Malin Leschly, Logitech’s chief design officer, earned her chops at the hardware company by working for a demanding set of customers: Livestreamers. “Streamers want to look good, they want to sound good, and they want to have control over what they do,” she says.
Now, just over half a year into her role as Logitech’s CDO, Leschly is exploring how the company can use AI to make life a little easier for content creators. In September, Logitech, through its Streamlabs subsidiary, released an “AI Game Highlighter” that automatically converts livestreams on Twitch into shorter clips that can be shared on platforms like YouTube, X and Instagram.
“It’s an opportunity where we can see if AI can be helpful,” she says. Streamers, for example, consider editing their content to be “worse than schoolwork.”
Winding path
Leschly took over as Logitech’s chief design officer in April, replacing Alastair Curtis, who’d spent a decade at the firm. The hardware company has long prided itself on its design focus, with former CEO Bracken Darrell speaking openly about the design process at the center of the company.
The designer took a “winding path” to the hardware company, she says. Leschly grew up in Sweden, where “pretty much any experience you have is designed.” She arrived in the U.S. to attend business school in the late Nineties. “California got its teeth in me,” she explains.
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Leschly bounced around startups and design agencies, including a stint at design studio Nonobject, which worked on the UE BOOM, a bluetooth speaker whose design is now “widely copied on almost any Bluetooth speaker on the market.” Leschly joined Logitech when the hardware manufacturer acquired Nonobject in 2018. “It wasn’t a big leap to move from smaller companies or a small studio to Logitech,” she remembers.
Logitech is now barreling into the AI trend, integrating the new technology into its many products and services. Earlier this year, Logitech modified its computer mice by adding a dedicated “AI Prompt Builder” button, which automatically launches the generative AI program ChatGPT with preset prompts.
AI is a controversial technology in the design space, as critics argue it rehashes old ideas, reinforces existing biases and, importantly, puts humans out of work.
Leschly however sees AI as the latest in a long series of tools for designers, like Adobe Photoshop and Epic Games’s Unreal Engine. Still, she agrees that overusing AI has risks.
Design is “craft and creativity,” she says. “If AI is all about doing the same thing over and over again, there’s no creativity in that. There’s no positive, meaningful surprise.”
“We can’t use AI in that way,” she says.
‘Constraints into opportunities’
In 2023, Logitech pledged to include on each product’s packaging the total carbon emissions generated over its lifespan. It’s part of a sustainability push for the hardware company, known for its peripherals ubiquitous in offices the world over.
Sustainability fits into Leschley’s design philosophy of trying to turn “constraints into opportunities.” For example, Logitech’s Casa pop-up desk, released last year, uses around 80% recycled plastic in its touchpad and 60% in its keyboard. Both wireless peripherals are packaged with a laptop stand; Logitech pitches the combined products as an easy way for users to work from any surface in the home.
“We reduced the carbon footprint of this product by more than a third,” she says.
The Casa desk is also notable in being derived, at least in part, from the needs of Logitech’s customers, particularly those in Asia. “Many people neither have the space nor the desire to have a desk.” she says. “It was very true among women. They wanted to move around in their homes.”
That’s not the only observation Logitech’s drawing from its Asian users. Leschly notes that younger Asians are now “blurring” work and play. The latest thing her team is noticing? Younger employees are bringing their gaming keyboards into the office, rather than relying on the standard cookie-cutter model.
For these users, a comfortable keyboard is “like finding your favorite sweater,” Leschly says. “They love the typing experience!”
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Correction, Nov. 25, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the bluetooth speaker model Malin Leschly worked on for Nonobject.
