Code, AI and design
Being a designer is hard. A designer is often faced with many dilemmas such as should I learn to draw? Should I learn to code? Should I learn softwares? Endless. But today, I would like to focus on one of the dilemmas. Designers and code.
Should a designer learn to code?
Yes, no, maybe.
THIS ABSOLUTELY DEPENDS ON YOU. You are the designer, you have got to take a call on whether you want to dip your feet in this area. Personally, learning code is a boon because you understand the backend of your work and allows you to recognise the limitations, restrictions and also possibilities for a developer. You become independent and confident regarding your work. With the advent of AI and ML, the world of designers has expanded. The immense possibilities have given us inspiration for a better future. We kickstarted our first session of Design with code with a debate on this topic. I would like to express my opinions regarding the topics touched upon in class as well as few of my own readings based on these topics.
“Ai is the new electricity” — Andrew Ng
Pondering over this, I wonder how designers can make use of AI to mould their designs. Machine learning being a part of AI, makes me question the future of living. With all the sci-fi movies and books which talk about singularity, I think it is only fair to reward it to machine learning. Social media being a major platform for extracting data, machine learning is growing at an unimaginable pace.
Data is the new oil.
I recently attended a talk where in an engineer kept stressing on how data is extremely important and I related to this talk while we spoke about data in class. Currently data is the most important element for companies as machines learn only if they are fed with data. With the shift in ideas, voice has recently picked up and Amazon echo and Google home have started collecting data on lifestyles of people. This happens to be extremely precious data but this raises privacy issues (which will be a completely different debate altogether). Well, I guess we can vouch for how precious social media data is after finding out that the government of Uganda imposed social media tax. Yes, social media tax. (this was something that I HAD to mention)
“In a few years, bots will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it “ — Elon Musk
The increase in the quality of bots, shows us the progress in the industry. For example, the Olli, is a driverless bus employing the IBM’s Watson. Voice is the most natural mode of communication and this factor is targeted by conversational agents to attract users and improve experiences.
Another example for improving experiences is Ira in the banking sector. Ira is a chatbot used by HDFC bank which allows the users to have a delightful banking experience.
Reading and learning about these topics, I am quite excited about the project that lies ahead of me!
