AI & The Future of Design
In the future, you will not lose your job in this industry to artificial intelligence: you could lose your job to an imaginative, ethically responsible, full-stack designer using artificial intelligence. Indeed, the future of design finds her momentum in the balance of timeless solutions and innovative breakthroughs. And this is precisely what we’ll see in the years ahead when every studio will be working with AI in a growing capacity — though not without some much-needed, significant changes to today’s AI models.
And, spoiler alert: this future is closer than you think.
The exciting truth is that industrial design has always looked to the future for inspiration, iteration, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing. Indeed, even the most austere, organic, and minimal designs with lasting impact require curious imagination, a capture system that likely includes smart technology, and a sketching/modeling phase utilizing advanced tools for measurement, alignment, and even sustainability. Moreover, no one is manufacturing, distributing, and marketing at scale without some help from technologies that will one day be connected to AI.
From Bluetooth to drawing tablets, from cell phone cameras to software applications, and from digital tools to email marketing: the entire design process is intimately tethered to technological advancements and, therefore, the inevitable integration of artificial intelligence and augmented assistance.
This is not a question of if or even when: but it is a question of how we will adapt today for the already changing future that is fast approaching every sector, every industry, and every niche market.
The Design Process Will Become Increasingly Integrated With AI
I predict that no step in the design process will remain untouched by the incredible power of artificial intelligence. Of course, like any tool with which we wish to build, the benefits will be met by complicated and volatile challenges. For every technological update or new AI-enhancement we encounter, we’ll need wise, sage leaders acting with integrity and curiosity on the other side. Nonetheless, the design process will become increasingly integrated with AI.
Let’s look ahead at how some of these pieces of a general design process might be positively impacted; we will later turn to some of the challenges we can expect to face.
Inspiration
Perhaps the most ubiquitous and initial design step for every product team begins with inspiration. We’re already moving at light speed when it comes to the prolific assimilation of platforms like Open AI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E, plus others such as MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, Google’s Bard, and Bing’s Chatbot into the collective ideation fabric of copywriting, art, design, and social media. All of these platforms have already seen extensive use by a growing number of individuals and teams.
One of the fantastic benefits of using AI-enhanced tools is that our earliest ideation practices will finally transcend the human problems of limited speed and the inability to produce variable designs at scale. This brings to mind an early experiment from Juan Carlos Noguera, Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who found his MFA students testing and affirming these same benefits.
Simply put, AI models can produce a significant amount of cohesive, cogent visual renderings that far exceed human ability while allowing us the near-immediate benefit of real-time evaluation, cross-domain transference, and artistic representation. This is an unbelievable benefit in the earliest stages of design.
Iteration
Next, the iteration phase will also see substantial enhancements with the ability to generate variations of your designs targeting different surface textures, upholstery options, or fabrication materials; moreover, your team will quickly be able to see their design with alternative hardware or represented across multiple styles and eras or with newly applied reference sources.
All of these actions and tasks are not impossible for today’s design team — but they require significant manpower, multiple team members, and are subject to the limited imagination and scope of any particular designer.
To quote Miklos Philips, “AI is going to be mostly about optimization and speed. Designers working with AI can create designs faster and more cheaply due to the increased speed and efficiency it offers.”
Manufacturing & Distribution
Once a team moves through the iteration phase, the real power of artificial intelligence will be on display — or rather, embedded — within the manufacturing and distribution activities. AI will come to bear on the design industry with the same power and effect that automation had on the automotive industry in the 1960s.
Artificial intelligence will be functioning as part of the foundational layer of additive manufacturing and will revolutionize our most stunning technologies like 3D printing, laser welding, advanced and sustainable material fabrication, real-time analysis, and much, much more.
Marketing
Finally, there is a lot AI will not be able to do in the world of design — but producing multiple lines of approved marketing copy will definitely be something it can do. It is already capable of writing profoundly good, clear copy. Not perfect or even consistently compelling copy, but good copy.
This doesn’t mean AI will run circles around your marketing team; rather, your copywriters can focus on creative editing, crafting microcopy, and performing the many other tasks associated with a product launch or campaign rollout. What this really means is that every marketing team will have the chance to prove themselves worthy of taking good copy and making it compelling. Making it great. Making it connect to the product and the target demographic.
If anything, we can celebrate that “writer’s block” and the dreaded “blank canvas” anxieties so common to writers will be all but eliminated with AI.
The Power Is In The Integration
Imagine an AI-enabled device with a full, detailed, historical, and schematic understanding of your design in its “mind,” (a neural network-database) capable of providing near-instantaneous data in order to advise you on everything from patents to supply chain updates to newfound chemical interactions for decreased carbon footprinting to syncing your calendar and email newsletter with the latest marketing copy (checked for spelling and grammar, of course) all so your team can launch with optimized success.
The power is in the integration.
Integrated theories have long been the silent hero of many insurmountable problems across every field of study or sector of industry. It’s no wonder: the world is complex, made even more so by complicating factors such as our collective desire to explore, innovate, and flourish; we often find ourselves needing to integrate multiple theories to account for the multiple layers of problems we will inevitably encounter. Simply stated, things are never quite as simple as they appear.
As we can see, artificial intelligence has incredible potential to reveal hidden, coalescing patterns to the designer that would otherwise go unnoticed by even the most observant teams. Consequently, it can be reasonably assumed that AI harnesses the power to solve problems, prove a worthy assistant for every design-related project, and integrate virtually unending streams of raw data into meaningful, contextualized, usable content.
The power is in the integration. But the beauty is in human imagination.
The Beauty Is In Human Imagination
It is true that AI will become a versatile, worthy assistant capable of integration at ridiculous levels — but it can not, and should not, do everything. There are significant limitations we can leverage with careful responsibility as we progress on this ever-changing journey of technological advancement.
For starters, AI currently lacks the capacity to wonder and has no internal compass, no intuition: AI can not replace the wild spark that is creativity. For better or worse, we remain responsible for wanting to want to be creative.
Creativity moves us toward dreaming, playing, and enjoying the world only we can imagine. And insofar as we can see, AI is nowhere close to this level of engagement. This is the work, joy, and responsibility of humanity.
Likewise, AI can not understand human emotions and therefore lacks the ability to empathize and respond to emotional cues. This important difference — the lack of ability to empathize — means AI will need to be governed by human designers if we have any hope of creating kind, curious, patient, and gracious interactions within any team.
Finally, solving problems is not the same thing as making complex decisions based on critical societal and communal needs. Artificial intelligence remains incapable of considering relational nuance and taking actions based on the holistic person in order to effectively render wise judgments and offer strategic insight.
In conclusion
Welcome to the rise of the full-stack designer. I like Matt Owens’ definition where he sees the full-stack designer as “not so much about a specific skill set as it is about having a holistic mindset.”
In the very near future, the use of AI within product design will require holistic, well-rounded, open-minded teams dedicated to doing the important work of discernment before we look to implement or include the AI’s recommendations — that includes designers, leaders, and journalists willing to point out the shortfalls, biases, and red flags as they encounter them.
For all of the power we gain using artificial intelligence, our quickly evolving world will require twice as much human intelligence and creative imagination. Indeed, the future of design will always hinge on beauty; and it is an imagination for beauty that humans have in spades.
