Designers of the Future Will Look Nothing Like They Do Today
Design is an expression of agency in the interplay of artifacts and ideas, the interactive and the experiential, the economic and the cultural.
As designers, we are in the business of context, understanding, and realization. We bring to life ideas which shape environments and society. Our work literally touches every field of human endeavour, across medium, function and form. We are bound together by craft. We work as craftspeople, and our effectiveness emerges from our ability to feel the material potentials of our craft.
We are nearing the moment when the materials we craft begin to express agency and intent in the transformation of our field.
We are entering an era of design where the capabilities and agencies emergent in cognitive technology and machine intelligence become the content, collaborators, interfaces and consumers of our process. An era where technology transcends its role as the product of our intent, and begins to act upon design with new formulations of intent unique to itself.
Perhaps the practice of design will be embodied by an emergent intent of its own. Perhaps we are entering the uncanny valley of design.
The Inflection Point
Decades ago we designed technologies to connect. Moments later, we evolved to design software at the application layer of a global, connected environment. Today we design, not only for, but increasingly with, the world wide web as platform, input, content and medium.
If we peel the layers back, we find a deeper operation at play. We have begun a process of rewriting our social contracts. Humans and machines are co-evolving a new ecology. Welcome to the overlap.
When I was 16, a company formed on the basis of a distributed service architecture would endeavour to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Rather than describe the then infantile web with prescriptive directories curated by humans, Google would implement ever self-complexifying software, known as ‘spiders’, to the tasks of automated link and content indexing. The information space of the internet revealed itself organically even as its form and behavioural properties were yet unknown.
To discover this meaning, its systems “experienced” information as both a material and as a dynamic process. To provide its users with value, Google had to appropriate the information of the web into itself — into its own content and interpretive structure, literally as a dynamic of “inner formation.”
Soon, by consuming the functions and outputs of this dynamic system, Google began to “in-form” us. We no longer simply searched for information. We “Googled” something. We internalized its engagement and embodied the connectivity it provided.
As digital technologies restructure the landscape of human capability, we must understand that these transformations are not simply evolutions of product functionality or interface. We are transforming the language of our relationships to technology, to ourselves and to each other.
Designing Machines with Feelings
Machine intelligence has entered a new realm — computing the cultural. Cognitive technologies now engage the personal and the emotive. Design in the agentive age is intimate — in our clothing, in our homes — in our sense of home.
While our understanding of what can be ‘felt’ by a machine is limited, machines have already been afforded license to shape how we feel, and by extension, to interface personally with our decision-making faculty.
Today we have personalized Spotify playlists, robot art competitions, computer generated film scores, conversational chat bots and personalized mass manipulation of political opinion.
As I write this article, I have been listening to the ‘masterworks’ of Aiva. Note that Aiva stands for “Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist” — an AI platform designed to deliver musical compositions in the style of John Williams. But that is not the point. The point is that its name is Aiva, a name one might give their daughter. It is not a music processing system that is envisioned here — it is an artificial agent ‘who’ will hopefully become one of the ‘great master composers’ of our time.
In the agentive age, AI is not only enabling personalization, it is becoming a medium for personhood. At the political level, this already includes statehood. Sofia is an AI citizen of the UAE, and possesses a decentralized intelligence. One might wonder in the future will other Hanson robots who share her brain also receive citizenship by proxy? What will their influence on society be? What will they design?
Design Practice as a Question of Normativity
As designers, we must evolve to meet the opportunities and risks presented by innovations in machine intelligence.
Here at Normative, we are learning to question the assumptions and expectations of our practice. Our name comes from a latin word ‘norma’ which means ‘carpenter’s square.’ (How might we find that ‘right’ angle?) In this sense, questions of normativity have always been questions of craft: embedded in process, dynamic, contextual and material.
Normativity is about connecting with the deeper art in what we do and how it is known. More than a question as to the specification of how things ought to be, normativity is an inquiry into the qualitative and evaluative power of our tools and our practice as designers. Cultivating mastery through tacit knowledge over prescriptive control.
Learning to feel with machines.
Craft is the Path to Art
Let us consider that these outputs of our design practice today will become the media and inputs of our design practice tomorrow.
How might we prepare to design, not only for the realization of intent in an “idea becomes artifact” sense, but also in an “artificial becomes agentive” sense? How might we literally “realize the artifact of intent?”
Designers of the future will contend with the capabilities of machine intelligence, cognition, agency, and intent. As they do, they will also be required to contend with the nature of their own.
Admittedly, this is a conversation where there are more questions than answers. A conversation where the most urgent value may be in our ability to discover and to ask, rather than to prescribe or even predict. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we will explore in practice what designers of the future will focus on and do!
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If you’d like to connect with our conversations at Normative, feel free to join our monthly Design + AI meetups.
