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.
Projects
Google Search is a search engine that helps users find information on the web
Google Assistant is Google's second digital assistant- multimodal and multi device.
Work Experience
Researching what Design will be for the next 20 years.
Teaching Design in the age of AI to the next generation of leaders.
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.
Saga Studio is to storytelling as the word processor is to writing.
Set the standard and best practices by being Google’s first Distinguished Designer (highest level of IC).
Head of Design for all Google Search related products: Google Assistant, Google Search, Google News, across all platforms and devices.
Head of Design for: Google Now and Voice Search across all platforms and devices.
Responsible for leading: Android TV UX, Google Sky Map, supervising design across APAC , and advertising platforms.
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.
Education
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.
Writing
What is the force that you need to break out of the inertia of your prior convictions? What is the force you need to break that membrane of the known? For me, it’s curiosity. But for you, that force might be doubt or desire or courage or an unsatiated hunger for a constantly evolving understanding of your world.
Which is why I want to be wrong again and again and again. There’s nothing to lose. It feels great to be wrong on the way to right. Even — or especially — if that right ends up being wrong, too.
The concept of human has changed dramatically since it’s conception. From Aristotle, to Decartes, to Hume, Diderot and Kant. Each epoch reframes the notion of human, going through a flux of contraction and expansion of the term- starting from its definition against the cosmos (what makes us human is external to the human) to a metaphysical characterization that lives within the human (Kant). The following NFT captures de dead of the human as we know it and celebrates what’s yet to come.
A kids tale about the history of concepts, humans, nature and technology.
Why Elegance is more important than efficiency
3 part conversation with Dr. Cynthia Breazeal about the relationship of tech and humanity
- Part 3: Curiosity, and how little humans embrace the combination of humanities and science.
3 part conversation with Dr. Cynthia Breazeal about the relationship of tech and humanity
- Part 2: Empathy, disappointment, technology role from protagonist to auxiliary, how AI can help people flourish.
3 part conversation with Dr. Cynthia Breazeal about the relationship of tech and humanity
- Part 1: Other dimensions of human experience like emotional and social connection, dance as a metaphor, and how people are emotionally driven.
Open up your curiosity to what’s happening in places you’ve never considered looking. That way we can better understand those places we’d never thought much about before, and make them better, safer, and healthier for everyone.
A personal tale of managing your career by molding your character.
How to make ambient computing work—for people
What makes an environment “responsive”? This book provides some key concepts in the form of a design manifesto. Critically articulated from the perspective of leading experts, scholars and professionals, the ideas explored are unpacked through speculative urban visions and design projects at different timeframes, contexts and scales ranging from interactive artifacts to augmented cities. Drawing from a multiyear research at the REAL Lab at Harvard GSD and design work by INVIVIA and other innovative practices, the book unfolds the experiential facets of our technologically-mediated relationship with space in the fields of architecture and urbanism, design and art.
We should just be grateful that we don’t need to learn a new language to interact with this new technology. We just need to get used to speaking it with somebody — or better yet, something — that is still learning to talk. So be patient, be open-minded, and just be yourself. Only then will the future of technology finally take a human shape.This might be the end of the article, but hopefully the beginning of a longer conversation. I’m eager to expand my thinking in this space and would love to hear your perspectives.
Have you ever wondered how the sky was back in 1900? How the sky looked when the Apollo 11 moon landing happened? Or what the sky will look like next Thursday night for your planned star-gazing trip?
Today, the new version of Google Sky Map lets you time travel to see the sky at a specific date, past or future. After smooth travel to the desired year, you can fast forward or rewind in various speeds and watch how the sky changes.
While viewing another time period, you can still search for your favorite objects.
Speaking
Strategic & practical advice on how to get comfortable with discomfort while growing in your career.
Lessons from a self - reinvention journey
Granted 13 patents on novel user experiences
Features
We are thrilled to announce that Hector Ouilhet will be our first Advanced Interaction Resident. Known to be a trail-blazer, in his time at CIID he will focus on The Future of Design in the Era of AI.
On today’s episode, Ari has a conversation with Hector Ouilhet, former VP of Design at Dropbox.
Ari’s chat with Hector covers several topics, including helping teams define themselves as a group and as individuals, operating in the background as a team of coaches to the advantage of the people within an organization, and the idea of aging and patina in digital assets.
The conversation begins with Hector sharing his early experiences with his sense of self, how they shape his perspective on leadership, and how that helps him lead his team through change with understanding and awareness.
Launched Dropbox Dash. Find what you need instantly across your digital workspace with Dropbox Dash, AI-powered universal search Full release here
The IA Collaborative Design for Women Roundtable Series themed “Illuminate + Act,” convened 25+ innovation and business leaders across industries including technology, healthcare, consumer products, financial services and insurance representing companies such as Airbnb, Johnson & Johnson, Google, USAA, and more, to explore challenges and bright spots to champion designing for women, for the benefit of all.
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.
Hector Ouilhet is Head of Design for Google Search, Assistant and News family of products. He is originally from Mexico and has lived in 6 countries and 11 cities. He considers himself part of the world. Hector has a degree in Computer engineering and a Masters in interaction design. He taught design to engineers at MIT Media Lab, worked at HP and ran his own company....
Interacting with technology the same way we interact with people. Voice, the most common interface that mankind has ever developed, is about to undergo a renaissance, and the reasons why are as natural as the technology that is driving it.
From inventing fictitious calendar entries to incorporating personal photos in design mocks, listen in to Google designers’ deepest design confessions. In this episode, host Travis Neilson and a panel of Google UX designers discuss and reflect on their peers’ anonymous confessions and offer insight on important topics, quirky habits, and design struggles that don’t often get airtime.
We’ve gotten used to adapting to technology. But in the future, tech will adapt to us. On this episode, Hector Ouilhet, head of design for Google Search and Google Assistant, shares the latest in people-centric design.
Tres latinoamericanos trabajan en pulir estas tecnologías de la gigante de Internet y lograr experiencias más satisfactorias
Il designer di Google Hector Ouilhet racconta l’evoluzione prossima dei dispositivi digitali: grazie all’uso del linguaggio naturale saranno più semplici da usare e meno invasivi nella vita di tutti i giorni
Ecco come Google immagina le nostre interazioni con i dispositivi di domani: più semplici, dirette e condivise. L'intervista di GQ
l ha logrado escalar alto en una de las compañías más valiosas del mundo. Conoce su historia.
Hector Ouilhet es el diseñador encargado de Google Search y Assistant
Google thought leaders in the UX & Design community talk about what it's like to work at Google, our design philosophy, and our take on the future of design.
A revolution is happening in the Human-Computer interaction: Soon, devices will finally speak our language.
There's always this internal debate about how much functionality should we add
In Berlin startet heute das Tech Open Air: Überall in der Hauptstadt versammeln sich digitale Vordenker, Tech-Begeisterte und Unternehmer. Im Fokus: Ökonomie, Kunst und Leben in Zeiten des technologischen Fortschritts.
In teaching computers how to communicate with people, Hector Ouilhet, Google's head of design for Search sees in the technology the same 'painful yet interesting' learning phases that a young person goes through when becoming an adult. To train computers in the art of questions, Ouilhet looks to the questing period of his own youth and to his four-year-old daughter for models of both simple and complicated questions that he wants computers of the future to understand.
For people, talking is easy. We’ve been doing it for millennia. But for machines? Not quite, says Hector Ouilhet, Head of Design at Google Search.
If you think of human speech as having been around for 24 hours, Ouilhet says, written word has been around for just eight minutes. Computers have been here for one millisecond.
Google's new chatbot, Google search assistant, helps you discover how you might talk to the virtual assistant as it rolls out to the rest of Google.
We asked seven leaders at some of the biggest companies how design impacts their business---here's what they had to say.
Inspired by the way his daughter Ana Julia communicates, Hector Ouilhet is trying to make Google’s voice search more human.
Entre las responsabilidades de Héctor Ouilhet está el proceso de interacción de plataformas como Google Assistant, Google Now y Google Search para todas las plataformas y dispositivos.
Designers from Google, Argo, Work & Co., ustwo, Sagmeister+Walsh, OKFocus, and more tell us how they stay focused and keep innovating.