LCI Lean in Design Forum Keynote Speaker Spotlight: An Interview with Eric Cesal
We were thrilled to speak with Eric Cesal, architect, writer, educator, post-disaster expert—and the 2025 LCI Lean in Design Forum keynote speaker! Our conversation focused on the value and evolution of design in a world rapidly changing due to the impact of AI.
Enjoy this sneak peak of Eric’s outlook on the future of design—and don’t miss his inspirational, exciting keynote address at the 2025 Lean in Design Forum, April 30-May 1 in Chicago. Save the date—registration will open soon.
Eric brings a rich background to his outlook on design.
Eric has a varied background including roles as an architect, construction manager, professor, podcast host, writer, disaster responder, humanitarian, and more. He’s led on-the-ground reconstruction programs after the Haiti earthquake, the Great East Japan Tsunami, and Superstorm Sandy.
Eric’s formal training is in architecture, with international development, economics, and design futurism among his areas of expertise. He is currently serving as a special program instructor at the Harvard Extension School.
He noted that the throughline connecting all his roles is his interest in “the value of design.”
Eric is motivated by opportunities to demonstrate the value of design in a changing world.
Eric completed graduate school in 2008 during the recession, and noted that experiences during that time led to “young architects carrying a lot of insecurities about how design is valued in the world.” He added, “A lot of my work is an attempt to demonstrate and argue for the value of design. Another thread is social impact and humanitarian work which is kind of a family trade. I was a humanitarian before I was any of those other things. It was part of my upbringing. My motivation flows out of these things.”
He continued, “I respond to challenges and incidents where there is an opportunity to speak to the value of design, or to+ help people using design. And specific to AI, which I will be talking about in my keynote, I’m motivated by instances where I see the value of design being threatened, which is the case with AI and this current revolution.”
He will discuss how architecture and design evolve in the larger context and the impact of AI.
Eric noted that he’s still fleshing out ideas for his talk, but plans to speak about how architecture and design evolve in a larger context. He noted that “when we architects get together to talk about AI, we talk about what we are going to do with it, as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. My work focuses more on how AI will shape the world, which then shapes architecture, which we then have to respond to. It’s about the awareness of how AI is changing everything else.”
He also offered, “In disaster work, one encounters a lot of myth-making and one has to do a lot of myth-deconstruction. There are a lot of myths about AI floating around there. If you want to chart positive aspirational futures, you often have to confront your present without the myths. You have to deconstruct the myths and come face to face with the wolf at the door and go from there. That’s how I see the overall profession unfolding alongside AI.”
He continued, “The second part of my address will hopefully be very aspirational—talking about all the amazing things we have to look forward to from the wider scope of humanity and opportunities we have to create a new design profession without the historical baggage we’ve been carrying around.”
He hopes to reframe attendees’ perspectives on AI in design and in the world.
Eric noted, “A lot of architects are looking at the whole AI thing in terms of how do I use AI to do what I am doing faster and cheaper and potentially better? I would like them to come away with a different perspective—how do I use AI to do things that were impossible to do or even imagine before AI? What new skills, capabilities, and work areas will AI enable? How do I reinvent myself and the design profession, knowing this is a permanent part of our human landscape?”
Eric sees a commonality between Lean and AI.
“I’m more excited about Lean by the day as I prepare for my address. I had some familiarity with Lean and studied it at business school but it has not been central to my work. In thinking about the talk, it’s become obvious to me that there‘s a symmetry between Lean and AI itself. Lean is a framework system of collective wisdom. You contribute your wisdom and insights into it, and draw out of the system everyone else’s, as they benefit from yours. The result is a process of continual improvement.
And that’s what AI is doing at the scale of civilization. It’s a technology that was trained on us as humans. Some of what it spits out is incorrect but we are correcting it and we are all in a dialogue now with this new form of intelligence,” Eric noted.
He continued, “Specific to Lean and AI, my overall point is that AI isn’t to be feared. It won’t replace Lean or anything else. It’s an elaboration of the principles of Lean—a tool to amplify the original motivations for creating that structure.”
Designers should engage in conversations about AI at the Lean in Design Forum.
Eric offered, “This is one of the most critical issues of our time. AI is the platform on which we could solve every human problem. It is also a good way to ruin everything including architectural practices. The choices people make in the next year about what and how they are going to adopt AI will shape the future and it will move fast. Answers can be found in dialog and conversation with one’s peers, and that will be one of the most valuable takeaways from the conference.”
Eric discussed AI as part of the big picture in humanity.
When we asked Eric how he sees AI fitting in with other past world events, he talked about the very big picture. And we couldn’t put it any better than Eric, so enjoy his take on it from our conversation:
“There are moments in history when we have to evaluate our place in the cosmos. Before Copernicus, we thought earth was the center of the universe and it wasn’t. That really changed how we saw ourselves. Then Darwin came along. The idea that we were descended from something else was not started by Darwin; that goes back to ancient Greece. But Darwin described the process of natural selection, which meant that Humans are just a point on a continuum that stretches for billions of years. We are not the desired end-product of evolution, as we thought we were. So we had to reframe ourselves again.
At one point, we thought humans were humans because we were the only humans that could use tools and then came Jane Goodall, and we found out that animals use tools too, so we had to redefine what it means to be human again. And now, we thought humans were the only animals with advanced planning intelligence, creativity, higher orders of intelligence—and we’re not. Machines can now do that.
There were other moments when we had to take a step back and ask ourselves, what does it mean to be human? What is special about us? I have great faith we can do it again since we have multiple times through the millennia. But we can’t cover our eyes and pretend AI isn’t doing what it is doing. We need to think harder about what it means to be human.
A lot of visceral reactions come from this. For people who thought, I can operate this spreadsheet and that’s special to humans, but now you have machines that can do that and much more, you think, if I’m not that, then what am I?
Humans need an identity to understand themselves and when that gets challenged they can get angry. But there’s an opportunity to define ourselves as something more. Maybe intelligence isn’t a trait exclusive to humans, but morality is and we can continue to be the moral intelligence in the universe. That would be worth being proud of. We have to think about it.”
Learn more from Eric in person this spring.
We hope you’re excited to learn more from Eric during his powerful keynote that should spark many interesting conversations—and inspiration for the future—in our Lean design community.
Save the date and stay tuned for the opening of registration for the 2025 Lean in Design Forum, April 30-May 1 in Chicago!