by Janus Boye
Using the presentation title “Strategic creativity in a chaotic world” Hannah Gutkauf travelled to the famous tech fest SXSW in Austin, Texas back in March and gave a talk framed around the Metaverse, but really about all emerging technology at the moment, be it AI, XR or data science.
Working with strategy creativity in a chaotic world is also a fitting title for Hannah’s job as Global Partner & Head of Emerging Tech at the Copenhagen offices of design services firm Manyone.
Hannah is originally from Vienna, studied at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology and before joining the agency world, she worked in luxury fashion and also studied tech at the IT University of Copenhagen. Hannah is a self-proclaimed creative digital technologist and also our expert of the month.
Towards a more ethical and (digital) sustainable future
Reflecting on her trip to Austin and experience at SXSW, Hannah bluntly said:
It was quite narrow minded and I was surprised at how little research I saw. Instead, it was mostly hype and shining objects. Quite fluffy and one dimensional.
While hanging out with a crowd of mostly tech dudes in their 50’s, Hannah didn’t hear much talk about what Metaverse or any of the other emerging technologies are doing for society. In the presentation that Hannah gave together with her colleague Nikolaj Stausbøl, sustainability and ethics was among the two major themes. To quote Hannah:
Technology should serve us, not the other way round. It’s all about using the right technology at the right time in the right way
At the 11th annual Lovie Awards in 2021, Hannah was on the award winning team that was recognised for communicating Quantum Computing in simple terms and also to prototype the art gallery of the future.
With energy consumption from cloud and ubiquitous computing on the rise, Hannah is committed to also making this a part of the conversation. To put it another way, she does not want to just blindly launch another cloud service hosted by Amazon Web Services, in particular as Amazon has one of the worst renewable energy ratings out of all server farms as she said. As she said:
You can naturally still do websites with video and images, but be aware of your digital footprint and think about the structures you put in place and how they impact behaviour.
Discrimination is a disease in tech
Ethics clearly has several dimensions in Hannah's view:
During her career, she’s experienced discrimination when talking to senior management as a young female leader who’s been promoted rapidly. Just to be clear, this is not at Manyone, but rather in business conversations with prospects and other organisations. Internally at Manyone, Hannah works hard to create an inclusive work environment where talent can flourish.
She strongly feels that everyone in the tech space has a huge responsibility to hear from different voices what they believe the world should look like.
Turning to customers, it was quite clear from my conversation with Hannah, that she is very passionate about inspiring clients to scale up the diversity & inclusion conversation to move beyond just talking about it to actions and changing the status quo.
When it comes to discrimination in tech and specifically ethical tech, she turned to synthetic media, like deep fake voices and style adaptations as a part of the future - how do you do it ethically? Specifically she asked:
How do you introduce synthetic media without creating fear of discrimination?
In today’s world, we no longer design for each screen. Hannah urges all makers to be aware of the scaling effects when predicting the human behavior and needs, that we are trying to support in new ways. We should do so without discriminating!
Navigating complexity and co-developing future products
Looking back at Hannah’s career, she initially worked in luxury fashion, where she built up an e-commerce platform and handled social media.
Hannah is a popular and highly-rated conference speaker.
Rather than staying in fashion, she wanted to do more with technology and studied at the IT University of Copenhagen. As many other students, she had a start-up on the side and hers focused on sustainable fashion. For Copenhagen Fashion Week, she did a project with Augmented Reality to make it easier to co-develop future products based on customer needs.
Unlike many of her friends, who went to big firms and known brands, Hannah opted to join a small creative tech firm called Molamil back in 2017. Molamil then became a part of Manyone in 2019 and during the years, Hannah has moved from working with project management and digital strategy to leading the innovation unit and onwards to her current role as Global Partner and Head of Emerging Tech.
Besides her obvious deep understanding of technology, perhaps her speciality truly is being surrounded by talent, seeing the business need and then jointly coming up with solutions. Today, she works with some of their biggest clients on how they can use emerging tech as a part of their products and services. This involves explorative research in emerging tech and understanding both future human needs and future business needs. Or in other words: Navigating complexity.
Learn more about Hannah
Recently Hannah has been profiled in Danish media with some quite positive press:
Danish daily newspaper Berlingske called her the queen of virtual reality
The Danish Marketing Association published a profile, where Hannah talked about culture, purpose and diversity
You can also connect with Hannah on LinkedIn.