Week 09: AI as material for Design

Task: Articles this week deal with the idea of artificial intelligence (and its related methods and approaches) as material for design and UX. What does that mean, exactly — AI as material for design? What might you draw from the Cardoso Llach & Steenson readings (historically) and/or other contemporary examples? It’s always good to include images or video where they make sense.

Technology and design are indivisible. Technology is what makes any designed object happen (Paola Antonelli, 2018), and design provides technology a direction to reach further and enable real innovative change. The development of technology triggers design innovation as Daniel’s texts about CAD shows, but sometimes design also leads technical advance. The way Steve Jobs designed iPhones and MacBooks is a good example. He forced engineers to contain components into the fixed design, which seemed impossible at the first time. Thus, it is hard to define which one comes first, design or technology — it is similar to a chicken-and-egg problem. They are effected by each other and make progress simultaneously.

The current status of AI technology and its application to products in design’s perspective is incomplete — which means both are not fully ready to cooperate. AI agents, one of examples of AI technology that was released in the market, have some various functions but they are not ready to satisfy specific needs which encourage users to keep using them. For instance, it is common to see that many early adopters who bought AI products such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, or SK Nugu with curiosity no longer use them. Most of them realize that those agents are not useful enough to keep using them more than one or a couple of months, even though they might be quite fun or interesting to play with for a while. The current AI agents seem pointless; they are equipped with AI because they can, not because they have to.

What’s the problem? In a designer’s perspective, I want to rephrase the given sentence to ‘AI as one of materials for design’. Designers don’t have to use all of their materials. I strongly agree with what Graham, Kim, Jodi, and John are saying in their paper — the education and tools should be required for designers to learn about machine learning or emerging technology. At the same time, I also believe that designers should more focus on their own expertise—the process of finding appropriate needs and shaping technology in an appropriate form— as they have done until now. Designers should capable of utilizing technology for their purpose. Thus, in terms of AI technology, the question of why it should be implemented into the world must come first prior to the question of how to utilize it. If AI’s necessity is established and reaches an agreement within stakeholders including users, it could be developed in a particular way to overcome current technical shortage and focus on specific needs.

Reference

• Molly Wright Steenson, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers & Architects Created the Digital Landscape (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). (Required reading: Chapter 6, p. 165–190 and p. 221–22; additional optional reading: pp. 191–220 and if you wish, the whole of chapter 6).
• Daniel Cardoso Llach. 2015. Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design. London, New York: Routledge 2015. (Required reading: pp. 1–4 and pp. 49–72; additional optional reading: whole chapters 1 and 3).
• Graham Dove, Kim Halskov, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, “UX Design Innovation: Challenges for Working with Machine Learning as a Design Material,” CHI ’17 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 278–288. [Box]
• Paola Antonelli, “AI is Design’s Latest Material,” Google Design. A quick Q&A with the Museum of Modern Art’s Senior Design Curator.