you for the panel. Uh, we're here. Um, this is a great talk and I really enjoy it. When you are growing your team, hiring your next designers, hiring your next course hackers to your team, what is the definitely this generation of talent is very different from last generation, right? What are the skills or experience that really oh this actually this person know the new generation? What is the red flag? Okay, because of this behavior not work in this environment. So what is that why you're hiring and working on teams? either
way. I can go. Uh I actually last week I read a article on my social media and the topics like uh AI era is the best time for movies. Um just consider similar like uh web can use like iPhone to take photos. Like many years ago people have to learn how to use camera but with iPhone everyone can take photos. It's the same thing like you can really easily find out that a lot of like uh we talk like silver young people like maybe Chinese they can do even better than a lot of senior people. So I think uh AI has really u make that gap like shorten that gap uh for that years of experiences. So um that being a side I think it's so important for people to really have that um embrace the new ways of thinking the website and also uh playing tools is definitely important. So uh I recently interview a bunch of like and someone can really showcase uh strong protecting tools really stands out and doesn't need like years of experience just like the way how you think a product should go and it can really even like matters more than like for people who have many years of experiences. So I think it's u it's a better it's a really good time for for young people and for everyone who just want to get started. Um so that's why I risk like
young people
I mean like even your graduate like yeah they can sometimes they can even do better than auto
I think the next generation of talents um like I like I'm really looking for two things one is passion session. Um they're god driven. They have this inquisitive way of learning. Um and then two is ability to learn and update. It's almost like a metal skill. Whatever you learn today will be outdated very soon.
else.
Yeah, I have a question kind of corresponding to and pen's uh previous comment. Um so I think yeah mentioned like design sq code engineers can design and then I think a pound also mentioned in the well definfined content go recent I mean like that's been established for 10 20 years um has been changing so my question is um how do you see the existing corporation structure could change or or any or how could product designers possibly reposition us in your future.
Yeah, I I can't I can't predict how the organization will evolve, but I think uh like the status quo has been here for a reason.
So document the projects that people develop And the biggest takeaway, one of the biggest takeaway um is like adding more people to the project is not necessarily because you're increasing exponentially cost like my day job like at a zoom we almost zoom is not the purpose of company is not to have you having more meetings. is actually help you make those meetings they're trying to remove all the friction during a communication and I think AI can play a really huge role in such part uh we all heard about like there'll be very soon like one man people company um maybe we don't know but for like average company like the communication
else I think it's really hard question and I think corporate will will also I mean experience that revolution pretty soon u I don't want to mention layoff because there always lay off happening and there's always talking about like oh should AI replace things like that so um I can see this trend to be frank so It it is happening. It is happening. But how we better position ourselves is like um yeah it's like something we have mentioned many times like tools man but another things like if you never really rely on one company that's my that's my take like uh feel something for yourself like think about if you leave this company what what do you can still stand for like what else you can still show. Um I think that's that's the biggest part for for everyone like in this uh Korea life u because nothing is stable at the moment and things changing too much just really prepare yourself and and have more diversified way of living um side job project or anything content like to make sure that you are fully prepared for. So start a side project.
Are there any more questions?
Okay. Can hear now. Um I'm going to try to try to sort of encapsulate this. So based on the collective experience of the are there any sort of roles that look like they no longer make any sense.
And I say that because I remember historically that
do you see any sort of roles that are beginning to sort of less
and perhaps the necessity a new role that fully encompasses the power.
So like maybe before would be a sales executive but now be like
I think anyone related to like basic organization of information or extracting information searching transform them into different data type like those will become relevant. Um and because like I had this idea of like AI become a huge competitor like data format become anything.
So I think like operating information at a basic level what it
I don't have too much more to add except to share that what I'm seeing right now is that roles aren't necessarily being entirely eliminated so to speak but more so that the roles are evolving one, you know, very striking example in some of the operations that I've seen and growth at least in relates to content perhaps, you know, a lot of the work that I used to do was working with companies to, you know, scale up their their SEO, right? And that involved oftentimes either hiring or outsourcing basically to a staff of 10 plus writers especially if you're company that's publishing you know 50 to 100 SEO and that business model is essentially you pay per article and there's just a lot of humans involved in the process the person who writes the draft the final editor the person who kind of adds in more of the product expertise etc. So just a lot of you know human intervention there. But I think more so if I kind of take a step back and look at the patterns there. I think the tasks that are repetitive and kind of have this freaky process AI provides this potential to essentially automate away andor you know apply agents because those pattern patterns are easier to configure into these agents and easier to explain and teach the agents whereas the higher complexity tasks where there's a lot more human communication discussion andor just you know a little bit more input tends to be harder to just delegate away to agents and so you know maybe Sorry, this is not directly answer your question, but roles are evolving and perhaps the the types of work that we're, you know, essentially going to automate away are going to be the ones that are a little bit more.
Just want to quickly add I think um not just roles are evolving but also organizations are evolving. Um it's not like there's you know two being eliminated. I believe there's going to be is coming up but for people to um to be creative and to invent what's going to be meaningful. So um if you like get your hands dirty and talk to people there a lot of a lot of startups right now uh similar to 15 years ago you are trying to reshift the paradigm so I think there's new opportunities and ways to like to build new skills fitting into the so I just recommend like keep keep your heads up and um looking looking around look around and see what's on So um thank you so much. Um this is um for the panel and um thank you for everyone to um be so patient and and thank you all the panelists to share all this great perspectives and we gonna maybe take a quick couple minutes break. There's a uh by the way rest that way u we have Wi-Fi here and if you haven't uh added your u created your local account um make sure you do that. I'm gonna uh maybe we'll come back. Well, actually, we're gonna do photos together um before everyone uh gets up and then we uh we'll take a couple minutes break and come back maybe by uh 7:40 and then I will do a live demo of art. I really want to show you guys what we can do and then we'll switch into books and design. Thank you so much for uh for like um still with us. And uh can we get some
360
Just can everyone look here for like look look at this same for like three seconds. So how does it work? Just everyone look. Yeah. Just look here. Just look here. I just need five seconds of attention. Okay. Just look here for three seconds. Don't move. Three, two, one. It will be a video later and then let's do one more. Let's do one more maybe. Yeah, maybe people on this row, can you just Oh, go over there. Yeah, if you want to be in the picture, just go move behind me. Yeah, move behind me.
Yeah, that's good. That's good. Everybody is So, everyone turn around. Yeah, turn around. Turn around if you want me to capture your face. If you don't want me to fat your face, you don't need to turn around. Okay, just look here. So, I'll be like it's the same same deal, same drill. Okay, just count down from three. Three, two, one. Okay. And then I'll just take a regular one. Use my iPhone. Yeah. So, anyone everyone who want to take picture with me, go just Yeah. Just go to the front by the Oh, okay. Sure.
