The Future Prompt:// How AI is transforming Design
A few months ago, Speculative Futures Milan teamed with Domus Academy to help the school organize its event for Fuorisalone (Milan Design Week 2023). The event aimed to explore the impact of Generative AI on Design.
Needless to say, it was the perfect setting to start speculating and provoke the audience.
Below is a report on the round table discussion that we contributed to.
How it started
When we started exploring the possibility of organizing an event with Domus Academy for Milan Design Week 23, we had a few certainties. We knew it had to be something about AI and design, with a pinch of the future, of course.
Given all the hype surrounding Generative AI, we wondered what could be an interesting angle for an event that wanted to critically explore the impact of AI on design. We didn’t want to simply celebrate AI or browse through the latest technological features. Instead, we wanted to challenge the audience with thought-provoking questions.
With this in mind, we created a list of unconventional panel names with the clear goal of challenging the audience through scenarios that showed possible trajectories and their cultural and societal implications. No “AI will steal your job” or “look at this new Figma AI-powered plugin” here.
To stay true to the spirit of the event, we asked everyone’s favorite generative AI tool to write the email inviting our panelists. The tool worked relentlessly, creating multiple versions of the template. Five minutes later, we had what we needed and shipped our invites. The rest is history. What happened on stage is now covered in this post.
Panelists
Alexandra Mihai — digital product designer | https://alexandragurita.com/
Viraj Joshi — designer, technologist, and futurist | @virajvjoshi | virajvjoshi.com
Tobias Revell — artist and designer | https://tobiasrevell.com/
Simone Rebaudengo — product and interaction designer | https://oio.studio/ | http://www.simonerebaudengo.com/
Creating with machines: Navigating the boundaries of digital design and AI
by Alexandra Mihai
01. From hard skills to soft skills. The rise of Prompt Design.
In the near future, something new and exciting took the world by storm. Prompt design had emerged as the cutting-edge discipline of the era, revolutionizing the way people interacted with technology and fostering a society of problem solvers. And at the forefront of this movement was Domus Academy, a prestigious institution that had just unveiled its groundbreaking course on Prompt Design.
The announcement for the course on Domus Academy’s website caught the attention of ambitious individuals in the digital world. It wasn’t just about being technically skilled anymore. In this future, communication and soft skills were more important than just knowing software. After all, software skills could be easily trained, but the ability to craft engaging prompts and design solutions for everyday challenges required a unique set of skills.
The course at Domus Academy promised to transform its students into prompt designers, equipping them with the necessary tools and techniques to create complete end-to-end digital products. The students would delve into the nuances of effective communication, user experience design, and psychology to understand the needs and desires of their target audience. They would learn to empathize, analyze, identify and solve daily problems that people faced in their lives.
In this future, as prompt designers proliferated, society flourished with the ability to empathize, analyze, and design solutions to everyday problems. Creativity, communication, and soft skills became pillars of progress, propelling humanity into a new era of innovation and problem-solving.
The impact of prompt design extended beyond the classroom, influencing society at large. Companies recognized the value of prompt designers, inviting their unique perspective and problem-solving approach into their organizations. Prompt design became a sought-after skill, reshaping industries and transforming global technology interactions.
02. Preserving individuality: Navigating uniqueness in a homogenized world
A new problem arose in the design world in this new future. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), everyone had access to the same data, making it difficult to create distinct designs. People worried about becoming copycats and losing their individuality.
“Good artists copy. Great artists steal” — Pablo Picasso
To avoid this, designers realized they had to go beyond AI algorithms and add their own unique touch. Designers realized that they needed to transcend the limitations of data-driven AI algorithms and inject their own unique perspectives and creativity into their work, by tapping into their own backgrounds, cultures, and values to infuse their designs with authenticity. By infusing their designs with their own stories, they created something special that connected with people on a deeper level.
Designers also embraced the power of experimentation. They understood that taking risks and pushing boundaries was crucial in creating distinct designs. They welcomed failure as a valuable learning opportunity and leveraged it to refine their ideas. By embracing a mindset of exploration and embracing uncertainty, designers were able to break free from the homogeneity perpetuated by AI-driven design.
In this future landscape, designers faced the challenge of standing out amidst a sea of similar AI-generated designs. Through embracing personal narratives, interdisciplinary collaboration, continual learning, experimentation, and user engagement, designers ensured they retained their uniqueness and avoided becoming mere copycats. The human touch, fuelled by creativity and genuine connections, remained the key to creating designs that truly resonated with people, offering a refreshing departure from the sea of sameness in the AI-driven design world.
03. Designing with AI & exploring the role of assistive technologies in UX decision-making
As the practice of Product/UX design evolves, intelligent design tools have emerged as a new realm of possibilities for designers. These tools, in the form of plugins, go beyond mere tools and have the ability to analyze the ethical implications of design choices, optimize revenue generation while ensuring user satisfaction and ethical boundaries, and adapt interfaces to specific goals. Designers can toggle between viral and niche modes, tailoring the user experience to align with specific goals, while maintaining consistency and usability.
In addition to these capabilities, plugins can also consider accessibility, cultural context, and regional preferences. They can assist in designing products that are inclusive and accessible to users with diverse needs, and adapt designs to specific contexts and user expectations. However, it remains crucial for designers to retain their critical thinking and creative decision-making abilities. These design tools should be viewed as partners rather than replacements, as human intuition, empathy, and expertise continue to shape the design process.
The “marriage” of human creativity and technology’s assistive capabilities leads to the creation of meaningful, inclusive, and impactful digital experiences. By carefully considering variables like accessibility, cultural context, and regional preferences, designers can forge a path towards user-centric and responsible design practices. These plugins empower designers to navigate ethical considerations, optimize financial outcomes, and adapt interfaces to specific goals. As the future of UX design unfolds, intelligent design tools have the potential to revolutionize the industry by enabling designers to create digital experiences that are truly user-centric, responsible, and impactful.
Preparing for a Gen-AI Coup
by Viraj Joshi
Slowly but surely, Generative AI is infiltrating our image, text, and other creative tools. Where will you be when it creeps up into the tools in your hands, hacks the very job you say you do with passion, and disrupts a career you’ve built on the je-ne-sais-quoi of “creativity” — one that you can’t define for yourself? How can you best prepare for this impending inglorious infestation?
Consider the following three objects gathered from uncharted places and times that might contain hints for us to act now!
01. Mastering vivid description
Generating concepts and visuals can be a large part of a designers’ job. What might designers have to do with the time that has been freed up by GenAI generating at a rapid pace? It is likely they have to spend it parsing, curating, prioritising the context-less AI hallucinations. Might designers become the Masters of Vivid Description? Background desert image and University of Townshire logo generated by Dall-E.
02. Rising above the Great Online Mediocrity
When images and text — a large part of the internet — are generated by AI; we could very well see a ‘Great Online Mediocrity’ washing over the internet — a bland aesthetic that’s low-effort to produce. However, the best of designers might rise above this dreariness by whispering to their AI effectively.
03. Prompt Piracy
When we all whisper to our AI, we might want to keep our prompts a secret. Where there is secrecy of IP, there is piracy. Here is an official product, “Prompt Encryptor”, and a hacking device, “Prompt Decryptor” which can hide and hack into bespoke prompting languages.
Candy Text: Chocolate Code generated by ChatGPT, parsed and contextualised by Viraj Joshi. This piece of design fiction comes together as “Eliza — The Ghost in Every Machine no. 100”
Further reading / Viraj’s favorite AI fiction:
- The Measure of a Man — Star Trek — The Next Generation Season 2, Episode 9
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021
A History in the Un-Training; The Peten Pioticurt Peatean Lend
by Tobias Revell
Opening remarks at the 14th Annual AutonoDesign Conference, 2036 Milan, Italy
Thank you, it’s fantastic to be here with my esteemed colleagues you celebrating and reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the The Peten Pioticurt Peatean Lend. From where we are now, a decade on, we are afforded the privilege to more fully understand what it was and how it (or they) mark a break between the instrumental design practices of the pre-2030s and the current landscape. Before we begin with the panel’s presentation, I feel a critical retrospective of that history is important.
The late 2020s saw the continued encroachment of so-called AI systems — broken, janky, fractious things — representative of the state of industry and capital; intentionally hobbling and fragmenting the design ecology to drive competition and profitability. A world of competing systems and governance structures, universities and representative bodies unable, or unwilling, to tackle the fire across industry and academia.
The lack of regulation meant output data was re-fed into models and, like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, the human aesthetic world flattened as it became more targeted. For instance, the claim to serve bespoke, individual websites to users based on their browser history seemed like a great opportunity but when the profit motive acted to drive down choice and force behaviours they became variations of peronsalised traps — not serving the needs of users but the desires of exploitative business who could build the personal torture chambers of millions of people: When you know the preferences and needs of users in such detail and can craft the ideal, personal experience for them using so-called AI it was naive to assume this would make the Internet better rather than driving even more bespoke targeted advertising and exploitation.
In response, a proto-synthetic aesthetic style emerges; embracing flatness and uniformity. A ‘post-normcore blandcore’; attempting to remove all design or creative input at all as a critique of the very end of design. This ‘Cagian’ approach stood in opposition to the so-called ‘democratisation’ of design as monopolisation. After all, though ‘democratisation’ rhymes with ‘democracy’ it was an excuse for AI companies, touting accessibility and inclusivity to reap enormous profits by ‘enabling the creativity’ of everyone. The world flooded with insubstantial, unverifiable, authorless, contextless media and design.
As a result, the nihilism towards the creative and critical practice of Silicon Valley — long evidenced through the obsession with automating art, writing, poetry and film — came to a head. People claiming to be ‘designers’ were ridiculed with the same hysteria as people who referred to ‘the digital’ in the early 2020s
The Jevons paradox of design — the complexity of hyper-personalisation increased to a rate where no-one could anymore decipher how anything was built or redesign or control it. A full acclerationism of aesthetics, production, engineering and technology interaction beyond human meaning.
Late in 2034 is when we can trace the last patent to. It was accepted by the US Patent Office on November 11 2034 and to many, marks the end of intellectual property as a concept.
After year in which design bots and nefarious state actors paired up with IP trolls to bombard parent office systems with automated designs, the pseudo-industry and regulation system itself collapsed.
The last one: The Peten Pioticurt Peatean Lend was probably ignored by the frustrated parent officers in the same way as all the other generated synthetic content dripping the design economy but we can now look back and recognise its significance.
Taking inspiration from this, and (we assume) in despair at the state of design, the eponymously named The Peten Pioticurt Peatean Lend appears. Scholars debate whether it is a person, a group, even a bot and as we now know that was never the question. And so to our present day, this conference and the presentations we are about to hear. Before we begin, let’s recall the manifesto:
Further reading:
- Emily M. Bender, Alexander Koller (2020). Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf
- Ensmenger, N. (2012). Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm. Social Studies of Science, 42(1), 5–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312711424596
- Greene, Daniel. Hoffmann, Anna Lauren. Stark, Luke (2019). Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: A Critical Assessment of the Movement for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/2c91a03d-caad-4c6f-9069-9bca4f393ce6
- Hong, Sun-ha (2022). Predictions without futures. Historical Futures. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12269
That design week when everyone was talking about AIs
by Simone Rebaudengo
01. Three covers of a not so far away future design magazine
I found these magazines from 2024 on my table the other day, and it seems so long ago, when all this discussion about AI and design started. They are three numbers of Domus around spring time, just before and just after Design week in Milan. The first one focuses on reviewing last year’s wave of synthetic and generated everything. Reporting how the new wave of AI-powered design is at core an ode to remix culture and surrealism. With interviews to Algorithmic avant-gardists and Synthographists that are letting AI systems take a more independent role in generating products and spaces. The second one is a Design week focused one where Neo-artisans, slow designers and equilibrists are putting their foot down against the flood of AI-aided images and products, they are calling for a more thoughtful, slow and manual approach to design, materiality and craft. The third one is just after the design week, where a very niche new way became very visible: a new wave of more than human design studios. Here you can find interviews of many young studios made of humans and not-so-human designers. Bots, octopuses and rivers can be part of the process of designing our homes and spaces.
02. A spread of the third of the future magazines I found
In this spread you can find two interesting things. On one side some very old school brands have embraced generative technologies as a way to revitalize their historical archives. I actually love their new collection of generated Aalto-Wiirkala mashup glasses! On the other side there is an interview with one of the AI creative directors of oio.studio. They have a pretty interesting point of view about this GenAI craze: “We make our own datasets as we want to actually take the time. Speed is not the only value and small and slow generative tools feel more and more like a craft that we can bend and tweak”.
03. A map of Fuori Salone from 2024
I also found this map, like one of the many you bring back home in your swag bags from Design week. It struck me because it was the first year where first of all it was needed to label shows that where presenting work that was made by non-human designers, by humans only, or by the two together. Also I remember it was the first year of Nvidia and OpenAI having their design shows, of that crazy panel from Merriam Webster and Moma about prompt archiving and where there was a sit-in in the streets from the NO-AI movement. That was a crazy year…
Bonus track
Here are some bits and pieces that came up during the round table:
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Vision, MIT Press, 2013, https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262518512/programmed-visions/
- James Bridle, “The Stupidity of AI”, The Guardian, 16 Mar 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/16/the-stupidity-of-ai-artificial-intelligence-dall-e-chatgpt
- Jacob Sweet, “Meet the World’s Least Ambitious AI”, The Atlantic, 12 Apr 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/04/generative-ai-playing-chess-martin-bot/673697/
Some thoughts that came up during the night:
- GOTE — game of the event (by unanimous acclaim): Disco Elysium
- Band of the event (jaw-dropping guitar technique 😲): Polyphia
Special thanks
We would like to express our gratitude to Giorgio Lospennato, Sabrina Di Pietrantonio, Domus Academy, our amazing guests, and all the attendees of the session.
We would also like to thank Gabriele Ferri for his contributions.
Finally, we do appreciate the help of AI in writing this article.
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