Designing our Future with AI — at the Dawn of the Age of Creativity
January 2024
I may not have a crystal ball, but — friends — I’ve seen the future…
Just a few weeks ago I saw a demo of a suite of AI-based design and creative tools we are building in-house using GPT and DALL-E. And perhaps despite my natural skepticism around any homegrown enterprise tools… I can tell you what I’ve seen is nothing short of groundbreaking. A key ambition of these tools is to grant our creative, product, and design teams a true superpower: a way to insert design into ANY conversation with clients, a way to propose out of the box thinking in just mere days, and a way to boldly build creativity into everything we do.
As we look to the future, it’s important to examine the potential impact of AI on our industry. From intended benefits to unintended consequences, it’s crucial to consider the role of AI in shaping the future of design and creativity.
What I’ve had a glimpse into — and I keep thinking about it ever since — is a moment I hope to remember as the beginning of the AI Renaissance, ushering in the Age of Creativity, rather than what skeptics are calling the end of it.
But first things first… I am a kid of the 80s and 90s. And perhaps with my natural tendency to spend more time thinking about the future than the present, I’ve always dreamt of having the coolest gadget around: an all-purpose device like the Star Trek inspired iPad, or even the likes of the Esper machine, invented in the 80s by Ridley Scott for my beloved sci-fi masterpiece — Blade Runner — that at the time seemed more like science fiction than science fact.
Until today.
Tools like Adobe background replacement can create a programmatic substitution of a missing image, while Alpha3D allows us to create three-dimensional environments based on two-dimensional images we can manipulate and pan around, just like Deckard did to find some key clues in his investigation.
Technology and design have always been linked at the hip, and will likely continue to evolve side by side, creating new opportunities but also destroying the old in the process, by reinventing the ways in which we work, live, play and connect to one another. There is no reason why AI would behave any differently or would be less transformative than invention of print, photography or the micro-chip.
And if the past is any indication of the future, (and honestly, I am not even sure that it is any more…) we may be in the middle of a massive AI revolution and not even be able to react to it fast enough. One thing is definitely true — design as a profession is changing, as its role in the enterprise has evolved, while the value we expect from it is much more tied to the products and services in market it delivers, rather than just the futures it can imagine.
But still, the future of design and technology ARE tied at the hip, and a new definition of design — perhaps a meta-modern one — is emerging with what I hope is a renewed focus on humanity, creativity, equity and our impact on the planet at large.
The big unknown is how our neolithic brains will react to change: we are not yet ready for the degree of disruption AI technology will bring into our lives, and we need to pay attention to all the intended and the unintended consequences we will experience because of it in the next few years. So what is the future of design in context of technology that is displacing it at a rapid pace?
Let’s examine it for a moment.
First, the true impact of AI on our industry, whether in design, creative or content production endeavors, is most likely still severely underestimated. We have an innate tendency to overestimate in the short term what a new technology might bring to the table (that damn Gartner hype curve in the works… ) But we also underestimate where a new technology can truly bring true change by reaching the Holy Grail of innovation known as the Plateau of Productivity. Secondly, with Gen-AI at the apogee of hype, separating reality from wishful thinking is almost impossible. Not to mention that all change, especially as little-understood as the path the AI industry as a whole is on, is accepted with a great deal of apprehension, which colors our analysis with emotional biases and fears. Oh, the human condition…
So, back to the past for a moment, where have we seen this before? Is this a printing press kind of a moment or more like the bygone era of the Flash-websites in the 2000s? The recent drama with OpenAI, and the struggle for power in the organization that is driving key conversations around AI may be a testament to how polarizing this conversation has become. Many of our clients and competitors are IN LOVE with the promise of AI and are investing heavily. But the design industry calls for caution and often paints a dire, almost dystopian picture of the future with AI.
So what’s a designer to do?
One thing is true for sure: the paradigmatic view of design as a monolith has cracked, and although the new model has not yet fully emerged, I have a few initial hypotheses on where things could go from here…
This is where the glass ball exercise really begins, so bear with me for a moment. Are we perhaps in a Design 2.0 kind of a moment where we need to reinvent our tools and methods, and embrace this kind of change full-force? Or should we just stick to what we know well (yes, human-centered approach IS good for business and is at the heart of creating solid relationships with customers…) and continue to slowly evolve along our clients and their enterprises towards the inevitable automation of experience, design and some form of renewal of the creative “skill stacks”?
As Noah Levin stipulates the emerging AI design tools will not only lower the floor for access to non-design professionals, but will also lift the ceiling for designers to help them move design and creativity into the strategic and undeniably deserved role within the business. To drive the future of our industry, designers must embrace new tools and lean into the opportunities AI brings, while reconnecting to what is essential for every kind of human enterprise: to create new value.
The Three Horizons of Change
I’d like to examine the future with a classic three horizon view — to help us imagine the key stages of potential change, rather than to establish a specific timeline for when the possibilities might come to life.
Horizon 1 — Steady State — Designing for Experience with AI
In the early phase we are in today, as new Gen-AI tools and AI experiences come online, designers are beginning to challenge traditional UX models. The ubiquity of conversational interfaces require renewed focus on personality design, context recognition, anticipation and true personalization. Signaled by the emergence of Agents and GPTs, this new vast ecosystem will consist of digital and physical experiences, elevating the need to reframe design as kind of an operating system for businesses. The role of design in the Steady State is to orchestrate and design interactions with AI into a ubiquitous digital tapestry that envelops our daily lives, with minimum frictions and maximum value derived from each interaction.
Focus areas for designers:
- Breaking away from the standard UX grid: Evolution of interaction models towards natural language and input methods, ability to interact with content in conversational fashion (e.g. Google’s recent AI-assisted search results) and break from the current stereotypical approach to web experiences (aka: top-nav, “hamburger” menus, hero image, CTA… you get the picture) towards a more natural way of interacting with any system.
- Conversational Design: Design moves into the realm of personality, dialogue modeling and emotion sensing. Designers become key in training AI Agents on emotional responses, tone, and real-time context recognition. Designers will need to look deeply into human behavior to understand the internal hierarchy of needs, and “thinking lists” to automate them meaningfully and safely.
- Dynamic UI: Reimagined role of a container with maximum flexibility and context awareness; further evolution of responsive design, beyond layout and content and into content, input and output modes, etc; emergence of Zero UI and distributed experiences built into operating systems that run our daily routines, across devices (i.e. smart speaker vs. TV. vs. mobile phone).
- Design for ubiquity: Agents and GPTs drive new expectations from customers to perform automated tasks, using predictive logic and personalization / next best action engines across vast digital ecosystems that overlap with our daily needs and routines. Design is everywhere, but also nowhere, as it becomes understated and present only when the need arises.
Horizon 2 — Liquid State — Designing Experiences with AI tools
Efficiency and speed gained with new AI-aided design tools (e.g.: Figma, Magician, Anima, Adobe CC and Firefly, etc.) will usher in the automation of Design System creation and their maintenance, while AI-based data modeling and design processes begin to lower the barrier to discover, create, test and learn; (e.g.: automated validation of journeys and personas based on real-world cohort behaviors and patterns) The Liquid State offers fluidity between design and development — as the next-gen low-code / no-code prototyping tools bring design and development closer together, potentially creating a new discipline of Designer-entrepreneur (or perhaps Entrepreneur-designer?) capable of going from an idea to market with ease. New ideas flood the market unleashing the return of Digital Darwinism and a race for maximum value and efficiency.
Focus areas for designers:
- Automated Design Systems are embedded with self-healing modes (think identification of inconsistencies, multiple instances of styles and patterns, issues with application, etc.) while new, real-time analysis tools enable designers to make better decisions based on real-world performance (imagine a sign up form flow, that based on performance data recommends the best solution for a specific micro-interaction).
- Co-design with Design Assistants: As the notion of design assistant becomes more mature, our own interactions with design tools become more of a background for true problem-solving and creativity, elevating design as a means to an end in the process of creating impact, a new ethos for a brand, and business value creation, rather than the analogue of design as a part of a factory floor, within a linear process.
- Next generation Prototyping Tools: As visual language, design systems, UI and front end code get closer, designers will be able to depend on fast prototyping techniques expediting the ability to visualize the solution early in the process and move easily between the prototype and real code.
- Real-time insights generation, validation and data analysis tools: As assistants and design artifacts become more aware of the ecosystems they occupy, designers begin to depend on real-time modeling and automated analysis and synthesis tools to help them make more data-based informed decisions.
Horizon 3— Diffused State — Co-creation with AI
As neural networks advance, the emergence of AI-based team members (e.g.: programmable fit, personality, specific expertise) and AI-based Interactive User Personas (e.g.: being able to talk to a prototypical persona at any point in the design process, access and validation of research findings, etc.) User centricity becomes diffused, or perhaps infused into the business in new ways, aligning ideas to outcomes. Designers become truly empowered by tools that cut the distance from the concept to realization exponentially, and democratize access to insights, ideas and ways to realize them. As this access becomes ubiquitous, we will likely observe the re-emergence of Creativity as a driver of Business, giving us and the organizations we represent ways to approach our last design frontier — re-integration of the totality of humanity by elevating emotion, relationships, ethics and equity into design and business activities.
Focus areas for designers:
- Co-design and co-creation with AI-based teams and team members: ability for design teams and businesses to augment their design capabilities programmatically, by bringing together just the perfect dynamic needed for the caliber of the problem to be solved; casting rather than staffing design teams for fit, engagement preference and modes of operating that fit the business need (e.g.: “challengers”, “connectors”, “configurators”, “experimenters”, “creators,” etc.)
- AI-based interactive personas and user groups: perhaps the most exciting development for ethnographer designers and service orchestrators, giving them an opportunity to interact with a full-fledged, living AI-persona for key demographics and mindsets. New abilities for design teams to ask new questions and hear answers coming from a specific point of view, or to imagine specific situations (modes or moments that matter perhaps?) that can be modeled and evaluated with AI’s help in real time.
- Next generation of emotion sensing: elevation of tools enabling an analytical view of emotion as a part of experience in real-time, using real-time and live data rather than qualitative samples to define the context of each experience, and provide just the right degree of support or engagement across key moments of the customer journey.
- Creativity and Design as Strategies: in a world where enabling an idea becomes as simple as an AI prompt, creativity and experience design become the core of business strategies — businesses must adopt creative and end-user-first point of view to open new markets, drive awareness of innovative products and services, if they are to cut through the clutter of AI-generated images and messages.
Five Prime Principles of Integrating AI into Design
As new GenAI tools begin to flood the market with artificially created, unattributable content and messaging, designers and creatives will need to evolve the definition of creativity again to stay ahead of this curve. This will be similar to the advent of photography, which led artists to reinvent their relationship with reality, giving us impressionism, cubism, surrealism, etc. The creative industry will need to clarify its relationship with fundamental concepts such as intellectual property, ownership and attribution, as LLMs consume entire libraries of ideas and corporate data sets without understanding their true context or meaning.
In the world of businesses and brands, some fundamental re-invention will be needed as well, and I don’t mean just a new set of more efficient tools and services. Brands will have to stand out with unconventional experiences and market gestures that are human-made, while being amplified by AI. But in the end, they too will be judged by the core idea, their first principle and prime ambition, and their ethos that should be about a business outcome as much as about the community it impacts, or even the society and planet at large. In the end, what will matter in business will be the power and potential of human creativity that is still hidden in the enterprise, the power of stories we deem worth sharing, and the strength of relationships we create; as those are the pre-requisites our neolithic brains will always prioritize.
In the Age of Creativity, businesses and creators will have an opportunity to unlock the value of AI as a driver of change and amplifier of their impact, rather than a bullhorn for products and services, forcing re-evaluation of the core message, and realignment with customers’ needs and values.
So as creators and businesses, how might we prepare ourselves and our teams and set the stage for success?
__
SPARK NEW GROWTH
Bravely blow wind into the sails of creative entrepreneurship
Anyone with a great idea can become a driver of change by using AI to implement creative ideas at scale. As the Age of Creativity emerges, it will shorten the distance from concept to impact, flooding the world with creative entrepreneurs and businesses, but also disrupting formal design education and experience. Creatively-minded entrepreneurs need wind in their sails, and businesses looking to grow need the courage to support this ambition, while tracking business metrics and impact of new ideas.
__
REIMAGINE THE STACK
Carefully retool creative, design and marketing stacks with GenAI platforms
This is our opportunity to elevate our strategic and creative tools to move design upstream, and embrace the mission of using design and creativity to solve big business and societal problems we face. It will require re-skilling and re-tooling across the enterprise to maximize the value of AI tools: from self-healing and self-optimizing design systems and dynamic UI + Content, to improved efficiencies and speed from insight to impact, that now need new operational processes and next-gen innovation platforms to realize new growth.
__
DOUBLE DOWN ON QUALITY
Balance efficiency with quality, as you rethink what really matters for your business and your customers
Since AI can take things off our ever-growing design thinking lists, build self-managing design systems, and scale itself to the need, designers, creatives and businesses they represent will be able to focus their efforts on what matters most: craft quality, conceptual depth, creativity of the solution, core business value, and real-world impact and ethos they create.
__
MIND THE CONSEQUENCES
Diligently teach AI how you handle intellectual property, personal privacy, equity, and sustainability to prevent unintended outcomes
Inevitably, AI will continue to be imperfect, because the inputs it is trained on reflect our own imperfections and biases. It’s infinite (and expensive to generate) computing power and insatiable thirst for data will make it want to learn more about us, requiring a new set of defenses and privacy tools. Businesses must establish clear privacy, intellectual property, equity and sustainability rules for any AI usage, and get ahead of the curve as regulators are starting to ponder how to structure the right checks and balances around AI usage in the US.
__
BE HUMAN
Courageously integrate emotion and affect into Experiences and Brand Expressions
And last, but definitely not least… we must ensure that we take stalk of the imperfections of human emotion and group behavior into our digital ecosystems, creating the necessary allowances for our own neolithic operating systems to catch up. Emotion, as much as reason drive our decisions, relationships and societal tensions, and we need to recognize that we cannot build a perfect AI system — only the one that self-improves and learns from what works and what does not, as it strives but never reaches the perfect state.
AI + Design, Beyond the Monolith…
So let’s recap: Design has never been a monolithic entity anyway, and its many forms have peeked somewhere in the 2010s. But its next evolution, a Design 2.0 if you will, will likely be about integration, and not deep analysis of its individual components. It must be built on the principles of co-design, self-awareness, and programmatic realignment to the ethos and impact it wants to create. To use meta-modern language, design has to evolve past its critique of the world and into the change it wants to inspire, and that means dealing with the imperfections of the human and societal condition. But if AI is but a tool, Design 2.0 will come back into fashion as a way to galvanize all aspects of business towards a mission to create moments of customer delight that embraces the emotion each product and service evokes, but also leading to the next generation of self-aware experiences that recognize and see the real user, understands their needs, behaviors and values. And perhaps as a tool that gives creators an infinite purpose that will spark a new kind of Creative Renaissance, helping us reconnect to our own humanity, creativity, and emotion.
Dre is the Head of Design and Creative Fellow with Deloitte Digital.
Please follow him here.
The opinions and views expressed in this article are his and do not represent his employer. Images courtesy of Unsplash (natedefiesta) and the works of artists who trained Firefly
