Designing the Future: Anne Asensio on Shaping the Metaverse for Sustainability and Innovation

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse.

Anne Asensio:

When I was at GM, nobody understood my willingness to suddenly stop my career as a car designer to come to the ultimate position of being the Head of Design. Especially in the automobile, it's a quest that every designer wants to basically run after.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit.

Marc Petit:

Hello and welcome back, metaverse builders, dreamers, and pioneers. You are listening to Building the Open Metaverse, season five, the podcast that is your portal into virtual worlds and spatial computing. 

My name is Marc Petit, and my co-host, Patrick Cozzi is not with us today. He's flying around the world somewhere between Las Vegas and Tokyo on an important business trip.

As you know, this podcast brings you the people and the projects that are on the leading edge of building the immersive internet of the future, the open and fair metaverse for all.

Today we have a special guest joining us on that mission. Our guest is the acclaimed industrial designer Anne Asensio. She's the Vice President of Design Experience at Dassault Systèmes, and Anne will share insights from her remarkable career at General Motors and now Dassault Systèmes and she'll also share her passions for human-centered design.

Anne, welcome to the show. We're so happy to have you with us today.

Anne Asensio:

Thank you for having me here, Marc.

Marc Petit:

The usual first question in our podcast is to ask you to describe your journey to the metaverse in your own words.

Anne Asensio:

Something that I was basically always passionate about is to design a new world or a better world or a “new, New Worlds,” if I want to take Georges Balandier's quote. As designers, we basically are in the quest of redefining and redesigning our surroundings.

We are always carrying on the willingness to create; and create not just objects. Design is mostly related to designing objects, but in reality, I think we are more keen to change the experience we have as human beings with our surroundings, and how we are living in our environment.

With the extraordinary acceleration of technology, with the internet, and also video games, it suddenly took a completely new light. It's just like suddenly, when you are a designer, you basically get the tools that you were dreaming of to actually going from your virtual ideas that you have in your head, and you can structure those ideas and deliver them to everyone. I found this very exciting.

I have two personal notes about my interaction with the metaverse. The first one is very personal and intimate. I have two sons. They both were completely captured because of the generation with the video games and they both are 3D artists. One worked for Fortiche and is a character animator and he's doing a wonderful career there.

The other one is also a 3D artist after trying a career as a designer. He basically spent his time in the metaverse. He's living in there all day long. So this is my personal connection with the metaverse, my two sons live in it on a daily basis.

The second is how I basically started to get in touch with those technologies, specifically virtual reality because at Renault, early '90s, end of '80s, I would say '87, '89, I was working on a concept called Scenic, and at the time we had a small group of magicians, really magicians, they call themselves in which group, and with those people, I would like to name Bruno Simon that was leading that group and I know you know of him.

We were basically having the very early stage of combining 3D design and representation of 3D into, at the time, the very early stage of the virtual reality world. I remember very crystal clear the first time I saw the concept car Scenic as a digital asset, running and, actually, it's in our archive, we can still see it, on fully artificial ground. It was really very early stage. At the time I was completely fascinated by this experience.

Even if you look at it today, you say, wow, that's really, really, really cheesy. It's just this texturing, it looks like a dead world. It's fully dead. But when you can look back and this was just actually exactly the same image of my sons and what we can do today in the metaverse in video games, with the Vision, with the Oculus, it's just amazing. This has been just in my lifetime, just in that period.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Bruno Simon. I was at TDI at the time and we worked together quite a bit all the way to the Raccoon Project back in, was it '93, I think?

Anne Asensio:

Yeah, '94, '93, '94. But Scenic was really the first one because it was the first show car, actually. It was at the time we called it ZO1 and we also did the Laguna, the ZO2 and the Raccoon was ZO3. Anyway, but just the gap between the Scenic and the Raccoon, it was about two, three years and the gap was huge, just amazing.

The car was in motion in the real environment because that was also what I found very interesting, that level of experimentation in defining what could be a metaverse; today we sometimes think it's a fully CGI environment and it's untrue. I think a metaverse could be defined in multiple ways and we are basically, probably scratching just a surface. It's probably going to be a mix of many, many things and much more of that from what we see today.

Marc Petit:

I want to come back to the Scenic because our audience is from all over the world, and they may not know this French car. But in 1991, you designed that concept car, the Scenic, and it was the first time a car looked like that with bigger windows and more space inside. I would even say that you invented a genre of vehicle that ultimately gave us all the crossovers and the SUV that we have today.

I think you said that you were attracted by automobiles because they are the most complex products ever designed by human beings. Tell us about how you got to design vehicles and actually transformed the design of vehicles.

Anne Asensio:

Basically, I think I was more attracted to the capability that design can do about transforming life, our lives, our everyday life. At the time, being an industrial designer was mostly a male place and when it comes to the car and specifically the automobile, the people who used to design and style the cars were so in love with the automobile and its heritage and patrimoine, they basically didn't have the willingness to change it or to think in an innovative way about what really this type of object is delivering to the people, to the life of people.

At the time I was working on a project, research project for my master’s, which was called Véhicule à Grande Habitabilité. Because I was at the time there was Giugiaro, the Megagamma, there were a lot of studies going on. One that was coming up also with this in '82, they came with the one that today, it was already a small twinkle, small mono space with this very fast windshield. We also had Contini providing us when we started at Renault with this type of vehicle.

I will not say I invented it. I was really... It was in the air du temps. But what was very interesting is it was really a good moment to think about a car from a conceptual standpoint by opening the categories of design, and not just styling what we knew about the category of design, like a three-box car, like a regular sedan or a truck. It was a show car. It was requested by Patrick Le Quément. It was something, an opportunity for me to leverage my studies in school in which I was working on such concepts, and it was also questioning the process.

It was at a time when we were starting to see those first three-dimensional tools. Alias/Wavefront was already around so it was a perfect, I will say, moment to experiment all in one, what could be a new concept for transportation, for mobility?

The Scenic is not just in the genealogy of doing a new concept; it's a moment in time in which many things were converging and Renault was giving to themselves, to the design team, the capability to do it as a laboratory. Laboratory for thinking about the design itself, the architecture of the vehicle.

We had a core team. The contribution coming from multiple expertises was also very unique. In the past, designers were styling, then the engineers were taking the styling and putting it into a blueprint, a very long blueprint, a six-meter long blueprint. They were starting to do small mechanical parts in 3D. It was really very sequential. And the Scenic was probably the laboratory that just became the way to do cars in the future where everything came together. The team was working in a collaborative way, in a co-design approach that was basically the condition for innovation.

The way we were doing the car, the way the car looks and the transformation of the architecture all came together. That's really a moment. You know, when you have something that just comes, in the end of people, it's amazing how we, as just consumers or users or citizens, when something is very strong like today, the metaverse, you can feel that you just have passed a step, that something happens. That you are moving to a new level of inventivity or human ingenuity, I would say.

It's not really egocentric, but I think the Scenic was just a signal of what would become the way we were designing cars in the future, typically using 3D.

Then because of 3D, we were called about how to represent 3D, and how to make decisions; suddenly we were attracted by what was happening in the art and entertainment. Before the car industry didn't have a clue what was going on. Suddenly the entertainment and the car came together, and I was just having and starting my career at that moment.

The metaverse really, to me, started when we had those big huge screens in which we were able to see virtual representations of real things that meant real design. I remember very well, and I didn't realize it at the time but I realize now, that I was ready to take risks. Because as a woman, nobody would've expected me to actually be fully compliant. They were always kind of, she's a woman, what kind of design she's going to be doing?

When I was at GM, nobody understood my willingness to suddenly stop my career as a car designer. When you had to imagine that for a man, especially a designer, to come to the ultimate position of being the head of design, especially in the automobile, is a quest that every designer wants to basically run after.

When I got to that position, I just quit. They didn't get it. I said, "Have you gone back to France to work for Dassault?" It's because at the time I was working on the Sequel, full-size car, with Bob Lutz and the electrical car, the second electrical car that GM was doing. The first one was Insight. That was a long time ago.

I realized by working back with people in California, Bran Ferren from Applied Minds, that was a former Disney Imagineer designer, that there will be a possibility to do much more if I just get away from the car industry which was very much entrenched in the traditional design processes, very unusual. By moving in a virtual design company, there will be more possibility to actually reflect on the way to do design and to do design leveraging what is coming. That means those virtual tools and go beyond, basically taking the responsibility to design those tools and not just being behind the computer and using them as tools.

Actually, that's the term we use. Software tools, solutions. But nobody's looking at those tools as a space for thinking in which we will be living.

That is really the mission of a designer, thinking about the world. But if the world that was really becoming unreal, that means virtual, or if we call it virtual, where are the designers designing those worlds? That's really where I shifted myself.

I came to Dassault Systèmes, met Bernard Charlès, and I said, "I will be designing experiences." We were designing experiences at GM but they were brand experiences as luxury brands are doing also. You have to keep and design the DNA of your brands by leveraging not just the product but the surroundings. The total of, I will say, touchpoints that you want to give to your customer.

I felt so enclosed in doing those experiences because they were just for the purpose of selling cars, and I found this a reduction of the capability of what a designer can do.

We can design worlds. Every designer wants to design worlds and the things that go in it and the people interacting in it. Coming to Dassault Systèmes at the time I thought maybe there would be a possibility to execute that dream.

Marc Petit:

You arrived at GM in 2000. I mean, the New York Times wrote an article on it. I don't know if you remember that. People might not know that cars like the Camaro were actually the head of design was a woman. It was a big thing for GM and I think you were very successful.

Before we go back to that, you managed a lot of firsts in your career. What do you think enabled you to take on this leadership role, and at a very young age as well?

Anne Asensio:

We're operating in a world in which nobody was expecting a woman to succeed, okay? In some ways, you have nothing to lose. That's the first thing. I probably didn't have second thoughts when I was having the conviction I should run, I should do it. I was not questioning myself too many times. I was just running.

Also, I think it's my character. I think people who are around me are telling me when you get something in, I mean, it's probably one of the characteristics of people. I'm not afraid of failing or I'm not afraid of maybe something more important, losing credits. I think what restrains people from making and taking risks is mostly because they are looking too much or too concerned about what people may think about what they are doing or too much concern about what people think.

I am absolutely not concerned about what people think. So that just gives me a lot of freedom and I think it's a condition for doing those first, as you say. I was lucky. I guess I was lucky. People said there is no such thing as luck. You probably are provocating the luck.

I'm passionate. I'm really passionate about what I'm doing. I'm being so fortunate to only do what I like. I've never felt or if it came to me where I felt I get a little bit like not having the possibility to get to the next step, and the next step doesn't mean upper. The next step means to the place in which there may be a reason for me to be there and give sense or meaning to what I'm doing.

I didn't know I was doing it; It just happened. It just happens.

But back to the first. It's funny that we are getting back to the Scenic but the Scenic was a competition in design, the way it works. The head of design at the time, Patrick Le Quément, provoked all of the designers. He says, "We are going to do the first show car ever for Renault." At the time he was calling it the Mini-Max.

That was something that because we did the Espace; the Espace was already such a success that we wanted to capitalize on being the first ever, knowing that the V34 was also presented at Chrysler and Chrysler did the Voyager at the same time, but it was the same Matra idea that was presented both at Chrysler and at Renault.

Renault did really the Matra Espace. When he came, he asked every designer to come up with ideas and come up with sketches and I'd been selected. I could have missed that opportunity. It could have been Jean-Pierre Ploué who had been selected because we were just lining up all those friends. We’re still very much friends today. But Le Quément says, "Well, for this project maybe I came up with so many." He says, "Anne will be the designer."

Again, I was just very early on in my career, I just came back from a big project that I was doing in the US that was a Jeep Junior that was also in '87, '88, '89; that basically stopped in '90 because the joint venture failed. I was having just my first project already giving me some confidence about what I was doing. He was a very successful guy and if he shows up as a GP much later on in the market, but I would have built a little bit of an esteem, and I'd been selected.

I was just 27 years old and it was a show car and it was one of the first show cars Renault ever made. I was really fortunate to just be on that window. If the car would have been bad, people would just have remembered me, oh yes, yes, this woman at Renault, well, you remember the car.

Yes, you can be given a chance but you also need to get this chance, and it's like you get the ball but you need to make the try and then your career gets launched.

Also, I need to say Patrick Le Quément gave me later on a big responsibility when I was just 30. I was the director of the small and mid-size car. He trusted me and gave me that. It was probably because I was also, I think I've never been just a stylist. I think something else. Basically, we're designing cars, but I think my quest is not about cars. It's about design and changing the world by design. That's why I changed my career.

Marc Petit:

How far are we from the dream technological platform for a designer like you?

Anne Asensio:

We are really reaching now to a level at which we can even excite our eyes beyond what any human being has ever been excited about. Now the concern I have is the accessibility of those technologies. In a way, my concern is actually more on the human and social and societal areas.

Teaching a kid to draw is what I do to my sons and also to every young person and younger kids in my family, to me is an essential capacity for being able to understand how your body will interact with the world whatever it is, physical or virtual, doesn't matter.

The brain is an important tool that we own to actually interact with the real world. Whether virtual, real, or hybrid doesn't matter. What is happening, what just concerns me is the language in which we talk to these technologies. We sometimes shortcut and don't take enough respect for what is coming from a human body that basically hasn't evolved much for the last 3,000 years. The extreme capability, you see where I'm going, wherever the prompt or the abstraction 01, 01, the calculation that basically pushes us, designers or humans, to an area in which we should not go.

The technology by itself, it's one thing. What we need is to create an interface toward those technologies in which we respect the fact that we are made of flesh, made of tactile capability; by the way, the metaverse will be successful when we find exactly the right comfortable but also accessible. Accessible not just because of access but acceptable interface.

I’ll give you an example. I was just on my flight back from Korea sitting near a young, she was basically 12 or 13 years old. She had her tablet, a small tablet and she was drawing and you cannot imagine how fast she was drawing. She was drawing, then zooming all of those gestures you have on the tablet to go switch, add layers, come back, put, and so on. She was putting depth on those layers that are 2D. That was almost when she was narrowing down, and she was so agile, I mean fingers. But she was drawing as I do on the paper, but at the same time she was basically developing a full array of gestures with that technology that was just as flat and that pen and the way she was turning and getting in that metaverse of drawing.

I was looking at that, and I was saying we are just at the beginning and I think if we go and if we work very hard to maintain and respect this quality of interaction between our brain and what we want to say, what we want to design and those virtual manifestations of our creation, we will be in a very nice future.

Marc Petit:

When you look at AI, generative AI, and using text and voice as input, do you think that could help with the democratization of access?

Anne Asensio:

Drawings and readings are, I mean, text has been what institute the humans, I mean, they say it's by language that we institute, and that's actually a very interesting topic for deeper research. We only talk about the prompt, the prompts that are basically text, but texts are not just text. Texts are the symbolization of the previous image because the text, the alphabet, come from images. That was basically a way for humans to actually find a way to translate to another human, the world they see.

We all see subjectively the world we see. The text was just this nice long extreme conversation about the invention of communication among humans. The fact that we are right now through the text control worlds, sounds to me just like a nice return on back where we are. That's why I'm just hoping to make sure that prompting and defining worlds, will still be in this, I call it a practice of singularity and not a practice of generality.

You know where I'm going, but I agree completely with your words. I mean, I'm just working on your words, open, fair, interoperable, but also pulling the creation at the center, and creation doesn't mean it's only sketches.

I also write. I write a lot. I think the fact that we are focusing on keeping our young to be still alert and read and write and being able to actually imagine by word and text, a world to me is the same thing as sketching. It's just one of the many means humans have invented to institute a place in which we can live together.

Don't forget the laws are being created by text. We can imagine quite nicely that the world could be just what technology gives us instead of having a book, we get a three-dimensional world. So what? It's our inventivity. The most important thing is not what the technology will offer because it will offer a wonderful thing, it is who is scripting that world.

Who is writing those words? If it's still us as human beings, it's fine. The danger would be that someone does and writes the world for us.

Marc Petit:

I never thought about it this way.

Anne Asensio:

You know, when you are a designer, you are always navigating between narratives because a designer, when you are designing an experience, you basically create the experience. It's a scenario. It's exactly like doing a scenario for a game design or a scenario for a movie actually. And you know exactly since now most of the manifestation of my design is no longer a physical object like a car or a very complex, but something that will be only presented as a first presentation.

I'm not saying a re-presentation because it's the first time it’s being presented; the first presentation in a virtual universe. It leads to this question that is first and foremost a script scenario.

Before we engage on coding, because coding, you need to even if now we have AI that just will help us to code in the blink of an eye before we were coding, you still need to know what to code and what to code. We use a lot of video actually.

I have a filmmaker. The first thing I did when I came to Dassault Systèmes, I said the kind of designer I need is a real editor, someone who knows how to transform a script into a video in which we basically create our first hardware of the scenario, and because it's very quick to do a video sometime piecemeal video and then we can code. But now we're probably going to skip that. Basically, we skip the video with the prompt and the artificial intelligence right now.

What is also very amazing is all the assets that we are working on now are becoming our library. What is quite amazing is the second aspect of the role of a designer is curation. When you have a pile of, it's like a cook, okay, you have the fridge, you want to make a nice meal, you have to select which ingredients. The curation as we do when we do an exhibit, an installation or a design proposition of an experience, it's all about curation.

Those metaverses, they are crying for curation. It's not just like a collection of assets that you put in it; you have decorators, designers for those virtual things, or luxury brands. They all do that kind of retail, beautiful branded experience. But as often I would say, it's lack of curation, it's lack of the spirited expression of the subjectivity or particular creator. They think about the creator that is being translated into this retail, but they forget that the retail itself is a medium for creation.

Curation is going to be probably one of the keys to all of design within those metaverses. Basically, designers will have to know how to write. They're going to have to know how to be and translate the imagination into traditional mediums that are basically now exactly what you need with those artificial intelligences. Interactor, I could call them interactor, to define the work. And by the way, those metaverses that we are designing right now are dynamic. They are not just like a steel representation.

People think, oh okay, we are going to be in copy-paste. I'm thinking Assassin’s Creed where you have to set up your game design in Florence or wherever. They are not such a thing. I mean, we can do that. It's still very cool because of the music, but it's very fashionable and literal. What is really fun is to actually imagine a world in which basically you are in interaction with, and we know that it's already happening.

The world is being configured to your own. It could even be your humor. Okay, today I want to be happy, or today I want to, and the world will be just because we see it already. We are doing it, we are using it. But this will be very selfish if we just imagine the world for our own pleasure, comfort, and entertainment.

What I see and what I get to the WDO topic is that those worlds are becoming an incredible level for the challenges of the world that we are living in today. Because we have to change everything; we have to change our industry and the way we consume our behaviors as human beings, and there is no way we can change if we cannot see the impact of that change. We need evidence that if we take those kinds of directions in the way we are designing products, recycling is definitely no longer the topic. Even to reimagine the full industry is not enough.

We need to change the way we interact with all of the things we do. That means design becomes really the core of it. In this case, those virtual worlds have to be just as many simulation tryouts. We call it digital twinning, but right now, they are still very rational. They are here to improve by slower incremental parameters.

The way we can slowly transition to maybe improve our CO2 footprint or anything. But designers can go right away to what may be a desirable world, an incentive world, and this is much more than just trying to see how the finance will run in the metaverse or how we will buy our goods in the metaverse. This is really too much in today's world.

Marc Petit:

Let's unpack a little bit because this is fascinating.

The WDO, the World Design Organization, and you're one of the pillars of that organization, I remember you gave a presentation. You talked about plastic and how plastic defined multiple generations of consumerism and would design become the art of making things you actually don't really need.

Now I really like how you're using the technology and this intersection of design technology and sustainability to propose something else. Tell us about the mandate of WDO.

Anne Asensio:

The WDO had been created in '53 by a French guy, Jacques Vienot. He was one of the founders with others, and they gathered as industrial designers looking at how to improve by design. I mean, the mandate is really to improve the world because they were of the discipline of the Bauhaus philosophy. Bauhaus meaning, Bauhaus, construit la maison, house, but house is the planet. It's not just the house.

Bauhaus is how to construct and work and define and shape the world we live in, the world considered as the habitability of the human. That means the Earth.

The WDO today is an organization that is accredited by the UN, and we follow the roadmap of the 17 SDGs in which we have a clear mandate to improve the world in those 17 areas such as water consumption, reducing poverty, accessibility to education, ocean acidity, and so on. All of those SDGs and it's today a very large amount of a mix of design entities. That could be first the schools, the design schools, research labs, academics; those represent almost half.

Then you speak with professional promotional of design and also newcomers like the corporate companies that are willing to basically leverage design in transforming themself and the cities. Cities are a new pillar, as I was describing, because the city is basically not an object. It's probably the perfect playground for us to imagine the condition of how we would be living together because of a concentration of people in one particular location and knowing that that's where we will be living and most people will be living on earth in cities.

We have to consider cities as the playground for what may be the way we can, plus it also calls for rural areas because we have to think about how we get the food from one place to the cities and the people in the cities.

Anyway, WDO is really good in helping to give to a global stage the possibility for every designer everywhere in the world to understand the best of art, of what could be good design public policies. Public policy is the way we will be living tomorrow. That's why we put the regulation in place. But those public policies are basically being pushed by a proposition, coming maybe from citizens in democratic countries, but also have to be creative about those public policies.

I proposed to the WDO to leverage. I became basically the first data strategy officer at WDO because before, they were basically keen to protect the process of design. The way design is basically approaching with a human-centered approach, healthcare service or good product. And here I was telling them that they have to be ahead of time and understand that they basically have data, and that data will be just and could be transformed through those metaverse and through those digital twins, the actionable solution, technical solution for them to demonstrate how we can measure the impact of design.

We are starting now to put in some programs like the Protopolis that I mentioned in Bengaluru, the convergence of the design, best of art, best processes and approach and technology of metaverse.

And I hope that we will be able to have more and more designers willing to improve the world we live in, to maybe tackle those challenges with climate change, with the issues of like you described, the end of the plastic era that was basically running from the '60s that was basically completely exploding because of design.

And now we have to just reverse the situation to go back to a much more decent approach of goods and packaging and anything. How do we do that? Well, because the metaverse could help us to actually see how alternatives could basically be livable and get the industry to shift. In the end, the industry will shift only if they think they can do it without dying. That's what those virtual twins and if they are being, I will say, populate with design, design strategies ,design approach, I will say design incentive, like experiential incentive proposition, and people will say, yeah, I'm ready to shift.

It's very funny. I was listening to a podcast on sustainability, and they kept saying all of the problems, and at the end, I said how we can change people's behaviors? That is basically the only way for us now to save our future. They were talking about the fact that we are all addicted to the life we are in, including China. Everywhere in the world, everybody expects to live us Westerners. That is completely insane.

But how can we change that? Well, today, addicted to the comfort that all of those industries and design and plastic provide as the quality of life, there is no way we're going to go back and live like Amish, as Macron was saying. We need to actually create a new incentive. And the question is if we are addicted today to the way we live in the real materiality of the world in which we are with the CO2 footprint, with all of what is coming, designers and the metaverse can basically deliver a new addiction.

People are very afraid of the metaverse as a new addiction for people, they would be living in. But if it's very well done, it's maybe a good thing that we get addicted to something that would be saving the biodiversity, saving the extraction of resources that soon, if it's not already there, completely extinguished.

You know, I'm an optimistic person because I'm a designer first. We always think there may be a solution. The metaverse is just like an open world in which we can basically offer alternatives to today's world; it's not a bad thing, and maybe it would be the only way to protect the natural world.

I mean, I don't know if there is such a thing as a natural world because everything is artificial, but the moment you just brought is, look, we need to design a better world. And by the way, it's a design job because everything is artificial. Designers are the masters of artificiality.

Marc Petit:

I'm also an optimist, and you give me more reason to be an optimist; that vision is actually very powerful, and I'm so glad you were able to share this with us today.

Our final question, and we're out of time. You could have spoken for a couple more hours about so many other topics. But our usual question to close the podcast is, is there a person, institution, or organization that you would want to give a shout-out to today?

Anne Asensio:

If I go back to WDO, I will find a community of people willing to change the world, truly change the world. They are optimistic. In some ways, they may be idealists, and what I miss and what we all miss is the counterpart in the area of institutionalization of such a possibility. The designers, wherever in the industry, we are dreamers, and people say, oh yeah, dreamers, give us your ideas. Then we make the real thing.

You know, like this man with Red Hat in France. I would love to see politicians be serious as they should be and stop doing what they do and start to see that they can implement, on a societal level, on a political level, all of what designers will probably populate in those metaverses and learn from those metaverse propositions and not see that as entertainment, loss of time, gain. Whatever it is, take it seriously.

I would like the serious people, the counterparts of the world, the people who are supposed to make decisions, maybe it's us, maybe it's us, maybe they don't exist anymore. Maybe that counterpart body or entity is already us acting in the metaverse. Maybe that thing, person, or body does not exist yet. Maybe we're going to have to invite it together. We need to have more designers in the metaverse part.

Marc Petit:

Build it in a fair and open way and prove that it could be the blueprint for a better world. Anne, thank you so much for joining us today. Your insight and experiences have been incredibly enlightening. It's not every day that we get to hear from someone who's been at the forefront of reshaping the design landscape across notable giants such as Renault, GM, and Dassault Systèmes.

Your holistic approach to design and improving lives and creating sustainable futures is not only inspiring but also feels like a vital blueprint for the industry. And your passion for conceptual thinking, collaboration, and emerging technology is also a new standard.

We're so happy to hear your optimism and encouragement for tackling important challenges and hopefully becoming a beacon for all aspiring designers.

Thank you again, Anne, for being such an influential force and for sharing your remarkable journey with us.

Anne Asensio:

Thank you, Marc.

Marc Petit:

And, of course, a huge thank you to our ever-growing audience.

You can reach us for feedback on our website, buildingtheopenmetaverse.org, as well as subscribe to our LinkedIn page or our YouTube channels and on the podcast platforms. Thank you very much. Thank you again, Anne. This was amazing.