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What does it mean to spend our time well?
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I spend a lot of my time
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thinking about how to spend my time.
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Probably too much.
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I probably obsess over it --
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my friends think I do.
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But I feel like I kind of have to,
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because these days,
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it feels like little bits of my time
kind of slip away from me,
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and when that happens,
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it feels like parts of my life
are slipping away.
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Specifically,
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it feels like little bits of my time get
slipped away to various things like this.
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Like technology --
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I check things --
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I'll give you an example.
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If this email shows up --
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how many of you have gotten
an email like this, right?
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I've been tagged in a photo.
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When this appears,
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I can't help but click on it right now.
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Right?
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Because what if it's a bad photo?
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So I have to click it right now.
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But I'm not just going
to click "See photo,"
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what I'm actually going to do
is spend the next 20 minutes.
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(Laughter)
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But the worst part
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is that I know that this
is what's going to happen,
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and even knowing that that's
what's going to happen
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doesn't stop me from
doing it again the next time.
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Or I find myself
in a situation like this ...
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where I check my email
and I pull down to refresh,
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right?
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But the thing is that 60 seconds later,
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I'll pull down to refresh again.
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Like, why am I doing this?
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This doesn't make any sense.
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But I'll give you a hint
why this is happening.
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What do you think makes more
money in the United States
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than movies, game parks
and baseball combined?
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Slot machines.
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How can slot machines make all this money
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when we play with such small
amounts of money?
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We play with coins.
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How is this possible?
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Well, the thing is ...
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my phone is a slot machine.
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Every time I check my phone,
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I'm playing the slot machine to see,
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what am I going to get?
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What am I going to get?
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Every time I check my email,
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I'm playing the slot machine
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[to say], "What am I going to get?"
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Every time I scroll a news feed,
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I'm playing the slot machine to see,
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what am I going to get next?
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Right?
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And the thing is
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that again knowing
exactly how this works --
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and I'm a designer,
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I know exactly how
the psychology of this works,
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I know exactly what's going on --
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but it doesn't leave me with any choice,
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I still just get sucked into it.
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So what are we going to do?
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Because it leaves us
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with this all or nothing relationship
with technology, right?
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You're either on,
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and your connected
and distracted all the time,
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or you're off,
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but then you're wondering,
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am I missing something important?
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In other words,
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you're either distracted
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or you have Fear of Missing Out,
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right?
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So we need to restore choice.
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We want to have
a relationship with technology
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that gives us back choice
about how we spend time with it,
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and we're going to need
help from designers
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because knowing this stuff doesn't help.
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We're going to need design help,
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so what would that look like?
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So let's take an example that we all face:
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chat --
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text messaging.
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So let's say there's two people.
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Nancy's on the left and she's
working on a document,
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and John's on the right.
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And John suddenly remembers,
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"I need to ask Nancy for
that document before I forget!"
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Right?
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So when he sends her that message,
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it blows away her attention.
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Right?
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And that's what we're doing all the time,
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we're bulldozing each other's
attention left and right.
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And there's serious cost to this,
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because every time
we interrupt each other ...
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it's takes us about 23 minutes on average
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to refocus our attention.
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We actually cycle through
two different projects
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before we come back
to the original thing we were doing.
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This is Gloria Mark's research
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combined with Microsoft's
research that showed this.
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And her research also shows
that it actually trains bad habits.
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The more interruptions we get externally,
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it's conditioning and training us
to interrupt ourselves.
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We actually self-interrupt
every three and a half minutes.
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This is crazy,
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so how to fix this?
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Because Nancy and John are in this
all-or-nothing relationship.
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Nancy might want to disconnect,
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but then she'd be worried --
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what if I'm missing something important?
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So design can fix this problem.
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Let's say you have
Nancy again on the left,
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John on the right,
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and John remembers,
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"I need to send Nancy that document,"
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except this time,
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Nancy can mark that she's focused.
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Let's say she drags a slider and says,
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"I want to be focused for 30 minutes,"
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so "bam," she's focused.
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Now when John wants the message her,
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he can get the thought off of his mind --
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because he has a need, right?
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He has this thought
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and he needs to dump it out
before he forgets,
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except this time
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it holds the messages so
that Nancy can still focus
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but John can get the thought
off of his mind, right?
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But this only works
if one last thing is true,
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which is that Nancy needs to know
that if something is truly important
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that John can still interrupt.
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But instead of having constant
accidental or mindless interruptions,
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we're now only creating
conscious interruptions,
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right?
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So we're doing two things here.
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We're creating a new choice
for both Nancy and John,
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but there's second, subtle thing
we're doing here, too.
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And that's that we're changing
the question that we're answering.
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Instead of the goal of chat
being let's design it
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so that it's easy to send a message --
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that's the goal of chat,
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it should be really easy to send
a message to someone --
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we change the goal to something
deeper and a human value,
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which is let's create the highest
possible quality communication
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and relationship between two people.
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So we upgraded the goal.
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Now, do designers
actually care about this?
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Do we want to have conversations
about what these deeper human goals are?
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Well I'll tell you one story
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which is about a year ago,
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a little over a year ago,
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I got to help organize a meeting
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between some of technology's
leading designers and Thich Nhat Han.
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Thich Nhat Hanh is an international
spokesperson for mindfulness meditation,
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and it was the most amazing meeting.
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You have to imagine --
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picture a room --
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on one side of the room you have
a bunch of tech geeks;
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on the other side of the room,
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you have a bunch of long brown robes,
shaved heads, Buddhist monks.
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And the questions were about
the deepest human values,
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like what does the future
of technology look like
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when you're designing
for the deepest questions
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and the deepest human values?
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And our conversation centered on listening
more deeply to what those values might be.
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He joked in our conversation
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that what if instead of a spell check
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you had a compassion check?
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Meaning you might highlight a word
that might be accidentally abrasive --
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perceived as abrasive by someone else.
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So does this kind of conversation
happen in the real world,
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not just in these design meetings?
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Well the answer is yes,
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and one of my favorites is Couchsurfing.
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If you didn't know,
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Couchsurfing is a website
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that matches people who are looking
for a place to stay with a free couch,
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from someone who's trying to offer it.
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So, great service --
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what would there design goal be?
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What are you designing for
if you work at Couchsurfing?
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Well you would think
it's to match guests with hosts.
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Right?
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That's a pretty good goal.
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But that would kind of be like
our goal with messaging before,
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where we're just trying
to deliver a mesasge.
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So what's the deeper, human goal?
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Well, they set their goal
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as the need to create lasting, positive
experiences and relationships
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between people who have never met before.
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And the most amazing thing about this
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was in 2007,
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they introduced a way to measure this,
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which is incredible.
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I'll tell you how it works.
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Every design goal that you have,
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you have to have a corresponding
measurement to know how you're doing --
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a way of measuring success.
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So what they do
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is let's say you take
two people who meet up
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and they take the number of days
those two people spent together,
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right?
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And then they estimate how many
hours were in those days.
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How many hours did those two
people spend together?
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And then after they
spend that time together,
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they ask both of them:
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how positive was your experience?
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Did you have a good experience
with this person that you met?
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And they subtract
form those positive hours
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the amount of time
people spent on the website,
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because that's a cost to people's lives.
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Why should we value that as success?
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And what you were left with
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is something they refer to as net
"Orchestrated Conviviality,"
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or really just a net "Good Times" created.
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The net hours that would have never
existed had Couchsurfing not existed.
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Can you imagine how inspiring it would be
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to come to work every day
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and measure your success
in the actual net new contribution
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of hours in people's lives
that are positive,
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that would have never existed
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if you didn't do what you were
about to do at work today?
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Can you imagine a whole world
that worked this way?
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Can you imagine a social network that --
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let's you care about cooking
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and it measured its success
in terms of cooking nights organized
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and the cooking articles
that you were glad you read,
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and subtracted from that the articles
you weren't glad you read
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or the time you spent scrolling
that you didn't like.
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Imagine a professional social network,
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that instead of measuring its success
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in terms of connections created
or messages sent,
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instead measured its success in terms
of the job offers that people got
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that they were excited to get.
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Right?
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And subtracted the amount of time
people spent on the website.
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Or imagine dating services,
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like maybe Tinder or something,
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where instead of measuring the number
of swipes left and right people did,
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which is how they measure success today,
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and instead measured
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the deep, romantic, fulfilling
connections people created --
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whatever that was for them, by the way.
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But can you imagine a whole world
that worked this way,
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that was helping you spend your time well?
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Now to do this you also need a new system,
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because you're probably thinking,
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today's Internet economy --
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today's economy in general --
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is measured in time spent.
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The more users you have,
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the more usage you have,
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the more time people spend,
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that's how we measure success.
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But we've solved this problem before.
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We solved it with organic,
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when we said we need
to value things a different way.
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We said this is a different kind of food.
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So we can't compare it
just based on price;
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this is a different category of food.
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We solved it with Leed Certification,
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where we said this is
a different kind of building
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that stood for different values
of environmental sustainability.
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What if we had something
like that for technology?
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What if we had something whose
entire purpose and goal
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was to help create net new positive
contributions to human life?
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And what if we could
value it a different way,
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so it would actually work?
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Imagine you gave this different
premium shelf space on app stores.
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Imagine you had web browsers
that helped route you
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to these kinds of design products.
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Right?
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Can you imagine how exciting it would be
to live and create that world?
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We can create this world today.
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Company leaders,
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all you have to do --
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only you can prioritize a new metric,
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which is your metric for net positive
contribution to human life.
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And have an honest
conversation about that.
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Maybe you're not
doing so well to start with,
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but let's start that conversation.
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Designers,
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you can redefine success,
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you can redefine design.
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Arguably, you have more power
than many people in your organization
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to create the choices
that all of us live by.
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Maybe like in medicine,
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where we have a Hippocratic oath
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to recognize the responsibilty
and this higher value
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that we have to treat patients,
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what if designers had something like that
in terms of this new kind of design?
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And users,
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for all of us,
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we can demand technology
that works this way.
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Now it may seem hard,
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but McDonald's didn't have salads
until the consumer demand was there.
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Walmart didn't have organic food
until the consumer demand was there.
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We have to demand
this new kind of technology.
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And we can do that.
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And doing that
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would amount to shifting
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from a world that's driven and run
entirely on time spent ...
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to world that's driven by time well spent.
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I want to live in this world
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and I want this conversation to happen.
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Let's start that conversation now.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)