Evolving Digital Design
01/07/20 • 45 min
The digital design profession has undergone tumultuous change over the last decades, lessons from which inform the future of AI-driven computational design. Daniel Harvey, Head of Product Design & Brand at The Dots Global, is our guest.
Design has evolved since the rise of the Internet and mobile computing, resulting in unintended negative consequences in our world such as the appropriation of social media technologies by evil actors, and the pernicious influences of bias and other invisible forces. In extreme cases our tools even contribute to the culmination of the most horrific of outcomes, such as the genocide in Rohingya. We explore how these complicated dynamics provide a glimpse into the future of design and technology.
Memorable Quotes
“When we're ripping off the same Silicon Valley apps, or the same sort of business models we end up inheriting, intentionally or not, all their weird, fucked up, white tech world biases too.”
“There is this fantastic service that you can take the content of a job description, put it into that, and it will remove the gender bias from it.”
“As design does evolve, and as tools evolve, and as patterns evolve, I think we could get to a point where design is less about sort of pixel level craft, it's about more higher level value.”
“One of the things that I'm most excited about is the reemergence of niche networks.”
“Facebook was used as a platform to promote hate in Myanmar which led to an unconscionable number of real deaths, a massive refugee crisis.”
“You can have the most diverse and inclusive team in the world, but if you're looking at the same three or four big tech companies as examples to swear by, you're never going to really see the benefits of that diversity.”
“What's still not happening is you don't have one sort of common tool that's pointing to the same common assets and common design libraries or pattern libraries.”
“Because of this proliferation of advertising as the default business model, we're just accustomed to it now, and we're willing to accept it when it does creep back in.”
“When you have voracious growth of a community, of an audience, and then you start to put advertising on top of that, the inevitable metric becomes daily active users. And the inevitable experience of using the product is, we'll cram advertising more and more into every part of the experience.”
“If you start to grow your skill sets in other areas, it's just an extra superpower.”
“There's a real problem with so much sameness in design today.”
“The scale of these platforms is what invariably leads to their potential for damage.”
Who You'll Hear
Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)
Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)
Daniel Harvey, Head of Product Design & Brand at The Dots Global (@dancharvey)
Join The Conversation
Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org
Twitter: @GoCreativeNext
Facebook: /GoCreativeNext
Instagram: @GoCreativeNext
Sponsors
GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com
Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org
BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is
The digital design profession has undergone tumultuous change over the last decades, lessons from which inform the future of AI-driven computational design. Daniel Harvey, Head of Product Design & Brand at The Dots Global, is our guest.
Design has evolved since the rise of the Internet and mobile computing, resulting in unintended negative consequences in our world such as the appropriation of social media technologies by evil actors, and the pernicious influences of bias and other invisible forces. In extreme cases our tools even contribute to the culmination of the most horrific of outcomes, such as the genocide in Rohingya. We explore how these complicated dynamics provide a glimpse into the future of design and technology.
Memorable Quotes
“When we're ripping off the same Silicon Valley apps, or the same sort of business models we end up inheriting, intentionally or not, all their weird, fucked up, white tech world biases too.”
“There is this fantastic service that you can take the content of a job description, put it into that, and it will remove the gender bias from it.”
“As design does evolve, and as tools evolve, and as patterns evolve, I think we could get to a point where design is less about sort of pixel level craft, it's about more higher level value.”
“One of the things that I'm most excited about is the reemergence of niche networks.”
“Facebook was used as a platform to promote hate in Myanmar which led to an unconscionable number of real deaths, a massive refugee crisis.”
“You can have the most diverse and inclusive team in the world, but if you're looking at the same three or four big tech companies as examples to swear by, you're never going to really see the benefits of that diversity.”
“What's still not happening is you don't have one sort of common tool that's pointing to the same common assets and common design libraries or pattern libraries.”
“Because of this proliferation of advertising as the default business model, we're just accustomed to it now, and we're willing to accept it when it does creep back in.”
“When you have voracious growth of a community, of an audience, and then you start to put advertising on top of that, the inevitable metric becomes daily active users. And the inevitable experience of using the product is, we'll cram advertising more and more into every part of the experience.”
“If you start to grow your skill sets in other areas, it's just an extra superpower.”
“There's a real problem with so much sameness in design today.”
“The scale of these platforms is what invariably leads to their potential for damage.”
Who You'll Hear
Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)
Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)
Daniel Harvey, Head of Product Design & Brand at The Dots Global (@dancharvey)
Join The Conversation
Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org
Twitter: @GoCreativeNext
Facebook: /GoCreativeNext
Instagram: @GoCreativeNext
Sponsors
GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com
Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org
BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is
Previous Episode
Architecture & Generative Design
What is the role and future of generative design and machine learning in the field of architecture? Lilli Smith, Senior Product Manager AEC Generative Design at Autodesk, joins us to discuss these emerging technologies.
Architecture, in collaboration with Engineering and Construction, leads to the creation of the millions of buildings around the world. Like many other creative professions, architecture is being transformed by smartware in the form of things like generative design applications and additive fabrication, which is better known as 3d printing. Autodesk’s Lilli Smith brings more than 20 years of personal history and insight to our conversation on these topics.
Memorable Quotes
“By the year, 2050 there are going to be 10 billion people on earth and if you do the math, we're going to need to build about 13,000 buildings a day to accommodate all those people.”
“Humans are still going to be critical in these design efforts because they're gonna be setting up the problems, deciding what kinds of problems to solve using machines to help them to do a better job.”
“Machine learning algorithms lessen the number of design options that the designer has to sort through.”
“The computer can actually surprise you with combinations of different inputs that you might not have thought about before.”
“Computer literacy and coding literacy are really seen now as core competencies for architects and engineers in school.”
“When there are several inputs to the design, it becomes really hard for the human mind to keep track of all the combinations of those inputs.”
“We have tools that can actually predict the next node that you should place in a design sequence and give you ideas about what can come next.”
“Technologies like machine learning can help people to code better and they'll be able describe their design ideas better for other kinds of automation.”
“What people say they do and what they actually do is usually different.”
“My 10-year-old has been coding in Scratch since before she could read. It’s really exciting to think about what her generation, the creative things that they're going to be able to come up with to deal with these technologies.”
“Generative design is really not new. There's a long history of generative art.”
Who You'll Hear
Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)
Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)
Lilli Smith, Senior Product Manager AEC Generative Design, Autodesk (@LilliMSmith)
Join The Conversation
Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org
Twitter: @GoCreativeNext
Facebook: /GoCreativeNext
Instagram: @GoCreativeNext
Sponsors
GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com
Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org
BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is
Next Episode
Art, Culture, & AI
The impact of AI and other emerging technologies is of great interest to artists, who translate that interest into insights about where the world is heading. Transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins shares her work and insights.
We go through our lives, ubiquitously using technologies like Alexa and Netflix, without critically thinking about the impacts that machine learning and other emerging technologies have on today and tomorrow. Stephanie’s art, as well as live event projects that create dialog and participation from experts and every citizens alike, strive to make us aware of and active in how we think about and engage with our technology - being particularly mindful about issues of representation, bias, and empowerment.
Memorable Quotes
“Not The Only One is talking a lot about ‘the would be’. So if you ask it a question it will say, ‘Take it to the would be.’ And I always marvel at that, because it seems to be offering this idea that you take it to this thing that I'm not quite sure what it's talking about, but the advice feels sound, and also feels in line with the way that my family and ancestors might answer that question.”
“If this is one example of this technology, are there others that represent people of color in a way? Are there others that represent different cultures and attitudes in different ways? How are they programmed, and what does this mean for the world?”
“She is a system that is representationally one thing, but perhaps is informed by coders who are not completely in line what her representation might be.”
“I've been able to step into this arena, learn by doing, and then have a voice in terms of trying to get people to think about ideas of bias and equity and ethical thinking and inclusion in the AI sphere.”
“And long run, really being involved in the making of the systems so that at least there are a multitude of different ways of being and ways of existing in the world, to start questioning how the system are working, what data they're based on, and bringing up why that might be a problem.”
“Not The Only One is my attempt at making a memoir of my family through artificial intelligence. And the original idea was to take three generations of women from the family, have us all talk to each other, do oral histories, transcribe that information, feed it into a recursive neural network, or a chat bot system, and allow others to question it so that they get to know us and our values and ideas.”
“I also think that there's a space where we get to interrogate and question the systems and think a little deeper about not only using those systems, but changing them.”
“We need to find ways to make technologies that seem really inaccessible and perhaps not for certain communities feel like they are accessible, and find ways then to use them.”
“I've come to the conclusion that in the short run specifically, the data is going to be the thing that we need to be conscious of.”
“I feel like the story of my family is a very specific one that has some specificities that we would like to share in a certain way, and that I don't want to be lost even to a next generation. And a way to hold onto that is to build it into a system that will be going on and engaging other systems. And so I do this work hoping that will hang around, and hoping that we don't just get overrun by whatever it is makes it most expedient to get to the information or ideas that are out there.”
“We seem to be creating a world through algorithms and artificially intelligent systems that - it's gonna really form and inform the way the world functions going forward.”
“I was talking to this robot and questioning her and we were having conversations, and it became clear to me that some of the things I was looking for were not in her.”
“I happen to think that we're entering a time where artists and everyone else are going to have to be learning all the time.”
Who You'll Hear
Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)
Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)
Stephanie Dinkins, Artist & Associate Professor, Stony Brook University (@StephDink)
Join The Conversation
Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org
Twitter: @GoCreativeNext
Facebook: /GoCreativeNext
Instagram: @GoCreativeNext
Sponsors
GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com
Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative pow...
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