We are more powerful than we think | Steve Vranakis, Google Creative Lab | OnBrand '17

[Music] incredibly honored to be here I loved Jays talk and from a philosophical point of view mine is not dissimilar it's slightly different we work for very different companies but it's incredible when you see how aligned we are sometimes because I think the more people who are thinking this way obviously the better for everyone so I want to talk to you at tiny bit about this sort of thing I wrote that I think about but I can't imagine it's not the same sort of thing that you often think about and it's this idea as creative people and I'm not talking about people in a creative department I'm talking about people in the creative business and the power that we yield and when I talk about power I mean the capability for us to do incredible things for our clients for their businesses for ourselves but then for everything else that's going on in the world right now that really needs our help so I want to talk a tiny bit about my team because again like one of the things I'm really conscious of is when you do these talks I don't want to come up here and tell a bunch of people how to do things I want people to hear about how I've approached them with my arrangement and my resources but I also want people to get an understanding that I have just as much sort of scrappiness in my team as you probably do in your teams you know people I remember somebody we've worked on a project together and they said oh can we come and visit the lab in London and I said you could come to the visit the lab and we had just done this big VR thing and I'll show you a bit of it and she came in and I remember when I took her in the lab the utter disappointment of what the lab actually looked like which was it just a bunch of people and a bunch of desks and you know bit of hacking space that sort of thing but it wasn't anything other than a collection of really interesting people who had the desire to do big things and instill change so we are this this sort of an arrangement this sort of a structure designers coder Maker's as I said we don't use the word creatives because I only hire creative people so if you were doing things strategically you are a creative person you're inherently creative if you were trying to run the business from an operational perspective you are creative person and and what we try to do is we try to rethink things and yeah invent the future very difficult I was asked on the back of that to write something one time that was as close as I could ever get to a mission statement and it's kind of silly and it's a bit ridiculous but there are a couple of words in there that I hold dear and I use as a bit of a filter when we're working on projects and and we look at the approach that we want to take and the idea of this ragtag group that I just showed you that that group of people from all different backgrounds and disciplines and and we talked a lot about diversity and and I've been fortunate enough to take up the presidency a Deen ad this year and if you get a minute we read something I penned it's a thing about diversity and it comes at it from a creative perspective and I talk very much about what happens in my group when you bring a bunch of people from different backgrounds and different skill sets and different socio-economic sort of backgrounds along with ethnicities and cultural reference points you create these incredible creative collisions right this ragtag this ragtag group and and I call us vagabonds but fundamentally at the heart of that is the sense of idealism and I think idealism is a good thing I think to be idealistic and and if you channel that in the right way you can do pretty amazing things this is just a process thing and again I like to leave people with how we do things whenever we come up with an idea we take the the the thought no big idea no creative expression whatever we take the thought that drives the idea and we write it in one line and we put it on a poster and then we have a wall of work and now the wall of work has the posters and they have a line on them and you walk to it and you either get it or you don't get it if you don't get it we start over again from there we rapidly prototype within a week we'll do a sprint and we'll make something it might be a site it might be a mobile app it might be some sort of a voice you wax type thing on a piece of our hardware will probably create a film we do a lot of film work because I still think film is an incredibly important and emotive way of bringing an idea to life but we're making and I think again idle hands you know the expression I mean we're making all the time and and when people are busy in our instance they're very happy I'm gonna show you some work as well so I just want to fly through this and then lastly know the user know the magic connected to that is our mantra that's what we do having a deep understanding of people and I'm not talking about you know much like Jay said it's not not even from a research and targeting perspective there are a bunch of people that occupied this incredible place we call planet earth and some have kids some have mortgages some struggle to get to work some have to walk 10 miles to get clean water we have to understand the world that we live in we have to step outside the world that we live in and when you understand the user that's an incredibly important thing and then understanding the magic in whatever you do understanding the product mad at magic for us we were very fortunate we do some really really amazing interesting things that go on to have a massive impact one of the one of the examples I use is I grew up in Vancouver in in Canada nobody here from Vancouver in Canada and usually there's one rowdy person who throws something at me or something but I remember when I first moved to the UK at the time Google Earth was you know the big thing that you know I was using a log and I remember downloading at the time Google Earth and typing in the address that I grew up in in Vancouver where I used to play street hockey you know outside this little home on the east side and I remember seeing the globe spin and crash zoom into the neighborhood that I grew up in and they got it was incredibly emotional you know I was miles away and I missed home and technology allowed me to create this incredible connection with the place that I came from and that was magic that was product magic it wasn't functionality it wasn't feature set it was the magic within the product and the story that allowed me to connect with and this is why we do it and I think that you could probably take the word Google and put your brand or your company there as well and this idea of reminding the world what they love about your company and as I said I think I'm in a fortunate position we do some amazing things and I try to tell people about it and the stuff I want to show you today is stuff that I don't think you'll have seen because I think that we try to have this humble stance where we do things because they're the right thing but I think it's it's also equally important to show you that we do these things as a company if for anything they encourage other people to do them as well so these are some of the things that I've worked on in the in the last little while and they all have okay ours and kpi's and all that sort of stuff and I'm held you know accountable from a commercial perspective I'm gonna just show you very quickly what they are and then I'm gonna talk to you about what I really want to talk to you about this is something that you may have seen this was a project that we developed a couple of years ago called project jacquard project jacquard is this tech platform where we took a conductive piece of thread we wove it into a grid like structure to create a capacitive surface that when you weave it into clothing you have touchscreen clothing it's this first step to the invisible interface it's kind of making wearable technology wearable and why you may have seen it is it just launched with our first partner Levi's well we've done a jacket called the commuter jacket for cyclists that allow them to pair their jacket with a phone and then make calls dismissed calls use it to navigate all these sorts of things whilst keeping their eyes on the road and it's pretty cool a second thing we did last year a lot of VR stuff going on a lot of AR stuff going on and I'm a massive fan I'm always trying to find the reason for these things probably like yourselves we did something with the Museum in Berlin and the Natural History Museum in London where we thought and it's it's probably the most obvious thing in the world wouldn't it be cool if you were a kid standing in the Natural History Museum in front of that giant fossil skeletal structure and you put on a pair of Google cardboard and the and the fossil came to life and became a dinosaur and it walked over you all over you and you had to duck as his tail swept over you and we did that so you can see all this stuff on YouTube and it was pretty cool and the last thing and there's a lot of development in the space we did was we created a product so we also do some hardware and the product is called project blocks and it's a system based on tangible computing that alone that allows kids to use physical blocks to learn how to code our whole thing was everybody's everyone's talking about kids lean need to learn how to code and I had a longer age but we thought could you do this without getting them onto screens there are things like Lego that sort of thing that kids play with at a very early age could you take that physical form factor and then take some of the methodology around and maybe some of the syntax around coding and put it into that physical like structure and that's what we did again you can see all this stuff online but what I really want to talk about is a lot of the work that we're doing that is very much around what we believe and we have this idea of believing that technology should be for everyone and that when you give technology to people and you the barriers that that prohibit people from doing amazing things they can go on to do amazing things so removing the barriers and providing tech for everyone which allows us to be incredible in terms of the impact that we can go on to make as creative people so this is sort of a midlife epiphany I had after almost 25 years in advertising design digital as I said I grew up on the east side in Vancouver I grew up to working-class parents in a working-class neighborhood my dad was a laborer this is important because I didn't have much but tech and when I got connected to tech was indiscriminate like the screen didn't look back at me and say hey you're not from there and you don't do that thing and you didn't go to that school it kind of said when you get onto this thing it's up to you what you're gonna do with that and that's why we really believe we've got to get phones to people we've got to get Wi-Fi to people all these sorts of things because it helps people out and to use technology to empower others who have less exactly registers another one of my sort of things after after doing a lot of a lot of work a lot of campaign work everything mascots have done everything and I'm incredibly proud of it it's is why I'm here today but I think again very early on in my career as a creative person the big focus was on just selling and like Jay said there's nothing wrong with the commercial aspect of running a business that's what we do we run businesses you've got to do that and it there's nothing wrong with selling because people need to buy stuff but to do it with a conscience and to do it without damaging the things around us and also to do it and again like the storytelling thing which is again very very overused these days we do it with a sense of empathy and understanding and to acknowledge that people aren't just commercial transactions and these are sort of the things that I I started thinking about and and as I said that we are capable of doing more and why are we capable of doing more because we have two things and again some of you may go he's just saying these things because he a creative person but I think the skills okay that we demonstrate every day with our clients whereby we take complicated problems I mean really complicated problems and the way we deconstruct them and we find ways in and we create these worlds and we create these positionings and all these sorts of things that problem-solving set of skills combined with how we go on to articulate that and how we make it incredibly interesting for people that combination of the two makes us us incredibly well positioned people to tackle even bigger meteor problems alongside what we're doing on a day to day basis again these are my these are my thoughts and lastly before we go into it this is something that comes from the leadership at Google which is you know and I see the law and I've often thought about and people around me are doing it which is I did I let I did a whole you know lifetime of advertising whatever and now I'm going to stop and do good right I'm gonna join an NGO where I'm gonna join a charity and and how do you actually not do that and actually do it habitually on a day-to-day basis how do you make it part of your everyday routine and everyday job is is what I've asked you and and one of the things I think about as planes are flying over the sugar factory because I believe problem-solving storytelling puts us in a unique position dare I say I call us creative activists so I'll talk to you about three projects that I'll show some films and some imagery and the first one is an installation that we built at the United Nations where the world leaders were coming together to talk about all these global issues in the General Assembly and then there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids around the world who have things to say to them and will never be granted an audience to be able to tell their elected representatives what is going on in the country in the village in the place that they're living in the lack of sanitation schools you know domestic abuse all these sorts of things that are happening around the world and they can't actually tell these people you got it you got to help with these things okay the second thing is something that we built and this is again and I hope you believe me on all this or stuff the same team that does the VR dinosaurs and all that was asked to use our problem-solving skills and creativity to go over to one of the Greek islands in 2015 at the height of the refugee crisis and build an application for the you know the people fleeing civil war in Syria that would help them find safety in camps help them find how to register and seek asylum how to find medical services how to communicate with their relatives back home and that's something that we built that I'm incredibly proud of and then lastly a program that we worked with with the team in India which is an incredible program whereby we're teaching women in rural villages about using the internet and then equipping them with bicycles and then mobile phones and tablets on the back of the bicycles and because the villages are so spread out hundreds of miles apart in India they literally ride from village to village and they teach women in these rural villages most of which are many of which could be illiterate how to use the Internet to help build build a better future for themselves in their family so one of the ways that we do this is something that is a mid Lee stole from our friends at Google X which is the approach that they take to all these moon shots that they do so when they do Wi-Fi balloons like Project loon or when they when they were doing the self-driving vehicle before it became way mo they follow this this three-point methodology and it goes like this so they identify a big problem so if we use the example of the self-driving car I think they identified the volume of accidents that were happening on roads across America across the world big problem a lot of people were being injured some were being killed on road accidents radical solution is the second thing that they're looking for so when they're thinking about how to how to address road safety and accidents you might think you know lower the speed limit mmm might help but that's not really radical you might think I don't know put another layer of airbags or something inside the vehicle might help a bit but that's not radical etc etc etc but when they were thinking about this thing the thing that they obviously identified which was the cause of the accident was human error so that went on to become well if humans are causing accidents remove humans for pars remove them from the car that's a that's pretty radical remove the human from the car create a self-driving vehicle and Thomas vehicle and then how do you do that and again they're always looking for cutting-edge solutions ok so if you look at the car if you've ever seen some pictures of the way no car now you're seeing this thing spinning at the top you know which is called a lidar which is firing lasers in milliseconds millions of lasers and milliseconds and it's mapping the environment around it to get an understanding of what the landscape looks like that combined with radar which is actually firing off these beams you can see I'm not technically explaining it the best way but it's firing off these other beams which are identifying movement so you have the visual representation you have the movement and then it has a camera as well which is identifying color and graphics on road signs and all of the technology combined is allowing the car to see in 360 degrees okay everything up to I believe three football fields away that's pretty impressive I mean I I think I'm a relatively good driver but that's that's very difficult to do and that's how they do these things so as I said assembly of youth an installation to give youth a voice at the United Nations so I talked about I talked about why we were doing it and I tried to form it in this Google X thing obviously my stuff is much more from a marketing perspective so it's not going to be as sort of epic as soft driving cars but I think that's okay world leaders need to know what issues youth are facing around the world we need to give youth a voice and we have this opportunity when they all came together at the United Nations to to talk about these things amongst themselves so first thing we thought about was we want to create a personification a physical representation of these children because if it's just a screen you have no idea what it is it's something that's trending that day and we wanted to show the diversity of the individuals from around the world but we also wanted to abstract it we didn't want to make it a literal representation because we wanted to make it interesting we positioned it outside of the General Assembly and we wanted a people almost to walk up to it and go wow this looks pretty cool what is this and then to realize oh they're trying to tell me something so we developed these shapes and this is just a Photoshop file and we came up with this color palette and these different shapes and then we created multiple types of arrangements that I'll show you in a second secondly we needed to understand the limitations of the technology so in this instance it a lot of the developing nations where we needed the kids to send their messages from feature phones are still standard so we needed a way of getting text basic text messages sent via the internet to this installation on these screens at the United Nations and these are the sort of things that we needed to tell people you know these things that were troubling these kids and then as I said before we wanted to get we wanted to make it unmissable like we wanted to make it unmissable so we thought well you know what would be kind of cool is what if we actually arranged the kids that represented each country in a scaled-down version of the General Assembly so that actually you would understand where you sit in the real General Assembly and then you would actually see the kid that represents your country so so that was another architectural inside and this is what it looked like so the Assembly of youth and the first big board would pose the question and then in real time from all over the world kids would fire off these messages to their respective screens representing their countries easier so I'll make it sound really easy it was it was difficult this is what it looks these are some photographs of what it looks like and it was launched by banky moon and the head of the of the UNICEF David Beckham there he is and I want to show you the film on the 25th of September 2015 the UN General Assembly of world leaders convened to discuss the global goals a universal set of targets to help people all over the world UNICEF in collaboration with Google saw an opportunity to put disadvantaged and vulnerable children at the heart of their gender using technology they set out to connect the voices of young people to those in power this is the Assembly of youth an installation bringing the voices of rural children from all over the world to the hearts of the United Nations headquarters in New York each figure represented a real child speaking out about what matters to them they were designed and arranged to mirror the whole General Assembly whole symbolizing a newly formed assembly of children representing their individual Nations you report UNICEF social monitoring tool Center series our thought-provoking questions to a network of children and developing nations inviting them to respond for free from any mobile phone even with SMS and have their messages appear in the main entrance of the UN I'm scared of walking home all by myself I want to stay in school so one day I can feed my family we have to leave our homes because of the violence the hopes and needs of rural children were put in front of world leaders as they made their way into the general assembly hall Tina she talks eliminate poverty fight disease improve education UNICEF David Beckham embankment unveiled the Assembly of ease in front of the media and the initiative went on to reach billions of people worldwide is our opportunity to change the future of the world and give every child an equal chance in life by bringing children's voices to the attention of those in power we couldn't empty listen and take steps towards positive change for every child in danger truly given them a voice that could be heard for me I think I think yeah no I what can I say I'm incredibly proud to be able to do these sorts of things and as I said the formula the stuff I showed you at the beginning of the presentation it's the same stuff that we did that we do this the next the next thing I I get really really emotional I get emotional about everything but this is something I get incredibly emotional Bob because I saw it firsthand and at the height of the largest I think they're calling it the largest humanitarian crisis since World War two yeah so I I struggle with this because I until you go there and you see this stuff it's just stuff you see on the television stuff that you read about and then you go there and you think holy shit anyway so I'm gonna try to recompose myself but largest humanitarian crisis since World War two after at the time that I went I was sent by the leadership team at Google they we got together they made a massive financial contribution to the efforts aiding hundreds of NGOs but that wasn't enough they said we have incredible products that help people in day to day lives and there are people who really really really need our help right now we have a mapping product that can help people get to refugee camps we have a phone based telephony based communications based product called hangouts that if you have a decent Wi-Fi connection you can call your friends and family back home and you can tell them that you've arrived safely we have a translation tool that takes disparate language pairings Arabic into German into English into Greek and can help people who have no chance of being able to really communicate in a really traumatic situation speak to each other so and I think why I get emotional again is you know when you see people with their kids and stuff on rafts that were made for 20 people and there's like 60 people and they're coming in and you know your pulley you know people off the beaches and stuff like that it's an incredible you know it's it's just it was so emotional to see and to be part of so when you go there and you're thinking I'm not an NGO I'm not an aid worker I know nothing about this world I I myself am in shock but I have to try to do something with the tech that we have when you sort of compose yourself you you try to do what what you think is right so in this instance as I said so we've seen these types of images before you need to see them firsthand and then you'll I don't know I've made my point but these were the other images that I was saying which were people getting off of boats getting hydrated getting warmth getting their phones out looking for signals okay this was sort of what was my first humanitarian crisis of this was that I have ever seen but it was definitely the first one that I had seen whereby the mobile phone played such a pivotal role in the whole thing so when I was sent out on a fact-finding mission I saw the mobile phones I saw the lack of connectivity on lesbos at the time I saw seven thousand people coming in every day and again remember you're not being you know you know taxied and you're being smuggled in so if you do make it you have no idea where you are you don't even know what I what island you've landed on okay and you're holding kids in your hand phones and kids I mean it was just an incredible experience so we reported back yeah these are some pictures that we took these are people you know literally like buying SIM cards battery packs phones everything during this whole thing energy power battery power you know these yeah I think Jay mentioned or sorry our host mentioned the evolution of man or whatever the chart was that ends up as a developer from the caveman and I saw something recently which was Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you've probably seen it where it had all the traditional stuff and then it had I believe connectivity and then battery power I mean and it was done kind of flippantly and jokingly but the more I saw the more it actually stood true and this is what we did we went over there and as I said we saw that there was a lack of information there were literally people handing out photocopies they were wet they were like you got to go there dial this number somebody might pick up they might not pick up and we saw people with phones and as I said they were looking for signals so we used our problem-solving skills we said there's there's a huge amount of people who don't know where to go and what to do they're the local people from the government or from the NGOs we're completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people and it was an an impart information architecture part connectivity problem that we solved by saying if we provide access to the island and we provide a very light loading mobile information site that tapped into the products that I just mentioned we should be able to provide them with the information they need to get to where they need to go in terms of the camps safely so I I went out there for a few days with a few of my colleagues that night from the hotel we briefed it in to the same team in London the dinosaurs and within 36 hours we had deployed this on the island of Lesbos and I'll let the video kind of say the rest the civil war in Syria has forced millions to flee their homes causing the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War in the summer of 2015 up to 7,000 refugees were arriving on the Greek islands every day often with just the necessities legal documents and mobile phones they landed not knowing exactly where they were what to do nor where to go next they needed information to ensure their safety and security but much of the information available was inaccurate out-of-date or in a language they did not understand that's why the International Rescue Committee Mercy Corps and Google created refugee info hub a mobile site for NGOs to give refugees accurate and up-to-date information it's powered by Google Docs at all NGOs are familiar with to make it easy to update with vital information as quickly as possible information like how to register and seek asylum how to get to refugee camps maps medical resources and anything else they might need all in their native language the site was designed to load quickly and in white on black to preserve battery we let refugees know about the site through posters banners stickers Wi-Fi landing pages and volunteers the site was created in only 36 hours and launched in lesbos within four months it was being used in 18 locations across Europe by more than 30 NGOs and Counting because it was built in a simple way NGOs can deploy an update it quickly and easily in any future crisis [Music] [Applause] so so as I said like I just want to keep reinforcing like I don't have well I tell my team were super human and and we do these incredible things too much Cuba motivated but I have probably the same sort of people that you do and I think we just try to do these things that don't cost a lot of money well that cost nothing we built it in Google Docs you know it was nothing actually and it's just incredibly important it says times up I have one more thing or they've given me a couple more minutes or should i and I could fly through one more if everyone wants to get one more ok I'll fly through it sorry and this is the last thing and I'll just fly through it this is the program that I talked about getting women in rural villages in India on the internet millions of women Rolland in rural India no access to the Internet we want to bring the web to them so that they can learn language they can learn to read they can learn when to take their crops to market they could learn how to download images of garment patterns to be able to make stuff that will give them a better livelihood so how do you create a program that reaches all these people that's scalable because I think fundamentally what we're all about is being scalable should I just fly through so this is what we did I sent a team out we had to get through a massive cultural barrier the cultural barrier was that in a lot of these places it was not maybe deemed important for women to be on the internet so we had to convince people the value of a woman being on the Internet and this is the value that they bring it's not just to themselves it's to their community it's to their family and when you get people comfortable with that fact it's a lot easier and you have to be incredibly respectful of different cultures in the way they think about things so I'm just going to show this film and I will there are over a quarter of a billion people online in India today as the number grows so does the potential of technology to transform their lives [Music] every second three people in India used the internet for the first time but less than a third of them are women and the number is far lower in rural areas for these women access to technology is in the only obstacle there are social and cultural barriers Amara and me papa knew a Kazakh internet safely so Google in collaboration with Tata trusts set out to overcome these challenges and last year piloted the Internet sati program and on the grant initiative where we trained local women to help other women get online these internet ambassadors provide devices with free data to help inspire and educate local people about the possibilities of using the Internet to convince communities of the benefits of women being online we reaffirm their role in society which are centered around helping others like giving their children an education finding medical advice for their families and helping their neighbors make a better living the villagers are often miles apart so we designed specially equipped bikes for saudis to bring the Internet to women in the most remote places today thousands of them are helping create opportunities and change lives so over the next three years we're going to reach 300 thousand villages which is half of the villages in India working with local communities helped us understand that those best place to help women get online were other women and when they can access the internet it's better for everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music]