AUGMENTED DESIGNand challenges moving forward

We all know Artificial Intelligence is a buzzword that is around us and is impacting every aspect of our daily lives. The design world, then, is no exception.

We all debate about this hot topic. And, while we still do not know the consequences of Artificial Intelligence, and the technology is relatively new, I think it can be interesting for us to think where it may take us, what are the things we can do with it, how it will modify us?

So the idea of this article is to explore how Artificial Intelligence can disrupt but more importantly, AUGMENT DESIGN.

Welcome to the FUTURE
I’m sure you have all heard many times that Computer Intelligence will exceed Human Intelligence, and that moment seems to be around the corner.

Many people say it will happen before the end of this century and that we will be jobless and living in an apocalyptic era.

They also say that if we don’t wake up and do something right now, we will lose everything. What do you think? Are you so pessimistic?

Let’s try not to be so apocalyptic, but face the reality: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS SITTING NEXT TO US, it’s sitting at our table. Do you think it will replace our profession?

Let’s analyze what other people in the field is saying about this:

A survey done by Adobe: “The Changing Landscape of Creativity in Business: Key Takeaways from Survey”, showed that 69% of creatives agree that the use of AI will dramatically increase over the next five years.

Adobe also asked creatives how Automation and Artificial Intelligence will impact their futures. The numbers show that more than half of them (55 percent) are optimistic about AI and don’t foresee Automation taking over their jobs in the next ten years.

What we are seeing is that AI is eliminating boring and repetitive tasks so we have more time to do the more creative aspects of our jobs. In fact, many creatives told that their workflows have gotten simpler over the last five years and around 20% attribute the change to Automation or Artificial Intelligence.

I also found in this McKinsey’s report: “Four fundamentals of workplace automation” that “Capabilities such as creativity and sensing emotions are core to the human experience and also VERY difficult to automate.”

So as you can see, we can be very optimistic, what I am hearing is that the surviving professions in the future will be highly creative and the creativity that is found in humans is very difficult to teach to machines.

Makes sense, right? Machines can not love and they can not feel empathy, but they can produce variations of those concepts. However, these variations are only as good as the rules we put to them — they can’t break the matrix.

I’m sure that AI can learn how to produce Swiss typography but, can it design what David Carson did without previous reference? His work was singular because he ignored the design conventions of his time and re-defined them while exploring topics like legibility and the designer’s role in society. I doubt that AI can invent a new design approach with intent, without any previous reference. Right?

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, wrote about how Humans and AI can collaborate to solve social issues. He discussed the future of employment, including qualities needed to survive and thrive in an AI dominated world. Two of the four were creativity and empathy. Again, the same.

We are lucky! These are core qualities every designer has (or should have) and keeps developing during his career!

Now that we all agree that we will not lose our jobs, we can start thinking: How can AI augment and IMPROVE the design process?

The design process is end to end, from finding a solvable problem, to ideating solutions, iterating designs and prototypes, and launching a final product or service.

We all know this double diamond model developed by The Design Council to explain how the design process works. The exercise we should make is to think about all the activities and deliverables involved in this process to see where AI can come into play:

• What tasks we will be happy not to do any more?
• Where can AI enhance designers’ abilities and give us superpowers?
• Where should humans just do what we are good at: being creative, empathetic, and using our intuition?

THERE ARE 2 WAYS IN WHICH WE CAN UNDERSTAND HOW AI CAN HELP US.

One way is as a very smart passive tool in a designer’s hands. The designer has full control over what the AI is doing; it is a tool that helps the designer to achieve what he wants. No more, no less.

An example for this is the “face aware liquify” filter in Photoshop. It uses computer vision and pattern recognition to identify and modify faces and expressions. It was trained on a huge amount of facial image data and it understands how changing a detail in one facial feature impacts the rest of the face. The designer can change a parameter and modify faces, quickly and easily.

OR the other way is to understand AI as augmenting designer’s power.
In this case it is still a tool, but it augments the designer’s abilities. Together they create something that was previously unachievable. Here the designer is both a creative director giving a brief to the AI and a curator making final decisions based on the options the AI-suggests.

An example of the 2nd way of understanding AI is something that happened a long time ago, When IBM Deep Blue won against Chess grand-master Garry Kasparov in 1997, people thought it was the end of chess — that the game won’t be interesting anymore. But the next year, Kasparov played chess together with a computer against Topalov (another chess master) and his computer. And at that moment a new type of chess appeared. Kasparov called it advanced chess, because the new game is a hybrid of human intuition, creativity, and empathy, and machine capabilities like remembering and calculating huge numbers of chess moves.

So translate this to Design and imagine how AI can augment designer’s performance.

Artificial Intelligence, when used as a way to augment design, can help designers create concepts they may not have otherwise imagined.

We can create designs faster and cheaper thanks to the increased efficiency and more productive features that AI can provide.

For instance, we can reduce the time it takes to analyze massive amounts of data and also we can test multiple prototypes with our users in a fraction of the time and cost compared to traditional methods.

With all this context, at Globant we understood that we need to re-invent our core services to take full advantage of A.I. That is why we decided to create AUGMENTED DELIVERY, that is a new ecosystem of tools and services representing the complete delivery journey with AI-assisted development.

But let’s talk about Augmented Design. The use of Computer Vision in the design processes will help us to:

• Create outstanding customer centric products and services
• And reduce the Time To Market.

This AI ecosystem of design tools will allow designers to:

• Interact with users remotely (specially useful in these times)
• Accelerate their design processes
• Empower our designers abilities

The Augmented Design ecosystem will improve product research stages and speed up the decision making processes.

While many view AI as a threat, it can also be a gift: augmenting, complementing, and completing human abilities.

The successful collaboration combines the human as the creative force, and the AI as the pragmatic partner.

The human defines the vision and the values. We bring the creativity, unpredictability and inefficiencies that are part of any creative process.

The AI deals with the data and the technical constraints: it brings the efficiency in creating endless iterations based on the human-specified parameters.

But let’s not confuse variations with creativity or good design — it’s the human who defines the parameters, while the AI executes the work.

The AI-generated results may look different than what a human can create, but that is because we have different problem solving approaches. Machine output is always based on logic and repetitive variations. While the beauty of human creativity is that we understand logic, but often diverge from it just to experiment and explore.

Although machines can generate endless variations, only we can recognize the outstanding ones. But design is not just generating, it’s comparing options and making decisions.

So we can conclude that given the right tools, the product design process could greatly benefit from coupling intuition with grit, empathy with pragmatism, and curiosity with efficiency.

When you combine human with machine, I’m sure you get something greater than the sum of its parts.