GenAI Futures for Design Industry: How to analyze emerging tech through speculative games & collaborative storytelling
This article outlines a process for evaluating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its impact on the design industry in the near future. You’ll find it most beneficial if:
- You’re seeking methods to identify challenges and opportunities related to emerging disruptive technologies.
- You’re interested in ways to transform uncertainties into innovative solutions.
- You’re looking to incorporate more diverse perspectives into the innovation or strategic process.
- You’re keen on infusing more playfulness and storytelling into the design process.
- You have a curiosity about the evolving landscape of the design field.
Context
Generative AI is easy to use and accessible to anyone with good Internet connectivity. Some believe it enables individuals without formal design training to achieve professional-grade results in a short span. A quick rise of generative AI tools has both excited and scared many creatives.
Within just two months, ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot, celebrated more than 100 million users, something that has never been achieved before by other popular applications. This remarkable success didn’t go unnoticed, sparking a lively debate about the far-reaching impacts of widespread generative artificial intelligence use, affecting various industries, including design and the creative sectors.
While some have found ways to integrate these tools into their work, others hold concerns about the potential risks they might introduce. Can anyone be a creator now? How does this impact the design process? Is training algorithms with artists’ work equivalent to plagiarism? What does this mean for creativity and skill development? How will it affect the job market? Are robots the designers of the future, potentially making their human counterparts obsolete? Today’s designers are pondering these and many other questions, and for now, most of them remain unanswered.
Mission
The idea behind the project was to kickstart a discussion about the implications of generative artificial intelligence and how it might influence the design process and industry.
The truth is, we’re not entirely sure how this future will unfold, or what widespread adoption of GenAI could mean for the field. It’s in the hands of stakeholders, users, creatives, technologists, regulators, and researchers to help shape it.
Amidst all the noise and chaos, there’s a pressing need for a safe space for experimentation and discussion. We want to offer a platform, where those affected most by the changes, can engage in a dialogue and co-create the future.
Methodology
Exploring something that hasn’t happened yet can be a challenging task. We’ve developed a speculative simulation game for designers and stakeholders in the field. Its purpose is to help us uncover potential future challenges and opportunities.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to the process:
- Discover Uncertainties
This step often occurs subconsciously. As you go about your day, you may start noticing discussions and excitement surrounding new technology. Suddenly, numerous articles with captivating headlines attempt to predict the future. It can feel like everyone is saying something different. This may lead to a sense of anxiety and uncertainty about what lies ahead.
With GenAI, each week brings news about new applications, insights, and questions. We bear witness to the first court cases, emerging regulations, the development of new art movements, innovative forms of collaboration, and even new conspiracy theories. There’s a prevailing feeling of confusion and uncertainty surrounding these discussions.
This signaled to us that this space requires more clarity, discussion, and vision!
2. Scout Signals of Change
By the time you recognize a deep uncertainty in society, if you look well, you can already spot the manifestations of the coming transformation. You can scout these signals of change by exploring cyberspace, engaging in conversations with colleagues, strolling through the city, or attending theme-related events. Look for the unusual, the extraordinary. The signs could be in the form of new data points, emerging subcultures, intriguing events, innovative products and services, or unexpected consumer behaviors. They represent potential new ways of existence. They are glimpses into the futures that may come to pass.
Considering the rapid adoption of GenAI, it wasn’t particularly challenging to find signals within the design industry. What proved to be more demanding was accurately assessing the pace of this change.
At this stage, among other things, we experimented with new generative applications, followed artists’ protests against AI, analyzed statistics on task performance, examined products co-designed by humans and AI, explored masterpieces of AI art, delved into environmental footprints, and consulted with experts in the field.
3. Develop Scenarios
For this unique project, our aim was to explore the diverse impacts that various approaches to GenAI adoption could have on the design process and the industry. To accomplish this, we employed a framework of 4 Archetypes, outlining four potential trajectories for the future:
- Continued Growth: What might the future of the design industry look like if GenAI development continues at its current pace?
- Decline: … if GenAI development were to come to a halt?
- Discipline: … if there were new methods for regulating GenAI?
- Transformation: … if GenAI development made traditional design obsolete?
Following this, we constructed four scenarios that allowed us to envision possible future dilemmas:
For a detailed look at these scenarios, click [here].
4. Design Provotypes
We aimed to go beyond just describing these scenarios. Our goal was to immerse ourselves in these visions, temporarily living through these potential futures. Thus, we developed four narrative provotypes, each set in a different scenario. Each provotype depicted a future event and featured a dilemma, encouraging players to engage in an open discussion on the subject.
These narratives are:
For the complete provotypes, click [here].
5. Engage in the Game
We believe that the future is a continuous act of co-creation. The more voices and perspectives we include, the better we understand what tomorrow holds. That’s why we invited four designers from various backgrounds, fields, and expertise levels to help us test the provotypes.
The testing session was conducted in an online MIRO environment. During the workshop, designers were presented with the provotypes, each containing a dilemma they needed to react to, drawing from their own experiences and opinions. Through this collaborative storytelling, every player contributed insightful details to the stories we constructed earlier.
6. Analyze the Insights
The discussions that unfolded during the game and in response to the provotypes provided invaluable insights into the critical questions, challenges, and opportunities facing the field of design in the age of AI. This session even sparked some innovative ideas. Once collected and analyzed, these findings revealed the immense future potential of this technology and offered valuable insights into the most effective ways to implement it.
Results
Although the sample size of players participating in the game was not large enough to draw any definitive conclusions about the challenges and opportunities presented by GenAI for the design field in the near future. We hope to achieve this by running the exercises with a much larger group of designers and stakeholders. The aim of the test session was to assess if participants understood the instructions well and if employing such methodology could lead to meaningful insights.
Despite the small number of participants, certain important topics came to light that will need to be addressed when considering future-proofing the design field moving forward. These included, among other things, data ownership, safety and privacy, copyright issues and regulations, the evolving job market, necessary skills and literacy, content transparency and quality, costs of use and development, ethics and algorithmic bias, as well as deep personalization and deep fakes. Designers contemplated the ways in which AI and creatives could collaborate, and what design might become if certain tasks were to be outsourced to machines.
Next Steps
We were pleased to receive positive feedback regarding the engagement of participants and the effectiveness of the workshop process. We also gained valuable insights on how to further enhance the games, make them even more relevant to the future of the field. We’re eager to carry forward with this project and conduct the exercises with a larger audience. This expansion will allow us to delve deeper into existing use cases, confront challenges, and uncover opportunities.
What new skills should designers or aspiring designers possess? How can the development of GenAI influence the design process? Which design tasks could potentially be outsourced to AI? How can an ethical and successful collaborative design practice be established between AI and creatives? These are just a few of the questions that we aim to answer by expanding the scale of our games.
Currently, we are actively seeking individuals and organizations to collaborate with us in scaling this project. We are also looking for designers who are interested in contributing by participating in the games.
