Is All About Generative UI Now

AI & Humans Design A New World

Coderfull
InAllMedia
4 min readFeb 17, 2023

--

Imagined with Midjourney

The advances that AI is bringing to product development and testing are going to transform UX/UI Design drastically, but how? Let’s dive a little bit deeper into the concept of generative design and its coming combination with AI. Will it produce a real impact on our material world? It’s only a matter of looks? Will it change how it functions around us?

Let The UI Do The Talking

Right up until now, we were used to feeding the machines simple commands. Learning how each device’s quirks, buttons, and operating systems take a crazy amount of time. In a way, we invest lots of working hours in learning a language that machines can understand. Luckily, that learning curve has been decreasing for some time now with the launch of more intuitive UI/UX supported by each new technology: touchscreens, face scanners, fingerprint readers, different sensors, and even lidars.

This means better functioning and more power of production. But also, it is forging machines that adapt better to humans: to our gestures, our anatomy, our customs, and our surroundings. The key part behind all these changes is UX/UI design.

Imagined with Midjourney

Who else would convert an AI assistant into a robotic pet? The world of the future has UX/UI designers as the main players in the industry, and generative design will be their superpower.

What Is Generative Design?

We have discussed earlier the power that tools like Fusion 360 give to industrial designers. Their tool is so new that they even created a course that explains the concepts behind it. They define generative design as a “collaborative design process between humans and computers”. As simple as it sounds, as powerful as it gets. Humans set the needs, the parameters, and the limits and the machine produces an incredible amount of possible design solutions.

The Internet of things is one of the fastest growing markets right now and it needs machines that communicate to humans in unpredictable devices, with heterogeneous surfaces like fridge doors, car windows, glasses, and bottles. The combination of generative design with AI is a power that will bring the future home. The Digital Environment is permeating the Natural Environment and it will need to be more adaptable to jump off the screens into different surfaces.

Unlike humans, machines have a different way of creating. Since they aren’t limited by social and historical frameworks, they can iterate design in ways that aren’t available for designers to think on their own. AI is an amazing sounding board for anyone who wants to push the envelope. It’s not about who can do it best, but what are the strengths and weaknesses of each part of the team. The power that AI has, and the one it will develop in the next months and years can be of great benefit to humans.

Imagined with Midjourney

Generative UI Is Almost Here

If we think about the fact that a machine trained with countless samples and data, pulled not only from its industry but nature too, we can start understanding the potential of it working side by side with a designer. Imagine the power of a computer that has been trained with large datasets and is connected to major world databases. It’s easy to see how it can come up with answers no human could produce.

We know the story of Deepmind’s Alpha series of AI. They revolutionized the way the ancient game of Go is played in a few months with AlphaZero: starting from scratch it learned to play with only the rules and an incredible amount of games against itself. After the AI conquered several human games, Deepmind turned to scientific challenges. AlphaFold, one example of this, solved the structure of proteins producing several lives of work in weeks. With this power of learning, iterating, and building strategies is not a reach to assume that UX is about to be revolutionized in the same way.

It’s almost a certainty that UX will evolve UX/UI, the question that remains is if designers have the adaptability and flexibility to steer this powerful tool.

Will they build a better world? How will it look? How will it work?

Imagined with Midjourney

--

--