EP. 70 AI AND THE NEW DATA CANVAS OF CREATIVE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE with Samar Younes, Founder SAMARITUAL

ABOUT SAMAR YOUNES:

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samaryounes/

Websites:

bio.site/samaritual
www.samaritual.com

Bio:

Samar Younes is a Beirut-born hybrid artist, futurist, and creative catalyst whose work embodies a transcultural approach. As the visionary behind SAMARITUAL, a multidisciplinary creative studio, she weaves multidimensional narratives at the intersection of humanity, technology, and nature. With over 20 years of experience as an artistic director and brand strategist, Samar blends generative AI with artisanal craftsmanship and ancestral wisdom to create immersive experiences that challenge stereotypes and envision nuanced futures.

A Central Saint Martins alumna, Samar's work explores global south futures, otherworldly narratives, and interspecies harmonies through three interconnected spheres: Creator, Catalyst, and Cultivator. As a Creator, she crafts visionary artworks and installations that blur the lines between art, fashion, and architecture. In her Catalyst role, she provides strategic foresight and cultural alchemy for organizations navigating our evolving world. As a Cultivator, she nurtures future creativity through her Imaginalogy hybrid future edu lab, empowering individuals with tools and perspectives to thrive in an ever-changing creative landscape in the age of AI.

Samar's transcultural perspective allows her to seamlessly integrate diverse cultural influences, creating a unique aesthetic and transcultural language symbiotic to her diasporic and third culture experience. Using a neuroaesthetic lens, she celebrates kaleidoscopic identities that resist binary categorizations. Through SAMARITUAL, Samar fosters interconnectedness, radical imagination, and visionary world-building, inviting us to participate in crafting inclusive, sustainable narratives that bridge ancestral wisdom with speculative futures.

 

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

Well here we are…SEASON 6…our 70th episode. And we’ve had some great interactions in the first 69. 

This season will be no less engaging.

In the coming weeks we’ll have artists, architects, authors and educators. We dig into tech issues with people who make crafting a digital future their lives work. Scientists who will expand our understand of the way we work and how the environments around us work on us. 

These dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

In this 70th episode I talk with Samar Younes is a Beirut-born hybrid artist, futurist, and creative catalyst whose work embodies a transcultural approach. 

Samar blends generative AI with artisanal craftsmanship and ancestral wisdom to create immersive experiences that challenge stereotypes and envision nuanced futures.

First though, a few thoughts…

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At the core of this podcast is the idea of fostering “dynamic dialogues on data DATA” an acronym to include Architecture, Design, Technology and the Arts. 

Of course, the idea of talking about DATA is that it's a double entendre that allows me to dive into subjects about the impact that a data-driven society has on a myriad aspects of our human experience. 

Since writing my book “Retail Revolution: Why creating right brain stores will shape the future of shopping in a digitally driven world,” I've had a persistent interest in studying how technological advances are reshaping the way we interact with each other and the world around us.  

The impact on various industries - commercial enterprises like the retail and hospitality worlds where I have built a 30 year career. And I've often chosen to discuss how artists and creators of all kinds can wield this amazing tool of data as a new medium for the creation of places where we can interact and connect in relevant ways. 

At both a city level or small footprint retail store level, I've looked at how digital technologies have grown beyond touch screen interfaces and wayfinding devices to fully immersive environments that deeply affect the way we experience a brand, a product assortment, entertainment venues, a night out for dinner a hotel museums or libraries…the list could go on.

In many of my discussions with guests in previous seasons, when we've talked about the emergence of digital technologies, there have been the obvious concerns about how AI and super intelligence could begin to replace humankind.

While I don't discount the possibility of those dystopian views being possible, I've tended to land on the side of thinking about technology and its extraordinary capacity for creating and making - or for ‘making right,’ some of the things that design, even though some of the things that we have designed into the world have been extremely successful in supporting human advancement, have resulted in other challenges that we now face like the global climate crisis. 

We've looked at how technologies have been used for pure entertainment as well as applying technology to new approaches in farming. We’ve had guests with whom I have talked about how technological advancements in neuroscience have allowed us to understand more about how the human brain's capacity to spontaneously create, as in a jazz improvisation, and how that is even possible. 

Across the 70 episodes that we've published we've intentionally cut across a wide range of subjects. That has been intentional because I happen to believe that everything is connected to everything - that we live in a world of intricate interdependencies where nothing exists in a vacuum and everything in some way either directly, physically, or energetically impacts everything else.

And so, when we talk about things like artificial intelligence, we don't do that in a vacuum either. My guests tend to understand the interrelationship of these extraordinary advances in technologies and that they are derived from a human hand or a human brain.

This idea of the touch of a hand is important to me because I've always believed that there's something magical in making.

That one of the clear defining features of humankind is that we are makers - that we make things that make other things.

I've said this often before - birds make nests and so do the great apes but they don't make nests that create other nests on their own.

I think that when we look at AI, there's often this idea that artificial intelligence is this deep dark cold entity. Perhaps we tend to paint it that way in dystopian movies the capture our imagination and our strange propensity for thinking about destroying ourselves - but I'd rather talk about how artificial intelligence and the hand of the artisan can collaborate to make things that have never existed before and how that collaboration is a critical component to envisioning the new possible.

If you begin to interact with things like ChatGPT and Dall E or Mid Journey, creating visualizations of things that you initially write as prompts, you begin to see what is possible from machines hallucinating but the even those outputs don't exist entirely on their own. They require a human to start the ball rolling. 

Sitting a the keyboard, I need to be able to initially imagine something and then write a text-based prompt that will effectively give instructions to the AI upon which it builds an imaginary reality.

And so, it's not exactly true that there is some robotic process at work entirely devoid of emotion and feeling when using Ai tools as way to generate inspiration. 

We can introduce emotion - one of our foundational human qualities - into Ai created content and see what emerges from the machine when asked to represent the emotional experience of a place or things. 

Ask Mid Journey to create a light blue box and it will do a spectacular job. Ask the ai to create a visual representation of the emotions felt when opening a gift from Tiffany and that‘s an entirely different output.

We can infuse the prompts with emotional content and when we do, the output can be really fascinating. 

I think we've often turned to art and in its many forms as expressions of emotion. Sometimes the things that we can't put into words are somehow better expressed through dance, music, painting or other graphic visualizations. And yet when we think about places of human experience it seems that art is often considered decorative rather than part of the strategy.

Now… I know that that's not entirely true and cannot be used as a sweeping generalization because certainly there is architecture that in its detailing is considered high art and that the artful design of places it is very much part of the overall experience.

Think of places created for the purpose of the enactment of religious rituals or other public or cultural institutions.  

Remember the Mies van der Rohe quote “God is in the details.”

I think there is something magical and mystical about the maker who take materials and transforms them into places and things that have not been before. And now we have new materials in our palette of things to use. 

Data is a new medium, yet it doesn’t exist alone in the tool box. When we combine “hand intelligence” with artificial intelligence, the skill of the craftsman with the collective intelligence of the masses, we are in for some really interesting creative futures.

This is where my guest Samar Younes comes into the story…

Samar Younes is a Beirut-born hybrid artist, futurist, and creative catalyst whose work embodies a transcultural approach. 

As the visionary behind SAMARITUAL, a multidisciplinary creative studio, she weaves together multidimensional narratives at the intersection of humanity, technology, and nature. 

With over 20 years of experience as an artistic director and brand strategist, Samar blends generative AI with artisanal craftsmanship and ancestral wisdom to create immersive experiences that challenge stereotypes and envision nuanced futures.

Samar explains that her work explores otherworldly narratives, and interspecies harmonies through three interconnected spheres: Creator, Catalyst, and Cultivator. 

As a Creator, she crafts visionary artworks and installations that blur the lines between art, fashion, and architecture. 

In her Catalyst role, she provides strategic foresight and cultural alchemy for organizations navigating our evolving world. 

As a Cultivator, she nurtures future creativity through her Imaginalogy hybrid future edu lab, empowering individuals with tools and perspectives to thrive in an ever-changing creative landscape in the age of AI.

When seeing Samar’s work, I am transported to a new place where imagination plays. She is a creativity maven who wields the tools and touch of an artisan and the deftness of a data scientist in making the new possible. 

I was lucky to sit down with her at the SHOP Marketplace show to talk about the worlds of artisan craft and its new creative partner in artificial intelligence…

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ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites:  https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.