Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We'll be talking in the next 45 minutes or so about Computational Experience: The New CX. We're super thrilled to be here at the Content Design Conference, especially now that it's online, because not only are we able to reach you hopefully out in North America, but folks around the world as well can watch this later asynchronously, no matter their time zone. So as we introduce computational experience to you today, I just wanted to start off with some introductions.

Hi. I'm Erin Golden. I'm a Senior Content Strategist at Publicis Sapient. I've spent most of my career working in the public sector, so nonprofit organizations, higher education, government agencies, and therefore I've spent a lot of time working in some really information-rich content experiences. When I think about making content useful and usable, what I'm talking about is of course helping organizations achieve their strategic agendas through content, but what really drives me is helping people. One thing I'm really into now is exploring and learning more about data, all of the types of data that we can consider, the ways we can collect data, interpret it, and really integrate it with our design process.

Thanks, Erin. I asked Erin to collaborate with me in this talk today so that we could really have a good perspective from a content strategist as well as design standpoint. So a brief introduction for myself. My name is Wendy Johansson. I am the Global Vice President of Experience at Publicis Sapient, and my whole background has been in Silicon Valley startups. I'm based in San Francisco, went to many early stage startups as a early designer and eventually co-founded my own company for the last six years before I joined Publicis Sapient to work with our Chief Experience Officer John Maeda.

And so in my journey here, just like I had done with other teams and companies at my startups, I build and scale global product design teams, and that's such an interesting artifact for me as I continue down my journey of web design, to UI, to UX, to product design, to what I do today, because I like to think that one of the next things we should start paying attention to a lot is EX, the employee experience.

In building these global design teams, one thing I'm finding not only is that partnerships between product, engineering, and design, no matter what type of designer you have on your team, but also where design falls in that whole business ecosystem within your company. How do we work with marketing? How do we help help sales understand our value? How do we actually incorporate that employee journey into the holistic view of our world in the same way that we consider users and customers in their usage of our products?

So to start off, we want to set the stage for what is computational experience. It's another word, it's another CX, it's the new CX, like we're saying, but with the advent of the internet in the digital age, there's been a lot of introduced advancements in computational speed, and automation, and machine learning, and even cloud storage, and this is what some can call the fourth industrial revolution. It's revolutionized what's possible in the world of content and design, and all of our jobs as we continue to evolve as a result of it, and that's what we're really gonna talk about today is how have our jobs evolved and how do we measure that on a scale that makes sense to help us understand the maturity, not only of our companies, but of the work we do, and even our own skillset and how we can evolve that. There have been tech luminaries early on like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They've had a heavy hand in heralding in this digital and internet age, but there's also been a couple interesting figures out there who saw the potential of the internet long before anyone else did, like David Bowie, in this 1999 interview with the BBC.

I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.

It's just a tool though, isn't it?

No, it's not. No. No, it's an alien life form.

So what continues to guide us forward in this fourth industrial revolution with this alien life form? There's six tectonic shifts that continue to move our society and technology forward, but let's start with the tech ones.

The first is Moore's law, which powers the exponential age of computation that we live in, and Moore's law was a prediction in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of co-founders of Intel, and he was basically saying that chips would become exponentially stronger and smaller, and the cost for these chips would exponentially decrease year over year. Sometime in the 70s, he adjusted his prediction to say it would be every two years, but since then, that's what's really driven the whole Silicon Valley boom, everything around technology, and it continues to lead us forward.

The second tectonic shift is China, who's been able to take advantage of those exponential speeds and really just forward the entire economy, and technology, and everything around it So for example, if you go to Beijing airport today, and you're a Chinese citizen, you're able to actually take inter-country flights very easily because you don't have to pull out your ID, you don't have to pull out a passport, you don't have to pull out your boarding pass on your phone or anything. You just walk up to the machine, it recognizes who you are, and it starts giving you guided directions straight to your gate, through security, maybe through a couple of stop points so you can buy some things, and if you do stop by those duty-free stores and you decide to buy things, you don't have to pull out your passport, you don't have to pull out ID. You might not even have to pull out any form of payment, because through facial recognition, it can actually automatically charge you, knowing who you are, and those bank accounts or any other forms of payment that you might have tied to that identity.

So China's been able to take advantage of these exponential speeds, and we continue to see that be a success for them, as we look at things like COVID, and contact tracing, and how they've been able to leverage technology to help not overcome COVID clearly because none of us have, but to help them have an advantage over that and be able to return to some semblance of a newly formed, functioning society with COVID.

The third tectonic shift has been happening for a while now. We've been seeing a decline in year-over-year smartphone growth, and by smartphone growth I mean actual purchases of brand new phones from consumers, and we all know why that's happening. Like what's really the difference between this year's iPhone and last year's iPhone? Is it another lens? Is it another alien looking lens on the back of our phone? Really nothing, and we're not seeing consumers being persuaded enough by new technologies within the smartphone for them to purchase a new one.

However, in this COVID economy, we should see that even more highlighted. Folks are spending less on big purchases like this. Who's gonna shell out one to $2,000 for a brand new phone year over year? But also in conjunction with that is e-commerce. It's still growing because we're seeing more shoppers not only move online, but again, in COVID era, we've seen so much have to be shifted online for businesses to sustain themselves, not only in normal clothing and Amazon purchases, but also things like groceries, a lot more takeout happening, a lot more pickup on curbside. So, as we continue to see this economy shift and evolve, we'll see e-commerce grow in really interesting new ways.

And then fourth, we have, from the Pew Research Center, data that's telling us by 2060, as you can see this gif trending towards, that boomers will actually be in equal coexistence with gen Z and millennials in terms of population, and that may have to do with medical advancements, that also has to do with some things in terms of lowering the birth rate across some nations in the world, and that continues to lead us into this new population where gen Z and millennials now actually have a voice. They can vote. They are going into governmental positions. They are your local senators or your local mayors, and so they're starting to really have an impact on what society's gonna shape out to be beyond technology, which leads us to number five, where gen Z and millennials are also acutely aware, this is their world.

So pre-COVID, we heard a lot about Greta Thunberg, and the movement around acknowledging climate change and reducing the harm that we do to our environment, and that's something that is very much the acute awareness of population of this is their world, this is the only world that they're gonna inherit, from their parents, their grandparents, from the corporations and the governments of the world, so they need to treat it better, they need to create something sustainable for themselves to live in, but not only that, but in the last couple of months, we've also seen Black Lives Matter really come back as a huge movement and not just the moment in time, where not only do we care about the planet we're gonna live in, but the societies we're gonna live in, and be able to seek equity and create a more equitable future for everyone in the societies, and I think both of these movements are really speaking back to number four, where we're starting to see gen Z and millennials really have that voice in political power, in society, in their votes, in their voice online, from the things you heard about TikTokers being able to influence different political campaigns.

So I think this is all really really interesting as we take a look at four and five in the tectonic shifts, moving away from technology and more into awareness of society. And that leads us into our sixth tectonic shift, which has really emerged of the influence of technology and the awareness of society that gen Z and millennials have, and it's that big tech is losing its moral high ground.

When I say moral high ground, let's think back about Google, maybe 2010. It was still a hot place to work. You still wanted to go there because it had this great reputation for don't be evil, and everyone wanted to work for a great company that had that tagline, that was seemingly doing good for the world with technology, but that's not okay anymore, people don't look at Google like that anymore, and Google, quite frankly, in the last couple of months, has faded to the background in terms of big tech and being evil. We're seeing that folks think Facebook is kind of the big, new tech evil with a lot of the work they're doing in advertising and filtering, or lack of filtering, and all the things that Zuckerberg seems to stand for when he's in front of Congress, and so we're seeing that big tech has lost that moral high ground, and maybe Silicon Valley isn't the future anymore.

Maybe the future is something, quite frankly, a little more equitable, where we see these tectonic shifts leading folks into this new, fourth industrial revolution, and continuing to think of computation as something that can actually help the world, and for us to be actively aware of how we actually shape that future.

Thanks, Wendy.

So as we think about where we've been and how this alien life form, the internet, has grown, we can begin to talk about the new CX, and what we mean by that is how customer experience is evolving to include computational experience. We can think about the relationships and interactions that our customers and our users have with our brands, and our products, and our content, and consider how those interactions and relationships are being influenced by computation, how algorithms and data are beginning to shift consumers' relationships to brands, shape experiences in new ways, and ultimately change the way we do our work. Artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, these are all inevitable parts of our future, not only as consumers, but as designers.

To explore this evolution further, Wendy and I are gonna use the metaphor of the Kardashev scale. The Kardashev scale is basically a way to measure a civilization's maturity. In 1964, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev theorized that a culture's development is a product of energy and technology. Energy is harnessed to create technology. Our social systems are an expression of this technology. Therefore, social systems that demonstrate strong technological abilities are considered to be more advanced. Wendy's gonna dive a little bit deeper into how we adopted the scale to talk about digital business transformation.

All right, so taking us back to this alien life form, and how it continues to evolve, not only for societies, for technology, but also in this case for digital, for the internet, for the things that we do as content strategists and designers out there.

So first off I had mentioned that our CXO at Publicis Sapient is John Maeda, who many years ago started writing the Design in Tech Report, which ultimately became the report to find out what's happening with design in tech, and over the years, John's philosophy and kind of hypothesis around this has continued to evolve into last year, when he launched a book called How to Speak Machine, and that really led him into really solidifying his hypothesis for this computational future, which is what we're driven by within our experience work at publicist Sapient.

So in working so closely with John through the year, as well as contributing to various parts of his new CX report, computational experience report, we were able to adapt the existing Kardashev scale that he created for digital, which I'm showing you here, and that's what we're gonna move forward with. So on this Kardashev scale for digital, we're looking at K1, the pixels and bits, all the way to K5, that beautiful, automated, intelligent future that we're so kind of unsure of, but we've all watched enough Twilight Zone episodes or Black Mirror to hope that it's coming but also to fear it, but let's really dig down and see how we could define that for digital.

At the K1 pixel bit scale, we have the basic, hey, we're out there, we're on the World Wide Web, we're living in this alien life form, and that's really just the basic start of K1. As we dive into K2 and think about what Kardashev two means, it means that we're B2B-ing with the best. That means the Oracles and the bigger corporations out there can actually be selling to other business to business software, so they can be putting out their SAS platforms and selling that online. And as that continued to evolve, we move into K3, where we started to see consumers get involved in that.

So we start to see teams treading water with B2C, diving into getting their websites out there, getting their brands out there, getting themselves known and starting to develop that tone and voice in digital, which many folks hadn't thought of before when we were still looking at physical and traditional advertisements as that medium. And as we dive into K4, we have big tech, actually, we have the Googles and the Facebooks out there. They're treading along on their moral high ground potentially, and trying to figure themselves out as they kind of grow to be those corporate evils, but they're mastering data. Nobody has any question about that.

If you want to know about data at scale, back in the day, it was why don't you take a look at Banana Republic or J. Crew, any e-commerce site, but today when you look at that, we're talking about Netflix, we're talking about Amazon, and really understanding how they're utilizing data to get you to watch movies that they know you'll be interested in, or get you to buy things that they know that you should continue to spend your money on, or maybe you shouldn't. But they're the masters of data in this K4 scale, and quite frankly, this is where Silicon Valley lives today.

And as we get into the K5 zone, this is where the future lies, this is where we're thinking about the automation of things, but rather than just how do we automate things, we should be asking the question of did we automate the right things. If we think about what's happened out there, with algorithms driving bias and perpetuating bias because the people who are creating those algorithms tend to be a certain type of person, they tend to be white, they tend to be male, and are they incidentally, accidentally purposefully creating these algorithms with the same bias that they have, because, as you know with machine learning, a machine has to learn from something that exists, and how diverse is that sample set of data that it's learning from. That really has implications on what we're designing here.

So as we think about the Kardashev scale applied to digital business transformation, we can look at each level individually and you can think about where you or your company might be at this time. We'll start with K1, although I don't think we'll find that many of us feel that we're at a K1 level at this point.

Being digital in K1 means content websites. This is really conjuring that 90s era internet. This is HTML and a limited amount of CSS. You probably have your homepage and then maybe an about page or a gallery, but really kind of a limited set of content. Being a designer at K1 means being called a web designer. It means designing static screens, artwork in Photoshop, maybe some text art. Being a content strategist at this time is really nonexistent. If you are involved in the content creation process at K1, you're probably called a copywriter, which is really just a holdover from the print world. There's no discernible online strategy with regard to content creation.

During this time, the internet was sort of a mysterious place. We all kind of wondered, are we trapped in the matrix? What does this mean now or for our future? We talked about the World Wide Web and we idolized companies like Netscape and GeoCities. As we move into K2, things get a little more lively, but also a little bit more refined.

So being digital at K2 means Web 2.0 and mobile. This is the beginning of the participatory internet. Being a designer means a more structured kind of web design. This means recognizing patterns of user interface design. As content became more plentiful and more complex, we started to consider the needs of end users in a more real way. This was often seen in the design of web navigation and other sorts of information architecture considerations. And this is also where we started to see content strategy emerge. This is the beginning of content strategy as we know it today.

The first thing to realize was this was the era where content management systems became prevalent, so it really took the power of content creation and democratized it quite a bit, as you no longer had to have the skills to write the markup. This is also where we saw our first considerations of the content life cycle. This was largely due to Kristina Halvorson's work and the release of Content Strategy for the Web, but this is where content copywriters started to say like, hey, we shouldn't just be shoving content into predetermined designs and replacing Lorem ipsum. We should be considering the value and the volume of the content we're creating and why we're creating it. S

o, this era is where we first started to see that emphasis on content strategy. We think about Web 2.0 and mobile integrating technology into our lives in a more real way and in new ways and I think we idolized Tony stark and the way technology was so seamlessly integrated into his life, and in a way, that sort of began to pretend the future. Even though e-commerce was not very sophisticated at this time, we can recognize that we started to aspire to companies who were really able to connect their brand and their online presence, so these kind of more sophisticated brochure websites like BlackBerry where we saw their slick brand kind of evidenced in their web presence.

Thanks for walking us through K1 and two, Erin. Now, as we dive into K3, this is gonna start to sound a little more familiar to you.

Maybe these are companies that you work at, projects that you deliver on, skills that you have, or even just the companies that you shop from. And as we look at K3, being digital really revolves around social and commerce. So not only is it a destination such as Amazon for you to be able to purchase from, and follow that whole e-commerce loop from maybe offline to online, but also to take a look at the social means around that.

What does it mean for you to follow Amazon fashion and The Drop that they have? They have this great brand that is curated and they only print and create so many pieces of clothing and accessories as are ordered on demand, but what does that mean in that kind of social world? Who are the influencers that represent The Drop? They're pulling in Instagram influencers to design new lines for Amazon Drop and that's something they're able to do really well, and as we look at what being a designer means in this era of Kardashev three, we're really looking at UX design becoming that forefront.

Not only do we care about those patterns and the consistency behind the brands on the websites, but also, what is that holistic journey that entices you into that brand loop? How do you choose one brand over another? And once you do, what does that product usage, product ownership mean? So you're actually looking at that complete, end-to-end journey, going from assets that you didn't actually consider before outside of your product into the world that it dives into.

So being a content strategist though is really interesting in this K3 world, because this is when content started emerging as a business asset. With leads coming in, building your brand, and more, the planning and the creation of content strategy at this point required skill and intention, and I think that was so much different than just kind of owning a CMS and that content life cycle. You have to have an intentional journey and to do that, you need to understand that holistic journey coming from the UX side. And so this is where content and content marketing also start filtering in. It gives way to that kind of bigger view of the ecosystem, and this is maybe where, at least in my experience, I've started seeing content strategists work closer with UX designers, is in this kind of K3 world. Before, we were kind of handoff points to each other, kind of throwing it over the fence the same way that we would do with an engineer, but now we were working in concert, we were creating hierarchies, and diagrams, and information that we all understood despite our various languages and tools.

And so as the touchpoint started moving into Google searches and advertising, this helped us understand that there was that kind of brand enticement loop, as I pointed to earlier. How do we get users to choose our brand over others before they hit our website or our app? And with the influx of these new skills, we were able to see kind of the biggest maturity point of content strategists through this K scale was really from K1 two, all the way to K3. As we hit K3, this is where the big maturity and skillsets change, and this is where many of us are still catching up now, whether, quite frankly, we're designers or content strategists.

And an apt movie analogy for that is clearly the Facebook movie, and really just understanding that folks in that kind of K1 and K2 sphere were just kind of wondering wait, where'd the good old internet go, like what happened to the WWW era? How come folks are moving so fast in this? Why is everybody setting up their own store, and talking about their brand extension, and what are we talking about with lead generation, and using analytics to kind of track the conversions on different pages? This is really that kind of aspiration that Amazon set up for everyone in starting to introduce this kind of obsession with data, and the flow of data through our content and the journey.

As we get into Kardashev four, we start to really version in this territory of Silicon Valley, of where tech companies sit today, and this is where being digital starts to mean product experiences, and that leads us to evolve from our K4 UX designers into, or K3 UX designers, rather, into our K4 product designers, and this has been a title that's floated around and maybe three or four years ago, some designers on my team said to me, one day we'd like to rename ourselves from UX designers into product designers, and at the time I said, well, what's the difference. like how would you define that, and they didn't really have a great answer, and neither did I at the time, but as this has continued to evolve, as I've continued to work with teams across different organizations, some big corporations, some technical corporations and some startups, what I've come to see as a product designer is really an extension of product management.

So, I'm of the take that UX and product are very very closely related. At various points in my career have I transitioned into being a head of product into being a product owner, a product manager, and really had to understand the business constraints, and better partner with engineering to design and architect systems, and as I've versioned into that, I've started to realize that the perfect definition to me of a product designer is one who can take on that holistic view of the journey from the UX standpoint, not only within the product but how one enters the product and also how one exits the product into other products, into other parts of their job, but also taking in account that business acumen.

When we start to throw the word strategy out there, product strategy, UX strategy, this is exactly the type of thinking I expect a product designer to do if I were to hire one on my team, and be able to have actual insights, and philosophy even, and methodology, about how we take products forward and not just that feature that a designer tends to just work on within that feature view.

And so, as we see kind of that advent and really that evolution of UX into product and having a lot more ownership, having that seat at the table, maybe, that design has always wanted, we see a huge evolution in what being a content strategist means. As we see content design approaching an audience focus, that's really brought this idea of content design as this more, even more holistic ecosystem from K3, and we start to see research, data, the audience expectations of when and where really take flight and be the center of that kind of content design philosophy, and we see content structuring being the automatization of CX, being able to move away from that page structure into our presentation of the micro content across those channels, no matter where folks are, whether that's looking at a news site and all the different places that that micro feed can show up, or taking a look at data that's being shown, for example, on e-commerce sites. Is that now being cut out and shown as an advertisement in an Instagram versus a Facebook, versus a Google, or even the ads that follow you around the internet, and how does that kind of lead back into recommendations in your shopping cart, and how do we structure all of that content?

And so this is really that evolution in K4. It's not so much just thinking about data and design, which I think a lot of folks tend to think of this kind of Silicon Valley product experience as being just very data-heavy and data-driven but also taking a look at the multichannel consequences and implications of what design means. So this is really where we dive into that Mad Max and Charlize Theron being a total badass.

But Tencents is actually a really good example of that, and this goes back to those six tectonic shifts I touched on earlier, one of them being that China has lived up to that exponential age and value, and there's so much ahead of us. When here in North America, we're still worrying about Amazon and perhaps capitalism, but in China, they've moved ahead with Tencent and they're able to understand kind of that multichannel and content structure of where design is leading, so it's really interesting as we continue to think about K4, which then leads us into our simple and final K5.

And K5 is really general AI, and as we think about what a designer means into K5 and what content strategy means in that, honestly, maybe it's time for us to move on. Maybe our roles don't exist in a linear progression and evolution anymore because K5, it's something so unimaginable, as David Bowie said, about the alien life form, and we can't predict our future roles because it really depends on how that technology scales exponentially, and a good way to kind of refer to that analogy is Space Odyssey, 2001, which isn't gonna happen in 2001 or hasn't happened in 2001, but maybe leads us into 2040 where we get to open those pod bay doors, and if any of you have watched the show, it's called Upload on Amazon prime, they have really clever references of how various brands get merged together. So here, we think of the Googlezon. That is the future of general AI where Google and Amazon can kind of bring that world together. So it's kind of interesting to think about where K5 is heading, but it's also in that exponential scale of something that we just simply can't predict.

So now we'll spend some time talking about how to develop as a content strategist and what kind of skills are necessary to practice content strategy at each of these levels. I already had mentioned Content Strategy for the Web earlier as really a seminal work in the field of content strategy, and even though content strategy has evolved since this book was published I think in 2010, really the foundational skills are still very much a part of this text. So in this book, you begin to appreciate how to explore the value of content, how to think about governing content and kind of everything in between.

So even though content strategy has evolved from what is in this book, I can't really think of another place to really understand the basics of the field. I think it's important to understand web analytics as well, as a precursor to content strategy work, 'cause you'll begin to understand how your content is performing, so understanding the basics of web analytics data and what those metrics and measures say about your content is a necessary skill to build early on.

As I mentioned, content management systems were really important to the launch of content strategy as a discipline, so understanding content management systems and content types is really significant as well, because you'll be able to understand how your content is written, stored, and displayed. So moving on into the K2 era, the participatory internet. In many ways, this was sort of the beginning of the social internet and certainly conversational content.

So skills involved here would be an understanding of plain language, even if you are not always the writer, understanding personas and what those mean for your content creation, and maybe in the K2 era or level is where we start to see the first overlap with, meaningful overlap with user experience design and how content strategy and user experience design are practiced. So understanding personas, so who you are developing content for and how you capture and articulate those considerations. As I mentioned, I think this is the beginning of conversational content, and as far as all three of these skills go, I think Ginney Redish's book, Letting Go of the Words, is an important text to explore all of these skills. Again, this I think was the 2012ish that this book was published, so things have evolved, but this is good understanding of those skills.

I mentioned overlap with experience design, and I think K2 also points to an important overlap with experience design, and that is beginning, as we get from K2 into K3, we're beginning to understand information-seeking journeys and different touchpoints with content, so we're recognizing that a user's journey does not begin on our homepage or maybe even our landing page, and needing to understand the ecosystem of content, and I think that's where understanding journey mapping is important, so understanding the research behind journey maps, how that data is collected, and how journey maps are diagrammed is important. There's a number of ways to find that.

I think Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach is a good book. I enjoy his work and his talks all the time, so I think he is a great resource, and this book is a great resource. Moz is an SEO resource, and I bring up SEO in thinking about user journeys not beginning on your website, 'cause we all certainly understand that one place that user journeys consistently begin is on a Google search engine results page, and this is where SEO has become important to the practice of content strategy.

Again, not one discipline, but certainly content strategy and SEO work together, so understanding the basics of search engine optimization and keyword optimization, and moz.com is a great place to get some foundational knowledge about SEO. So as we think about moving from content websites to Web 2.0, to the social internet, we're kind of now shifting into K4, into product experiences.

And this is where we start to see the practice of content design, which Wendy had talked about earlier, really begins to take the audience research into consideration in new and significant ways, so collecting more data and allowing content to be produced with that kind of data in mind. So first skill moving from the social and commerce K3 era into product experiences is gaining an understanding of quantitative and qualitative data. You can get some of that in content design and there are other ways to learn that as well.

Another hallmark of the K4 level, in my opinion, is moving from page-level content to a more structured content, so this is where we get into content models and atomic bits of content that can be structured and distributed in a number of ways, and Designing Connected Content by Carrie Hane is another great resource to learn about that. And lastly, as we get towards the edge of this continuum, we think about another kind of discipline that has been pulled into content strategy, which is UX writing, and I think UX writing, it's important to understand how it differs from copywriting and really that comes in the U, in the user, and goes back to the idea of understanding audience needs and being strategic around what content you are delivering to who, when, and where.

Strategic Writing for UX is a great resource to learn kind of this practice and where this is going, and it gets into the idea of producing content for different parts in the user journey and the customer journey, and this is where we're going to start to understand the value of delivering more personalized experiences and really a persona-driven strategy. So, I think that that's kind of a good continuum with a good set of skills to develop and some resources where you can start to lean into these skillsets. Certainly not an exhaustive list, but the resources that I've personally found helpful.

Now evolving as a designer is nowhere near as complex as evolving as a content strategist. Most of us are already sitting somewhere in the K3 scale. Now, when we think about the simple evolution from, for example, K2 to K3, I really recommend reading Designing with Data by Rochelle King and others, and this book really focuses around the creation of that hypotheses, the validation, and how to make those business decisions with the data that's available to you, either around A/B testing or other means, and I think this is a really interesting way for those of you who are kind of still living in the K2 world, or maybe your organization is still living in the K2 world, to help them catch up into K3 and understand where data first comes into play and how it can influence design, because most folks think about data and data science as influencing engineering or the kind of magic behind the technology, but it has such heavy implications on design and how we can actually start to prove the business value of design, and that's what I really like to think of K3 level organizations as, is proving out that business value of design and understanding it, and also investing in it.

Now going between K3 and K4, this is where we tie back into John Maeda. All of this, again, the Kardashev scale for digital, was originally created by John for his CX report, his computational experience report, and all of that is really starting from his book that he launched last fall, How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us. He really does a great job breaking down what is exponential, how do we break down the concepts of computation, and start to apply it to the world that we live in, whether that's the physical world, the digital world, or social world, society, culture, impact, change, and I think it's a really great start to start thinking about product experiences and how you can kind of bring that language of computation, that perhaps your peers in engineering often have so much more leverage in, to the table as a designer.

Now moving from K4 to K5 is just a little bit simpler. All you gotta do is reach out and connect with a machine. But no, in all seriousness, I think, as I said before, this is still something that is so unimaginable to us, so we just really need to see where this continues to evolve. I mean, even in our current economy, in our current world situation, experiences keep changing, when we think about digital, when we think about technology. Maybe we all thought that Uber and this whole consumer commercialization is the way to go, but look at how that industries drops, look how Airbnb has been impacted, so I think this is all very up for grabs as our society and the world keeps evolving amidst all the different crisises we're living in.

Thanks for joining us today as we talk about computational experiences, and we hope you're gonna be able to take the Kardashev scale for digital and measure your company, your work, your skills, your team, and be able to start to evolve them into the place that you would like to see your company, your work, and your own skills.

Feel free to reach out to us over LinkedIn or Twitter, separately, and let us know if you have any thoughts, but we'll dive into Q&A now.