Ep. 217: Design Researcher Amanda Schneider on the Art of Contextualizing the Data
Founder and President of ThinkLab, Amanda Schneider, grew up outside of Chicago, inspired by a blend of engineering and design. Now a self-described “designer by degree, journalist by accident, and researcher by choice” at the helm of ThinkLab, she examines the ecosystem of the design world, unearthing and synthesizing the social and cultural shifts and drivers that impact the interiors industry. Together with her team, she offers insights and context that can empower better decision-making while also bridging the communication gap between creatives and the business sector. A keynote speaker (catch her recent TEDx talk) and the host of the podcast Design Nerds Anonymous, Amanda shares her wisdom on topics like communication strategies, storytelling, and the future of work.
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Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Design researcher Amanda Schneider. Amanda is the founder and president of Thinklab - the only research entity wholly focused on the interiors industry, ThinkLab has a global reach that expands to millions of A&D professionals, in furniture, lighting, kitchen, bath, fixtures and paint. Amanda holds an undergraduate degree in product design and an MBA in marketing - both of which inform her rigorous approach to research and her ability to translate across the creative and business mindsets. A respected thought-leader and keynote speaker, Amanda has been featured in the Huffington Post, Forbes, Interior Design Magazine, MIT Sloan Management Review, and has recently delivered a TEDx talk titled “Work is broken. Gen Z can help us fix it.” She’s also the host of the podcast Design Nerds Anonymous, which does an excellent (and entertaining) job of contextualizing the research into illuminating and actionable insights. And you can find that right alongside Clever, on the SURROUND Podcasts network. As you’ll hear, the gears of her mind are oiled and calibrated, contextualizing data is her jam, and communication is her super power… here’s Amanda
Amanda Schneider: So I’m Amanda Schneider, Founder and President at ThinkLab and I live and work outside of Chicago. So I have two and a half acres, a tiny little house on two and a half acres. Love my outdoors here and love working from my tiny little office, which is where we’re recording from here. So my life’s work and passion has been building this little company called ThinkLab. And I like to say I am a designer by degree, a journalist by accident and a researcher by choice.
Amy: I love it! Designer by degree, let’s start there. What discipline of design did you get a degree in?
Amanda: My background, my undergraduate degree is in product design and I started at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and pretty quickly realized that while I loved design, my life’s passions were not going to be around sitting behind a sketchbook. So really quickly discovered this business side of design and helped the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana start their first ever job fair, which 20+ years later is still happening today. And as part of that I sent out 250 postcards to the IDSA, Industrial Designers Society of America, Midwest Chapter. One of those postcodes was answered, it was by a man named Craig Schultz who at the time worked for Allsteel running their design department. He hired me on the spot at that job fair and really I feel like that was very foundational for where my degree in design went because from the beginning it really quickly became about this intersection of design and business needs and how to connect designers with those business needs.
Amy: Ooh, well I can’t wait to unpack that part. But can you quickly walk me through the ‘journalist by accident’ and the ‘researcher by...’ what was that, by passion?
Amanda: Research by choice.
Amy: By choice, yes!
Amanda: So undergraduate degree is in design, but then I went on to get my MBA in marketing. And what really started ThinkLab was when I left the corporate world officially in 2011 and started what I thought was a side step career, and was independently consulting. And I ended up landing a column in the Huffington Post. At the time, this is when myself and 20,000 peers from around the world, it was one of the platforms where they were, for the first time, kind of crowdsourcing information. So I wrote about the future of work for those who design and furnished the spaces where we work. And that was really a key part of, I think, my growth as a consultant and my view of the industry was really leveraging the view of a journalist, which tends to be kind of 30,000 foot, much broader, to really look at our own industry. And because I was writing for the Huffington Post I had to always shift that context into something that the average Joe could understand because it wasn’t, you know, at that time writing for Interior Design magazine, writing for Metropolis, writing for Design Milk, it was really a broad publication. So it was a really important part of my growth in understanding how to provide that context and share the messages of our specific niche, our specific profession with the broader world.
Amy: I find that even as an educator it’s one thing to know what you know and to know how to find out new information and to learn and grow and add to your knowledge. It’s a completely different skill to be able to package that knowledge for consumption for different audiences. But I think it’s a really important one because that’s the way that we disseminate and share knowledge with larger, wider groups of people and that’s the way that culture gets informed. So that’s a really interesting foundational element of your growth,
Amanda: It definitely is.
Amy: But it also sounds like… that piece of it and the consulting job kind of maybe sparked your love of research or tell me about that?
Amanda: It did! I mean when I look at what got me into design school, I think that that passion for research has always been there. I was thinking I was going to go into engineering because I have a family of a lot of engineers and I was like, well, I’ll be able to get a job if I do that. And my dad, who was an engineer at Maytech at the time, had me come in and I met with a woman named Ann-Marie Conrado who worked at a consulting industrial design firm called Insight Studios in Chicago. And when I met her she said, “You know what I love about my job, is that every day is a new adventure. One day I’m designing a baby’s bath seat so I have to observe a mother bathing her baby. Another day I’m designing a scuba mask, I have to take scuba lessons.” And I was hooked, I was like, oh, that’s what I want to do. I quickly realized again in design school that I was sketching scuba masks and sketching baby’s bath seats behind a computer. And so when I really looked back at what got me into design, it was that research side of design. And I think that’s an interesting segue to that final piece that is ‘researcher by choice,’ which is I think one of the most important words in our world today, is context. You can find research, you can find journalism, you can find opinions on just about anything.
And so I’ve kind of taken my passion for design and that intersection of business, really been forced to look at it at that 30,000 foot view as a journalist. But then the research piece of that is also really putting that into context for our listeners, whether we’re talking about a podcast, for our listeners, putting that into context for the industry in a lot of work that we’re doing to say, yes, this is true, but is a six good? It depends if a six is on a six point scale, or a 30 point scale, that has very different context. So for me the research piece is really a way to quantify that and give people that context to put it in a perspective that helps them interpret it, understand it and even research is only as good as the ways you can put it into action. So that has always been a really fundamental part of my passions and really a fundamental part of ThinkLab and all that we do.
Amy: Let’s get into ThinkLab more specifically. What sector do you serve? What types of research do you conduct and what kinds of insights are you actually really trying to draw out and put context around, and for who?
Amanda: Our tagline at ThinkLab has long been, ‘We research the world of design and the ecosystem that surrounds.’ Again, my background is as a product designer and I grew up on the product side of this industry. Mainly in the contract commercial office furniture realm. And so that is kind of our foundation and where we come from. But my paycheck and my team’s paycheck are paid by the product manufacturers that are really trying to understand how they can grow their business and serve; I’ll say the interiors industry better. A&D is a huge part of that. One of our favorite stats is that the average designer has 40 times the recommendation power as the average American consumer has buying power. And when you get into the interior design joints of design, that’s like the Fortune 500, but there’s only 200 and their interiors firm. Those specifiers at those interiors firms that work at those top 200 firms have 140 times the recommendation power as the average American consumer has buying power. So they’re a really, really important audience to understand and a lot of other industries have consumer insights. They have research, they have data to understand.
Our industry, prior to ThinkLab, has really never had context and that nuance to understand those decisions and how they’re specifically made for the built environment. Yet if you look at the impact that we have, whether we’re talking about GDP and how much product is run through our industry and specified into these, whether we’re large corporate buildings or when you get into the sheer quantity of homes and what goes into those homes, the impact is huge in terms of dollars spent. It’s also huge in terms of things like environmental impact. So this is something that should be studied, needs to be studied and we can always tell when some of our clients come from outside the industry because they’re used to having these consumer insights. And they’re like, oh, thank god, you know? (Laughs) I’ve never met an industry that runs more on gut. So our goal is to remove assumptions, some of which are dated and we don’t know that they’re assumptions that are built on history. And replace those assumptions with facts, data, insight that’s really put into context.
So how we do that, we are a research firm, but I want you to think of us like the McKinsey for the built environment. A lot of our work is in the B2B realm, not all of it, but a lot of it is. And I think people think of McKinsey as a go-to for B2B research, you see what they’re putting out there about the future of work, about how B2B decisions are made, things like that. We are measuring all of that but specifically for how decisions around the built environment are made. So it could be homes, it could be multifamily, it could be offices, it could be any aspects of that, we are really trying to capture the most comprehensive data about how those decisions are made and how people can either use that impact for good or how our product partners can really capture more of the market availability that’s out there and use that for good.
Amy: What about for evil? I mean I ask this because it sounds like there’s a lot of responsibility, when you’re wielding this kind of data, which has the potential to impact… when you think about the recommendation power of designers compared to the buying power of an average consumer, but then you think about how that filters out, and you can think about commercial spaces only in terms of workers, but workers are actually humans who are also parents and shoppers and regular folks who have medical issues. So you can’t really divorce any aspect of a human from their full spectrum of humanity. And so I guess the reason I ask about good versus evil is when you have that kind of detailed window into contextualizing this data for the use of people who want to use it, how do you make sure it stays used for good?
Amanda: We’re careful not to just give everyone a magic pill. (Laughter) We had a client say to us once they were considering subscribing to our subscription program and they said, if we’re all listening to the same radio station are we going to be humming the same song? And that’s a fair question and request, but the alternate to that is making a move with no data. And I don’t think that our data is so dialed in and prescriptive that it is designed to be like this chair company is the number one company, so nobody should ever buy chairs from any other company. If there’s one thing that I have learned in spending 20+ years of my career researching this specific sector, it’s that every time I peel off a layer of this onion, and answer one question, there are 10 more questions beneath that. I will say that it is something that we are aware of and sensitive to, even in terms of how the data that we put out to the universe could be misused, but it is not something that prevents me from wanting to do what we do.
Amy: Yeah, I mean knowledge is power and depending on how people use it, you can’t be responsible for everyone’s motivations. And at the same time I think what I’m hearing is that it’s not just entirely about selling more product, although that might be one of the reasons somebody might work with you. It’s really more about understanding larger societal shifts and helping the market see those and adjust itself to prepare for those. Does that sound a little more accurate?
Amanda: It absolutely is. It absolutely is, and if I made (laughs)… it’s not just about products…
Amy: No, no, that’s just my skeptical… like everybody is just trying to sell us more stuff, or harvest our attention spans and so that’s me needing to find out what is really underneath all this.
Amanda: Yeah, I mean I think it’s really… maybe that’s why I was Pollyanna in the beginning is because I do think it’s about making life easier and making life better. Metropolis has a stat that I think says that interior designers are responsible for… I’m going to misquote this, for 10% of the world’s carbon emissions, or something like that, like it’s a pretty big responsibility. And if that interior designer to make a decision is having to do a lot of work, there’s a lot of friction there, they’re going to be more apt, as we all are in human nature, to take the easier path, not necessarily the right path, the best path. So a lot of what we’re doing is really trying to… we do a lot of process mapping, we’re trying to look for friction and look where we can remove that friction, for our product partners that often means giving them a competitive advantage. But for our designers, if we can remove some of that friction, we’re actually enabling them to make better decisions and use the power that they have, that 140x, for good.
Amy: That’s a really important point you make because I think I’m hearing you say you want to put the power in the hands of the creative who is able to interpret that data through a human lens for human benefit?
Amanda: Yes, and one of my favorite statements, this comes from Allison Roon, who is a long time member of the ThinkLab team is, ‘We help left brain people look right brain, and right brain people look left brain.’ And I think that that can be a communication gap in our world that we have all these creatives that have such great methods and methodologies and ways of thinking that often don’t make sense to the business world. And the business world is run on dollars and cents and things are important because we all want to feed our families and have jobs. And so I look at us as kind of translators between those two worlds and if we do our job right, we give designers the stats to catch the attention of the business mind so that they can do their best work. And we give the business minds the best of the view into designers and why it impacts their business. And we give them tools to kind of speak across that divide, if you will.
Amy: That is heroic. (Laughter)
Amanda: We’re still working on our mission in life, we’ve got more work to do, more layers of that onion to peel.
Amy: I want to get back to ThinkLab and talk to you a bit about your creative process as a researcher. What are some of the methods and studies you design in terms of how do you identify a question that you want to solve for or what does research look like at your level?
Amanda: I think it’s layered and it depends, is the answer to any good question for any creative. But I’ll say we use multiple research methodologies and all of it, like any good design problem, you have to start with what is your goal? What are you trying to uncover, what are you trying to solve? I’m going to talk a little bit about our hackathon process.
Amy: Okay?
Amanda: Because I think this is really exciting because it gets into the really future forward look that we have in the industry. Each year we do something that we call a ‘hackathon,’ which you may think is just for tech companies, but we have brought it to this beloved creative industry that we all live in as well. And we’re just looking up and looking out to say what is the biggest challenge that we could help this industry solve? We have a unique standpoint from being part of SANDOW Brands where we have reached to 20 million globally design aficionados. So how do we use that power for our good as well? And a piece of what we look at is where is a big, hairy problem that we could solve? Some examples of this, in 2020 when we went from an industry that loves hugs and handshakes to being suddenly remote, we had to figure out what is the future of business development and sales and how is that going to work if we stay in this phase, which we still are in some ways, even five years later, it hasn’t gone back fully to the way things were. So we have a playbook of 100 ideas, again, translating that research into insights about how we could meet that process where it is today.
We have done things like Gen Z. We did a hack on Gen Z and how Gen Z will influence the future, not only of the design industry, but really influence the future of work and the world because that’s going to have trickle down effects. So each year we tackle one big, hairy problem, and I could certainly talk about a lot of different problems that we’ve tackled, but how that process goes is we start with a really clear goal. Then we look for pain. And while pain may sound like a really horrible thing to think about and un-inspirational, where there’s pain, there’s opportunity. So our process typically starts with some sort of process mapping. Typically what we would call a qualitative session to really look at our user base and map out their process. And look for points along that process where there’s pain. Once we’ve identified that pain, we typically go into more of a quantitative portion of research. That is again looking for that context.
Amy: How are you finding the pain points and the mapping? Are you doing this through surveys or how are you getting this feedback input?
Amanda: Yeah, so we start with a discussion. They usually look and put it in layman’s terms, something like a focus group or a discussion with a small group of individuals. Sometimes those are in person, typically especially over the last five years they’re virtual, using tools like Miro, where we use post-its, again, whether in-person or virtual, we use post-its to say, ‘where does your process start, where does it end?’ And then we literally fill out every step in between. Once we’ve laid out that process, we can go back and with Starburst or usually something red, we say, “Okay, where’s their frustration? Where’s their wasted time in this process? Where’s their wasted energy in this process? Where is their wasted money in this process?” Because wherever we can see some of that pain, it usually means there’s opportunity to fix something, to do something better there. Once we have those pain maps, and you’ll see a lot of the work that we’re putting out into the universe we usually translate those to really simplified versions that helps people understand where in, whatever process we’re mapping, there is pain. We then typically go into what I would call ‘quantitative’ research, which is a survey. That gets into, again, that context that we’re looking for. We might have done a mapping session or multiple mapping sessions, a typical mapping session for us is going to be six people, maybe a maximum of 10, beyond that you’re just not hearing from everyone in the group. We do multiple sessions to be sure that we’re avoiding group think or bias there. But then we launch into this quantitative, this survey portion that really allows us to give that context and a broader measure. We might ask things like ‘These are the following pain points, which is the most painful for you?’ ‘We heard xyz in our sessions, which of these do you most identify with?’ So you have to really break it down to get to 75% of people feel this way, we’re often doing multiple choice questions that is taking the insight we’ve gained from that first phase, putting it into questions that people can easily answer. And then the next phase is what we call ‘generative’ research. It only does you so much good to understand that 75% of people feel this way or this is where the pain is. If we can’t translate that to, okay, what do we do about it? So let me use an example of our Gen Z research, just because I feel like that’s one that your listeners could really easily understand.
Amy: Okay?
Amanda: Our first phase of that was working with architecture and design firms, so this is in the interiors realm of design, with firm principles, to say where are you struggling today? We’re still in the midst of this transition to hybrid work, where are your firms struggling to connect people across geographies, across generations? And we came out with nine different topics that were really hot pain points for the principles running the businesses of these firms. Then we did a broad survey where we measured perceptions across different generations. I think this is a challenge with a lot of generational research is what we did to the millennials, we stereotyped them. We said millennials want this… well, first of all, not always true and second of all, it wasn’t really inviting them. The minute you hear generational research, those generations often hear, this doesn’t apply to me. What we did differently is we measured this for Gen Z, but we looked at Gen Z in context of all the generations to say how is this trending, maybe in one direction or another across all of these different generations. How does it look different for Gen Z from these others and what do we need to understand by looking across these different generations that can help us bring them all together?
So we got this phenomenal survey data that really showed a lot of pretty pronounced differences and had a lot of surprises in it. And we took that to virtual room fulls of Gen Z’rs that said, “Your management is struggling with this, this is what your peers are saying, this is how your generation is a little bit different, how might we solve this?” Because one of the things about Gen Z is the earliest of Gen Z graduated in 2019, just pre-pandemic. So while this is a big shift for a lot of us that have operated in a physical world, in physical workplaces for a long time, for most of these Gen Z’rs their whole career has been largely virtual or somewhere on the hybrid spectrum. One of my favorite phrases is, ‘A fish doesn’t know it’s in water, it’s just swimming.’ So by bringing Gen Z in we can really understand what their norms are, how they’re thinking of this and we ended up with a whole toolkit, again, we call them playbooks. A whole toolkit of ideas of ways these firms could help solve some of these problems. And this has been so impactful, not only to the design industry, but we did our first publication in Forbes, back to my ‘journalist by accident,’ last October and it went viral. It had over 220,000 views and actually ended up being pinned to the front page of Forbes for a couple of weeks.
Amy: Wonderful!
Amanda: Our second submission resulted in the number one article in July of 2024 in the MIT Sloan Management Review, I co-wrote that with Brian Elliott, who is the author of How the Future Works, another phenomenal book. And I just took the TEDx stage in July of 2024 that will be launching in September of 2024, so we’ll be excited to share that with the world as well.
Amy: Can you tell me what some of the surprises were that you found in this research?
Amanda: Absolutely! My favorite surprise is, I think we expected to see trendlines. For your visual listeners, I’m going to say imagine a bar chart. On the left of your visual is a short bar, just to the right is a little bit taller bar, just to the right is a little bit taller bar and so on, until the far right, we expected that bar chart to go up into the right. Now if you’re managing this bar chart, it’s things like digital adoption or digital preference, how comfortable different generations are working in digital or building relationships digitally. We expected the Baby Boomers to be on the left, on that shorter bar, and Gen Z’rs to be on the right, that tallest bar, where we were seeing clear trendlines to the future that said ‘generations are trending this way.’ And there were some charts that we saw that, depending on the question that was asked. But what we saw more often, that surprised us, is what we’re calling the ‘Boomerang Effect.’ Where very often in that research millennials were the most extreme or that tallest bar and Gen Z actually was shorter, more in line with Gen X or Boomers. And there’s another great article out there that you can google and find, that’s called The Boomerification of Gen Z. And we all know that the pendulum swings, nothing is new and if you’re old enough you’ve seen the pendulum swing in fashion, in other areas, many, many times. And I think what we saw really clearly in our research was that pendulum starting to swing. Where in a lot of cases millennials were the most extreme with some of these and Gen Z is actually aligning a little bit more with our Gen X and Boomers, which is I think really good and should be reassuring for this moment of time that we’re in because Gen Z will make up 27% of the workforce by 2025. So it’s not a group to be ignored, it is a group to understand, but to bring them into that understanding process.
Amy: You mentioned that this research has also had a lot of impact. So I can see why some of this would be really surprising when it filters out into the world and people start to make use of this research. What kinds of impacts are you seeing?
Amanda: Let me start with what impacts I would like to see. (Laughs) And maybe we can kind of start there and back up from there. I would say what I’m seeing is the popularity of things like the viral Forbes article, the number one article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, which says that to me people today have never been more aware of the effect of design and space and how it makes them feel. They’ve never been more aware of that. While most of us in this world have thought about that our whole careers, I think people… I’m going to pick on my husband because he’s an engineer. He can walk into a low budget hotel and be like, eew, this doesn’t feel good in here, but he can’t tell you it’s because of the fluorescent lighting and the cheap carpet and maybe a smell from the pool that wasn’t properly cleaned. He just knows, I don’t feel great here. And I think that that awareness is a really beautiful place to start, right? That we’re all so much more aware of physical space. So I think to really bring this back to what impact I hope that this has is our world is an unbelievable state of transition. And this hybrid work conversation, whether you work in the corporate sector or not, is having a really profound impact on our lives, our economies and kind of the future of the world and where it works.
If we no longer commute into cities as much or as frequently or as often or as many people as once did, it’s going to have an effect on the retail spaces there, it’s going to have an effect on where we live, it’s going to affect on how often we travel and what we’re looking for from hotels and how we stay there. It could have an effect on even what we demand from Airbnb, if we’re all taking retreats with larger teams that we need facilities to go. So it’s going to have an incredible and profound impact on space and how we use those spaces. And I think what I see out there right now is again, trying to be this translator between the business world and the design world, is that there is a lot of business leaders really taking a lead in that conversation. And sometimes it can be the loudest voices and not necessarily the most impactful voices that are being heard. So my hope is that we can leverage some of this research and insight to pave the way, to be a bridge and communication between these creatives that have so many amazing ideas because they’re not afraid to say, ‘how might we,’ and, ‘what if?’ How do we get those voices to the stage so that it is the critical thinkers that can help us maybe rethink in new ways, the way things have always be done? In a way that could profoundly impact everyone in this world. And that’s the impact that I hope to have with this research is really to start to kind of open the doors for those conversations in bigger ways.
Amy: That is very noble and honorable and I see the need for it. So many of the critical thinkers and the really innovative thinkers who are imagining new ways forward, they need a research arm that they don’t probably have the resources or the wherewithal to do on their own. But to add fuel to their case, essentially, and so often there’s a kind of… I don’t want to say it’s not scientific, but there is a kind of instinctual, maybe it’s even unconscious need that designers are translating that’s why they’re coming up with new ideas. And they might not have all of the surrounding data that can explain why or where it’s coming from. But when they see or read an article or the culmination of your research, can go, ‘oh, exactly, that’s what it was that was driving me to create this newfangled system that I’m going to need a lot of help getting buy-in for.’ And so, I really appreciate that and I can see how it could easily pave the crossroads between the two camps so that we could… and they don’t need to be camps anymore…
Amanda: I know, I don’t want to make this sound like us versus them, but I think a piece of this too is… I think too often people think of design as pretty pictures or designers as pillow-pickers and fabric-pickers.
Amy: Still, we’re still fighting against that, like we’re the icing on the cake, but they don’t realize, no, we’re the ingredients and we’re also the baking temperature…
Amanda: The way that we can become the ingredients is giving more data. We made these choices for the ingredients and we measured it and this is more than I think this tastes better…
Amy: We chose these agricultural producers because of this too, which is baked into how they produce their grains, it’s all part of the design process. It’s had sometimes to quantify uncertainty, which is what you are doing in some ways, demystifying complexity. Designers or creatives are, I think, frequently in this kind of tension space where they have to validate what is unvalidatable yet. It can only be validated after it gets put into use. Therefore there’s this natural squashing of original ideas that just happens because getting an idea off the ground is difficult. Getting it into motion, getting the resources behind it, it’s difficult. And yet we continue to evolve, we continue to keep needing these changes and I think if we can reduce the friction through helping each other understand why these changes need to happen, and how they can happen with less friction, then we can all kind of coalesce around our own evolution. And that puts agency back in everyone’s hands and I think that’s ultimately what we’re all going for anyway, at the core of this is agency.
Amanda: I wholly agree with you, yeah, and I think that you just queued in on kind of a core passion of mine, is that in this industry that celebrates so much product innovation, whether your product is physical space, a UX app, a podcast, a chair, an interior design, a space that you’ve designed, we are an industry that celebrates product and that product… think about all of the awards that happen for all of those things that I just mentioned. Where are we celebrating process innovation? And I think that that is a big piece and I believe that the biggest future disruptions, the biggest future innovations are not going to come from product innovation. Listen, I’m a product designer, very passionate about product design, it is still so, so, so important. But the biggest future disruptions are going to come from these process innovations. And that is a lot of what we do at ThinkLab, is really study that process and try to enable the people in that process to do better, to serve the needs of their customers more. And our next season of DNA is going to be coming out on our latest hackathon and a lot of it is around how to communicate differently, communicate better given all the context that’s changed in how our customers today are making decisions.
Inflation is up, there’s more scrutiny on budgets, more people involved. The average number of decision makers has doubled, so therefore how do designers need to communicate differently? We have a soft skills expert that’s coming on Design Nerds Anonymous next season, she’s fascinating, her name is Kendra, I can’t wait to launch that episode. We have another one that is all around story and really how to bring your audience into a story so that they are the hero. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book StoryBrand by Donald Miller, but we have his chief of staff on, Dr J.J. Peterson, it’s my favorite episode coming up this next season, that really talks about how to engage people in stories so that they come along with you and understand their role. And understand how to make those decisions easier and better. If we can train our designers to connect with their clients in this way, it gives them that agency that you’re talking about to really use their power for good.
Amy: That was incredible. I feel like that was a finale and the only thing that’s missing is the fireworks, which we can propose in in post. (Laughs) I was going to ask you what’s on the horizon, but you just told me. Is there anything else… if we were to cast a little bit of a vision further into the future, I love that you shared what’s coming up on this current season of Designers Anonymous. If we were to look five years or 10 years into the future, what do you hope for, for yourself and for ThinkLab? You’ve been investigating the future of work since 2011 and it doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight, really. Nor should there be, as I think we need this kind of companion as work continues to evolve and shift so rapidly. But what does your big picture look like?
Amanda: It’s interesting that you ask that now because we are in the middle of planning for 2025 and beyond. And if you look at our trajectory, I started the business in 2011, incorporated it in 2015. We sold to SANDOW in 2018, so that was November of 2018, so just pre-pandemic. We only had a little over a year under our belt before the pandemic hit. And so much has changed. I think we could argue that what the pandemic did was accelerate a lot of change that was already happening. But it has been this frenzy pace of, oh my god, there are so many questions, so big questions and people are so hungry for data in a way that in this industry they never have been before, that we were just almost like kids in a candy shop. I don’t want to negate the challenges of that time period, but it was a really exciting time period for ThinkLab because there was so much change to study and translate and share back. And I think as we look at 2025, we are actually really slowing down and we are looking at all of the information that we have collected in our six years as part of SANDOW, and we are actually diving back in to say, yes, we hacked this in 2020, but a lot of shit has changed since then. Can I say ‘shit’ on your podcast?
Amy: Yeah, you can say whatever you want. (Laughter)
Amanda: All right, a lot of shit has changed since then. So what questions do we still have about that? Just because we hacked it once doesn’t mean it’s solved. We’re really looking for thought leaders in the industry to kind of join us in 2025 in that ‘test and proof’ mode. We still have big questions; we’re going to get the industry on board to start researching those questions with us. But I think who is going to be joining us in 2025 are really going to be those leaders that are starting to tell their stories about how they have invested, how they have changed, what they have done in response to this immense change that’s happened. And really join us in diving a layer deeper in this onion to really answer, we’ve got eight key questions for the industry that we’ll be answering in 2025 and so I would encourage any of your listeners that want to get involved, either as a participant of that research, or as a sponsor of that research, if you want a front row seat, or as someone who has got really interesting things to give us as a case study, a demonstrative, like we have solved this, we have figured it out that we can inspire the industry with. I would encourage you to reach out through our website, https://thinklab.design. You can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, I am a big LinkedIn’r, so follow me there if you’re not, it’s just Amanda Jean Schneider is my tagline on LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you. I would love to discuss how you could join us on our journey for 2025 and beyond.
Amy: You’re beautiful! You’re brilliant!
Amanda: Yay!
Amy: I love it! Follow this work. And I’m so excited that we connected and got to chat today and you got to demystify it a little bit for me. It’s like so fun to talk to someone who is so smart and who is so deeply invested in continuing to ask the big questions.
Amanda: It’s really an interesting time to be doing this and I will say especially because we’re both related to the media side of the industry, and like media, research is something that fewer and fewer people want to pay for, but if you’re not sponsoring this research and funding the work that we’re doing, when it comes from a private party it is often filtered and nuanced for the goals of that organization. So I think the beautiful thing about ThinkLab is our industry neutrality where we don’t have an agenda that we’re pushing. Our goal is to really… from a very neutral perspective, get this insight out to the world to allow people to action on it and give them that context that they need to make the smartest business decisions, the smartest world impact decisions that they can.
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. For a transcript of this episode, and more about Amanda, including images and links to her articles and research work - head to our website - cleverpodcast.com. While you’re there, check out our Resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners and sponsors. And sign-up for our free substack newsletter - which includes news, announcements and a bonus q&a from our guests. If you like Clever, we could really use your support: - share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, support our sponsors, and DO hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and X - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers.Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround podcast network. Visit surroundpodcasts.com to discover more of the Architecture and Design industry’s premier shows.
Recording Design Nerds Anonymous podcast.
NYC Design Hackathon.
Amanda on the TEDx stage in Fargo.
Atlanta Design Hackathon.
Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.
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