Cofounder/Principal, Hatch Duo
Jonathan Thai, an award-winning Bay Area designer, is the co-founder of Hatch Duo, a design firm, Mooed.ai, an AI software venture, and Aggregate, a lifestyle goods e-commerce brand. His acclaimed work in consumer electronics and wearables, alongside collaborations with companies like Hyper X, Sonos, Activision, and Logitech, has earned him international accolades, including the Red Dot and IDEA awards.
Featured in prestigious media like GQ, Mashable, and CBS's "California by Design," Jonathan's innovative designs set industry benchmarks. His diverse expertise extends beyond design into strategic investments in sectors like AI/Data, Food/Health, and Fitness Tech through Hatch Duo, showcasing his dedication to merging design, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Ethics in AI
As the boundaries between human and machine creativity blur, the ethical considerations become increasingly critical. Join our panel of designers and AI experts as we explore how designers must confront this changing landscape. From industry practitioners to software specialists and educators, this diverse panel will challenge the audience to contemplate the implications of AI’s role in shaping the future of industrial design, from regulation to IP protection and beyond.
This discussion will center on the impact of AI on human creativity and decision-making in design, exploring the potential social, industrial, and environmental ramifications of AI-integrated design solutions, raising thought-provoking questions about accountability, bias, and impact on the workforce. An interactive Q&A session with the panelists offers attendees the chance to delve deeper into the nuances of ethics in ID.
Don’t miss this opportunity to stay informed and proactive in navigating the landscape of AI in industrial design. Engage in meaningful discussions and equip yourself with the knowledge needed to navigate the ethical challenges posed by AI, ensuring responsible and forward-thinking practices in industrial design.
Key Takeaways
Jonathan Thai, IDSA is the co-founder with Michael Yim of Hatch Duo, an industrial design and project engineering company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jon and the team at Hatch Duo have many accomplishments to celebrate 2020, despite the ongoing challenges of the pandemic and also with the strong, collective desire to continue to support the ID industry in new, meaningful ways.
“The main source of motivation for 2020 was how impactful we could be: how a small team like ours could utilize social media, design, and teaching to impact the communities we participate in,” Jon says. “Whether that was to serve more Entrepreneurs that were POC, designing for a pandemic support effort, or giving talks to spread our ideas about how to adapt to a changing world of tech/design, we wanted to see how we could be more than just ‘designers.'”
This year, Jon and his team at Hatch Duo ran a GoFundMe campaign to help with their local effort of donating face shields to Santa Clara Kaiser and other surrounding Santa Clara County hospitals. They also put up their DIY accessible face shield design so that anyone could replicate and scale their effort internationally. They put out advice on how to help creative teams transition into a remote setting through videos, blogs, and panel discussions, helping the design community to adapt during the pandemic. They started a YouTube channel to inspire younger designers, entrepreneurs, and others within the design community. They received an IDEA 2020 Featured Finalist recognition for their design and engineering of the AI scribe Robin Healthcare, and they helped Solgaard launch their Bluetooth/solar boombox, designed with upcycled ocean plastics, among many design projects.
And through it all, Hatch Duo survived and stayed profitable in 2020. They were even able to scale their team and invest in four unique hardware startups, using design as capital. “We will publicize some very fun projects soon, including those in robotics, AI, health and wellness, and consumer electronics,” Jon says. “We hope to expand our team and grow this coming year, along with growing our YouTube channel to produce more fun content. We also are hoping to continue finding great entrepreneurs and ventures to invest in. Our goal is to eventually lean into a venture studio business model.”
Personally, Jon says he has been motivated to prove that he belonged in this entrepreneurial space, and that he could sustain the lifestyle and the momentum. More broadly, he has been inspired “by how much impact communities can produce, based on a collective effort to make the world better, whether through Covid support or standing up to racial injustice.”
