What If We Trusted You?
Filmed on October 24, 2014, at “Gain: AIGA Design and Business Conference”
About this video
Trust is a basic element of any good relationship either peer-to-peer or business-to-consumer. Yet mistrust is pervasive today. As designers do we encourage or discourage trust in our work? Do the things we design stalk or serve control or enable? How do we consider the ethical implications of our work and advocate for them throughout the design process?
Speaker bio
Over the course of a dozen years as a technology industry analyst Jerry Michalski realized he wasn’t fond of the word “consumer.” Becoming mindful of the word led him to the idea that consumer mass-market capitalism is being replaced by interactions based on trust and authentic relationships. He calls it the Relationship Economy.
In 2010 Michalski launched REX the Relationship Economy eXpedition which brings together change-makers in various industries to determine how these new forces will affect their industries companies and careers—as well as the world. From 1987 to 1998 Michalski was a technology analyst first at New Science Associates then a managing editor of the monthly tech newsletter Release 1.0. Prior to that he was a strategy consultant freight rate clerk and jungle cruise captain.
Michalski works with companies such as Best Buy and Havas Media as well as with nonprofits such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Institute for the Future. He also acts as a technology consultant to startups ranging from Twine and CoTweet to Evernote TheBrain Socialtext and SeedWiki. During the “dot-boom” days he was an advisor to eGroups (now YahooGroups) and Pyra (now Blogger part of Google). He earned a B.A. in economics from the University of California Irvine and an M.B.A. from The Wharton School. Raised in Peru and Argentina he speaks fluent Spanish and German as well as passable French.
