DesignX December 2017 Event Recap
I admit, being a developer, I have not been to a conference or event centred on design. When I found out TELUS digital was sponsoring the December 14 DesignX Toronto event, I took the time. I expected the content to be saturated with graphic design, but my thoughts were immediately quashed by the opening speaker.
The Speakers
Dawson Whitfield, founder of Logojoy, opened up with artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted design tools that are rapidly changing the way we deliberate over our designs.
- Google Autodraw can help render images in our imagination legibly and quickly
- Adobe Sensei uses AI and machine learning to make hugely complicated image manipulations as straightforward as painting
- Khroma streamlines the complicated process of making colour palettes
- Logojoy removes the back-and-forth discussion between client and designer in logo-making by turning the client into the curator
The pitch is not to be fearful of AI-assisted tools stealing jobs, but to remove the tedium in repetitive design workflows and projects, and welcome a new era of design curators who wield super-charged tools.
Michael Sacca, director of marketing at Dribbble, shared insights on the challenges faced in building features for a rapidly-growing community product.
- A team constantly working under pressure always delivers low-quality results
- When building a product, especially a highly-engaging one, it’s paramount to listen to your users and work with them to design the best experience possible
Alan Gertner, CEO of Tokyo Smoke, is building a lifestyle brand around cannabis in Canada.
- De-stigmatizing cannabis is a long-haul effort that may reap huge rewards like it has for other substance-controlled industries
- Thoughtfulness in the end-to-end customer experience are key in leaving no empty spaces in the brand to be filled with doubts; particularly in an industry that’s scheduled to open to a massive amount of consumers
- Substance commodities undergo a three-step pattern: first consumed in heavy doses, then branching off into many varieties, and then re-emerge among elite artisan brands. For example, coffee started off as being consumed mainly as ‘black coffee’, and then coffee shop chains introduced a variety of other blends and presentations, and then finally big-name brands attracted customers for their signature takes
As designers, we don’t have to solely focus on the product in its purest form. Diversification of consumption can bring about new opportunities, perhaps even disruptive ones such as a liquor-like beverage made with THC.
Topping off the speaker sessions, Chris Govias, The Canada Digital Service’s chief of design, opened everyone’s minds to the prospect of design and development within the federal government in ways that can improve our lives.
- Having spent time as a service designer in England’s ministry of justice, Chris helped streamline services such as sending money to criminals in prison
- In Canada, there is a lot of bureaucratic tedium that is front-loaded to its citizens such as filling and mailing forms. Shortening the gap between the user and their goal is key in service design
- Service design is about the user’s journey from start to end, and every segment they engage with along the way. Whether it’s in software or on physical pathways, each segment must be thoughtfully curated and optimised to enable an outcome
The Panelists
Preet lead a discussion with the above-captioned panelists and covered a lot of ground, including:
- The immediate and short-term future for graphic designers
- Conversational AI facilitating our workflows and ushering new varieties of designers
- Ethics surrounding big data collection and targeting vulnerable groups, citing Weapons of Math Destruction
- Differentiating AI from game scenarios and human scenarios
- Questioning whether “classically-trained” designers could still bring value in a world where AI tools can render solutions that conform to graphical principles. Spoiler: they can
In the past few decades, AI-facilitated technology was always a talking point of fiction. But today, we are living it. With great certainty, we can all see that a big change is happening in and around the world of design, and it is up to us to be adaptable to change.
Touching the ethical questions in user segmentation, it’s promising to hear there are some venture capitalists who deliberately do not fund projects that leverage AI to filter vulnerable or naive groups of people for maximising sales. We have a duty as designers to narrow down these groups and responsibly inform them of their activities, and put warnings or blockers on self-destructive behaviours.
My takes
Whether you are a graphic designer, product owner, marketer, developer, copy writer, or have any other involvement in designing anything; everyone is a designer. During the panel talks, Helen Kontozopoulos had brought up an uncanny title for a University course, “How to talk to developers.” I need to emphasise that this stereotype of there being barriers to communicating with developers is not useful to anyone. There needs to be a bridge built by both sides. As developers, we need to think about our users every step of the way. If we’re only developing to fill a gap in a process, or some business logic without considering the next developer’s onboarding to that same code, then we’re only developing for ourselves.
I believe we should treat communication as a virtue. In a world where everyone is unique, it’s particularly challenging to deliver a message, but it’s extremely important to make sure that message is understood. By working together, we can bridge the gaps of communication within our teams. That way, we’ll be able to remove barriers to innovation, come up with more efficient facilitators (AI being one of them), and then we’ll have the time to put more value into our designs. I look forward to an inclusive future, subconsciously embedded in everyone’s designs.
