Hector Ouilhet

Hector Ouilhet

Design in Palo Alto

About

Design Executive | ex-Dropbox, Google, MIT, HP and Founder. I’m a humanist first, technologist second. For 20+ years, I’ve been on a mission to make new information technologies adapt to people and not the other way around.

Work Experience

2024 — Now
Italy

Researching what Design will be for the next 20 years.

Teaching Design in the age of AI to the next generation of leaders.

2023 — 2024
SF

Dash is an AI-powered universal search for work. Quickly find, organize and share all your content to save time and focus on the work that matters most.

2023 — 2023
Palo Alto, CA

Saga Studio is to storytelling as the word processor is to writing.

2020 — 2023
Mountain View, CA

Set the standard and best practices by being Google’s first Distinguished Designer (highest level of IC).

2016 — 2020
Mountain View, CA

Head of Design for all Google Search related products: Google Assistant, Google Search, Google News, across all platforms and devices.

2013 — 2016
Mountain View, CA

Head of Design for: Google Now and Voice Search across all platforms and devices.

2008 — 2013
Mountain View, Tokyo, New York

Responsible for leading: Android TV UX, Google Sky Map, supervising design across APAC , and advertising platforms.

2006 — 2008
Cambridge, MA

The MIT Mobile Experience Lab research focuses on reinventing and the connections between people, ideas and physical places in order to improve people's lives through meaningful experiences.

2002 — 2005
Creative Designer at Hewlett Packard
Mexico City, Mex

Education

2020 — 2021
Berkeley, CA

At present, a concern for philosophical stakes is absent from technology research and development. The effect is that tech companies disrupt the concepts we live by without noticing the creative potential: the consequence is a missed opportunity to build products and processes that positively shape the new.

1999 — 2004

Writing

2023

Prototypes and provocations around AI

Speaking

2023
Melbourne

Lessons from a self - reinvention journey

2018
Melbourne,Australia
2017
Dubai,United Arab Emirates
2017
2017
2008

Granted 13 patents on novel user experiences

2022

Hector has been thinking for over 20 years about how the digital interfaces we encounter shape, and are shaped by, human culture. We chatted about the patterns that these algorithmic interactions sometimes lock us into, and how we can redesign them to drive generative discomfort. Access to spreading your own ideas widely, a very recent possibility, Hector notes, is also shifting our relationship to truth; we asked how platforms might design better ways for us to interact with information. Read on for more on design practices for a changing information ecosystem.