Suhair Khan is the founder of open-ended design – an incubator and platform for creative technologists. She previously led global projects on culture, art and sustainability for Google Arts and Culture, as part of a career which has spanned Google’s new cutting-edge technology products, as well as business strategy. She is also a trustee of the Design Museum in London and has been on many design projects and juries, including the Dezeen Awards, the London Design Biennale, and the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year Prize.
Suhair started her career at Google in California after completing her master’s at Harvard University. She spent over a decade at Google, working in business areas based all over the world. Beyond Arts & Culture, she worked on numerous new initiatives and products at Google – focused on new markets, digital payments, online maps, the very early days of social messaging, global access to the internet, and technology for education.
As Suhair tells DbyW: “I remember those first, let’s say five, six years at Google as a time when there was constant experimentation and I worked with some of the most inspiring people that I’ve ever met. This experience really opened up for me the idea of technology as a hopeful, optimistic force in the world.”
These interests manifest in her work as she sees herself and her practice as “tech-first, but heavily influenced by critical frameworks in decarbonisation and decolonisation in art, design and academia”. She is really interested in value-framing in these new industries, as she tell us, “Technology doesn’t have its own code of ethics – that is framed by corporations and individuals. Most other professions – law, journalism, architecture – do! I find this endlessly fascinating.”
Suhair’s platform open-ended design now focuses on the nexus of creative technology and innovation, launching an AI-focused incubator for creative technologists as well as curated conversations on tech and creativity in 2022. Partners have included Google, WeTransfer, the London Design Festival, and more lined up for this year.
We talked with Suhair to find out more about her inspirational career path, her time at Google Arts and Culture and her plans for open-ended design.
What inspired you to pursue a career in design and technology?
I was recruited by Google over a decade ago, a bit serendipitously while I was living in New York, figuring out whether or not to pursue a Phd in Economics! It has been a very lucky journey since then! I had recently completed a master’s in International Development and I moved from New York to San Francisco and worked with some of Google’s trailblazing business leaders at the time who were looking at everything from self-driving cars to emerging markets and technology. I remember those first, let’s say five or six years at Google as a time of constant experimentation and I worked with some of the most inspiring people that I’ve ever met. They really opened up for me this idea of technology as a hopeful, optimistic force in the world.
Can you tell us a bit more about your time with the Google Arts and Culture team?
What is amazing about Google is that they continue to invest in initiatives that don’t necessarily have to make immediate business sense. And one of them is Google Arts and Culture, which is entirely not for profit, product focused, really aiming to bring more art to the internet. There is no advertising on the platform, which works with museums and cultural institutions around the world in order to share and document art and culture with the mission of making the world’s cultural information accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Google eventually hopes to get as much of the world’s culture as possible online so anyone can visit a museum virtually. It’s not the same as the reality of course, but you can play around with augmented reality galleries, which showcase all of the world’s Vermeer paintings in a room, or you can watch a VR film inside a NASA spaceship. My favourite work there is run by an archaeologist, Chance Coughenour, who leads the work on the preservation of heritage at risk, using digital tools to both capture and recreate ancient or at-risk worlds.
“For me, there’s a lot of joy in continuing to look at experimentation and technology and continuing to find the freedom of building for the sake of building or building for the sake of creativity and technology.”
Can you tell us about a recent project you worked on with Google that you’re proud of?
One of the last products I worked on launching was a Cloud-based platform to help the Fashion industry measure its environmental impact at the raw material stage. I worked on COP26 in Glasgow, it was hugely rewarding. 70% of the estimated impact of the fashion industry is at the raw material stage. You might assume that it happens in distribution or manufacturing or packaging, but actually it’s at the raw material stage. There’s an opportunity to initiate better practices on the ground, which will hopefully eventually help everyone from cotton pickers in Bangladesh to sheep farmers in New Zealand.
At the very least, it’s going to provide a new kind of information portal and resource to anyone around the world, including students. We hope to make an impact in the discourse on a more sustainable future. A lot of the bigger fashion companies are already measuring their environmental PNL, and this will potentially slot into their existing formulas and algorithms. And for those who are not, it’s going to provide a set of tools and resources to figure out how they might use this data as they build out their organisations and think about being more environmentally aware.
What inspired you to start the open-ended design platform?
In 2020, I taught a class at the Architectural Association on culture and technology. Some of the things we talked about were how over the years creativity and technology can engage with people, telling stories at Google Arts and Culture, how some of the creative teams at Google have thought about bringing machine learning into cultural experience and looking at the future through the lens of technology. In devising this short course, I realised that I hadn’t been connecting directly with demographics outside of my own sphere in the way that I should have done.
I had this incredible class of 15 students, undergrads, based around the world. And it was this moment during the pandemic, we were all scattered across our various countries, and the idea of home became really confusing for each of us as we tried to find a safe space. All of us just wanted to imagine existing in a place that felt a little bit better, a little bit safer, and a little bit kinder. And so, I started to have very specific conversations with friends, colleagues, and people I’ve met over the years asking: What does it mean to be an activist today? Activism is a very loaded term, and I don’t personally have a single definition. But I do think there’s a difference between building a platform and building something that has some kind of political energy behind it.
“Activism is a very loaded term, and I don’t personally have a single definition. But I do think there’s a difference between building a platform and building something that has some kind of political energy behind it.”
It wasn’t just conversations between me and my colleagues, but conversations with people from different backgrounds, different professional disciplines, and most importantly, different age groups and social backgrounds. You don’t necessarily always get that in your professional space. So that’s how I ended up launching open-ended design as a platform outside of Google. What it is right now is a community of creative practitioners and technologists working across disciplines. And our goal is to spotlight and connect innovators in culture, and technology from all around the world. Each of them will come from a unique background. Most of them, you would say, are people you might not have heard from before. And the overarching mission driven behind their work has some positive social or environmental impact.
” What it is right now is a community of creative practitioners and technologists working across disciplines. And our goal is to spotlight and connect innovators in culture, and technology from all around the world.”
How do you think we can use design and technology to make positive societal change?
Through open-ended design I’ve recently been having conversations with technologists who are running their own companies and who are not based in Silicon Valley. Esra’a al Shafei has been based in the Middle East for almost her entire life and has established a series of tech platforms that look at activism through the Internet, such as an online platform that allowed voices of dissent to share photos and videos during the Arab Spring at a time when governments were blocking content online. She is one example of a technologist who uses her platform to have a positive impact. Sertac Tasdelen, a Turkish friend of mine based in Istanbul created Faladin, which is an app that uses artificial intelligence to generate coffee cup fortunes for people across the Middle East. My former colleague, Tilek Mamutov, is now working with entrepreneurs and technologists and computer coders in Central Asia to get them jobs at big tech companies.
The reason I’m listing these people is I think one of the big issues with leaning only on the world’s big tech companies to make the world better is that we’re then not looking at the diversity that technology needs. It needs data and information, users and audiences, coders and developers that are not based in just a few countries in the world. Technologists again, are not just men of a certain ethnicity based in certain parts of the world. If you don’t have people developing technology and working in outside the usual spaces, you will never have a perspective on what it means to build for everyone – for there to be less bias in data, less bias in artificial intelligence algorithms.
”If you don’t have people developing technology and working in outside the usual spaces, you will never have a perspective on what it means to build for everyone – for there to be less bias in data, less bias in artificial intelligence algorithms.”
I think all tech companies have a responsibility to support movements for social justice, investing in businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals and of course cultural institutions from around the world. And equally for culture. How can we be really thoughtful about how we represent culture from outside of the west? Maybe not every culture has an art museum and that isn’t necessarily relevant in every country in the world. But every culture has architecture. Every culture has design. Every culture has religion. Some countries have sports as part of the national culture. Others have food, fashion… And so how can we be sensitive and thoughtful? We’re living in a time of very rapid change. We owe it to ourselves to pause and to think. And I think if tech companies lean into this, it’s good for all of us.
Any exciting open-ended design projects that you’d like to share with us?
We were proud to be part of the London Design Festival’s official programme and collaborate with the founder Ben Evans and his team; and to celebrate London as the world’s cultural hub of creativity and entrepreneurship. At KOKO, we brought an incredible group of cultural leaders together in a shared space. We hope this will spark new conversations and encourage change.
Technology & Design Lab at London Design Festival is the first iteration of a forward-looking cultural experience. The mission was to connect visionary creatives and technologists, to catalyse, seed and build around new ideas. There is a need for spaces to foster a shared language between technology and design, two often siloed disciplines. Open-Ended design asks the question: “In an age of disruption and innovation: where do we go next?”
Through a series of conversations and performances, participants had a front-row seat to the dreams, challenges, and projects at the forefront for London’s futurists. Speakers included innovators from tech and the creative industries, with a lens of cross-disciplinary collaboration, speculative creative outcomes and hybrid realities. Featuring Es Devlin, Tom Dixon, Arthur Mamou-Mani, Freya Murray, Jefferson Hack and others.
What do you think are the most important qualities for a successful career as a Creative Strategist?
Being flexible, being open to ideas, being curious, and working across silos.
Are there any barriers or challenges that you have faced during your career and how have you overcome them?
Often being the only woman in tech and seeing no women leaders – I’ve had only one female manager – and have felt passed over for promotion! I’ve overcome this by fighting for what I believe in, having a voice and speaking up.
Do you have any advice for women and underrepresented creatives looking to advance their career in design?
More than ever, having conversations around what is that thing? What drives you? What is the positive moment on the outside of your work that inspires you, that connects you to your professional life?
Also, reach out for support. Ask for help. It will come. I seek out opinions and guidance and support all the time! For me connecting with others is enriching and empowering. I leave with ideas, validation, clarity, and if nothing else, a nice chat.
I don’t limit myself to a particular group of people, but I’ve found my connections have felt strongest and friendships have evolved with those I think of as “my people” – young, diverse, open, and growing in their careers – leaning on one another for support and love.
“Ask for help. It will come. I seek out opinions and guidance and support all the time! For me connecting with others is enriching and empowering. I leave with ideas, validation, clarity, and if nothing else, a nice chat.”