The story of the Design Thinking w/Joy Mountford

About the Episode

It's my absolute pleasure and privilege today to host one and only Joy Mountford. She is one of the women pioneers of technology. She began her career in the human-computer interface at Honeywell, designing user interfaces for military avionics systems. She has been designing interfaces for over twenty years in applications ranging from aircraft to personal computers, consumer devices, and music systems. Some of you may know the products she built when she joined Apple Computer.

At Apple, she managed the Human Interface Group and worked towards extending the user interface beyond the desktop application. Her research turned to audio and speech interfaces, 3-D design tasks, hand-held players, and multimedia systems. The Human Interface Group was involved with the evolution of QuickTime, Navigable Scenes, Bubble Help, AppleSearch, Macintosh Finder, uses of color and information filters, and portable devices. Joy is an internationally recognized leader in user-centered interaction design. She focuses on enabling technology for artists in music, theatre, the visual arts, and movie making. Her collaborative art and technology work uses new generative data visualization techniques. It includes diverse data sources such as air traffic patterns over North America and bursts of mobile phone usage on New Year’s Day. She is a pioneer of technology and one of the key influencers who defined design thinking and user experience today.

Some questions we discussed:

• As a pioneer in your field, how did your journey begin that led you to explore the human-computer interface? What led you to explore this field?
• As the builders of the future, we are told that what we invest our time in today creates what's next for the children of tomorrow. What is the number 1 thing that today's design thinkers think about differently, and what are some things that may lead to bad experiences?
• This is more of an open-ended question. As robots and software continue to interact with humans, such as pizza shops that automatically create pizza, restaurants without servers, self-driving cars, and pilots, human-to-human interaction is replaced for efficiency, consistency, and less interactivity. As humanity continues to find ways to boost Customer Experience (CX) with automation, what's the future that's waiting for us? Do people want consistency and efficiency over interactivity at all costs? And how can the young generations shape the future of work for a better experience for all? What are your thoughts?