TugTalks Kickoff – Pete Trainor
TugTalks is a task that has been set for us graduates to, once a month, bring a person of interest from outside of the agency in to give a short talk. The main aims of putting these on are to inspire the company. At the end of the week, it will be healthy for people to listen to an inspiring individual to inform them on a subject that they may not know too much about, to stimulate them, give them one last push when their concentration/wits are perhaps wavering.
So on Friday the 18th of November, Pete Trainor found some time is his busy schedule to come in and give us a talk called ‘What is Socrates had Siri?’ Pete is the founder and director of human centred design at Nexus, a company that uses behavioural design & data-driven tech to solve societal issues. He has recently published his debut book Hippo: The Human Focused Digital Book, which went to number one on the amazon internet book charts. It discusses preventing the acceleration of technological advancements from eroding away at our humanity, staying human in an increasingly digital world.
The talk itself was informative and moving, and prompted a plethora of questions from the team. One that provoked lots of dialogue was the issue of using the information off people’s phones to analyse it to benefit society. Whilst this is prohibited by law to be done for psychological purposes, huge companies like Apple or Google do in fact have access to this valuable information so that they are able to market their products successfully.
This made us realise that there is more to marketing than just selling products. It’s a valuable tool that can help to change and improve society.
