Day of Design: George Hakim

The second speaker I attended for Day of Design was George Hakim, a Creative Project Manager at Toyota of America. I was interested in this talk because I know how important storytelling is for a business, but also because another field I am interested in is animation, which is big on storytelling. Hakim gave a brief introduction and said that he came from a background in graphic design and worked at many different places before ending up at Toyota. He then went on to describe some history of storytelling, in that we have been telling stories since the beginning of time. With developments in technology, we began to see new avenues of storytelling. One of the most recent and important ones being virtual reality. After this, he showed us a short clip from a TED talk describing the Golden Circle as a method of thinking. The speaker in this video described how the average person thinks of the what, then the how, and finally the why. He said that the difference between these people and successful, inspired leaders was their thought process. He gave Apple as an example and said that great companies like these think of the why, then the how, and then the what. The ultimate message of this video was that people buy "why" you do what you do. George Hakim then went on to say that Toyota uses this thinking process and goes even further by asking "why" five times to find out the core message of the product. He then explained some different important terms they use at Toyota. The first was "hoshin" which means goal. They pay a lot of attention to the big picture. The next term was "muda" which means waster. Hakim said that they wanted to be able to explain to a non-technical person what they were going for and to avoid inaccessibility. Another term he described was "genchi genbutsu" which meant to go and see or to get to the source. At Toyota they always research the history of whatever they are doing to better understand it. After he explained these terms he went on to show a commercial for the 2014 Toyota Corolla (which I'm pretty sure I've been to the filming site of, as a side note). He used the commercial to explain that when marketing to people they wanted to keep in mind their target audience. For this commerical in particular, the appeal was supposed to be to a younger audience and to highlight that the car never goes out of style. While they wanted to attract a potential new audience, they also wanted to maintain their current audience. Hakim said that Toyota was all about customer first, and that that drove all of their decisions. The other core component of Toyota was "kaizen" which means continual improvement. After talking about this, he went into their process of development at Toyota which is to ideate, create, test, refine, repeat. Another way this was described was to plan, do, check, act, then repeat. What I found interesting about this was that it was very similar to Alexander Reyna's description of the process at MLB. What this says to me, is that it is likely a consistent process throughout much of the industry, so it is definitely something to keep in mind. While I found all of the talk interesting, the most interesting part was when Hakim talked about the Kiki/ Bouba effect. I actually wish that he would've gone more into this, however what he did say about it really interested me as it had to do with character creation. Basically this was a theory that people attributed certain characteristics to certain shapes and that more "bad" characters had Kiki shapes than "good" characters, who were mostly made of Bouba shapes. However, the fact that they still take this into consideration made it interesting in this context, nonetheless. Overall, I found George Hakim's presentation to be interesting as I never really thought about what exactly went into storytelling from a company's perspective. His talk definitely gave me some things to think about and I will likely research more about it as I later move into my career.