The Augmented Designer

It was in 1997 that I joined design school in Ahmedabad, India. At that time computers in design were still new. I had encountered PCs in their pristine air conditioned rooms a couple of times in school and in IT classes, but it was at The National Institute of Design that i found them ubiquitoius.

NID had a computer lab — again a pristine air conditioned environment and entering that room felt like entering another world. It was one of the few spaces that was air conditioned and machines themselves felt like idols — well kept, always brightly lit & worshipped daily by streams of design students day in and out.

As students we could only use it through a coupon system and for a limited period of time — further cementing the aura of rarified air it occupied and the promise that it held of altering our professions deeply.

Those were the early days of Adobe Pagemaker (in Graphic Design) and Photoshop versions were still in single digits. Quite a few of the design faculty had a deep concern of what they saw as an increased dependence on computers — away from our sketchbooks and how that would lead to a loss in original thinking.

“Maintain a sketchbook” was a common feedback — “Make sure you’re drawing before creating it on the PC” — was something I heard several times over the course of my education. To some degree it made sense — to be clear in my head and not get swayed by all the ease that the softwares afforded so easily — but at that time a pencil on paper to me seemed equally an external tool like Adobe.

The excitement, ease of use and the speed quickly overshadowed any concerns. While no one, who has used a letterpress can deny the romance of pressing type on paper by hand, I felt equal joy in being able to compose my first document on Pagemaker (with as many tricks & effects I could manage).
There was a sense of magic in not just being able compose type quickly — the mistakes or results from wrong commands were equally wondrous.

By the time I graduated (2002)— most of us had a desktop of our own or rented from a local store. (PCs though — not Macs) — we were connected online — through noisy routers and painfully slow internet speeds — but we didn’t know better. And these computers came out of their air conditioned temples and were suddenly next to our beds, our tables, everywhere.

At that time, no one could have predicted that we would be walking around with devices in our hands several times faster than the ones we used at our desks. Our files no longer dependent on floppy or disc drives but always available to use from the cloud. And the softwares we that we use today — are not just faster and more capable but they automate a whole lot of tasks as well.

As we stand at the brink of an AI revolution and stare at yet another uncertain unpredictable future — the role of the designer, like everything else, will be challenged and will evolve — whether we like it or not. And one of the core areas would be in our evolving relationship with our tools.

From the pencil to the mouse and now powerful learning systems — the designer has always been augmented with his / her tools — but theres a very strong possibility now that the tool itself could replace the designer.

The softwares and tools that we use currently are passive tools — fulfilling our functions and needs & operating in a standard process form. This is bound to change. The design software of the future could function not as a tool but in a broader sense a way to augment the design process. A lot of functions that the softwares do today could become automated & invisible.

Simple functions like image cleanup for example have already become automated — so it’s easy to predict that a design software fed with certain basic parameters could fulfil the basic functions faster and more efficiently than we do today. An architect could have a basic planning and mapping of the space done instantly — a graphic designer could generate several iterations for a wordmark almost instantaneously — designs for complex systems that takes into account user feedback, research, scrubs etc could also occur at breathtaking speed and scale.

The designers role then has to be redefined. How do we remain relevant in this future?

An interesting path could also be around the design process and the role of softwares in it. Every designer in practise — through same or similar design process — has his/her own unique perspective on the process itself — through intuition, experience and talent. A software that augments the designer should also function in a similar model.

Rather than have a standard software that operates in the same manner for everyone — native AI applications would understand how the designer functions, acts and thinks and augment the designer in their role. These learning applications would be able to understand the nuances of how the designer thinks & functions and over a period of time become a mirror image — applying design process, analyzing data and creating its own unique model of intuition.

A learning application that resides and learns from the designer would also in a sense be a form of an ai personal assistant and replicate the designers approach. With the rise of personal AI assistants (https://aifoundation.com) — that can help us function more efficiently, a design assistant would help the designer function more efficiently.

Whether its collating data points or research, generating options within specified parameters or evaluating solutions — a digital assistant that is able to understand a designers unique individual approach and method of solving problems would aid us tremendously.

What would really get augmented I believe, would also be the nature of the design process and how we as designers understand problems, analyze them and create solutions. When these functions are taken over by learning systems — perhaps the most important function that a designer is able to bring in to the process would be empathy.

Going further- the logical step would be completely AI designers capable of generating faster and more numerous options than any designer — able to analyze and synthesize data at inhuman speeds and generate insights that we cannot even begin to fathom.

Initial experiments like https://www.artlebedev.com/ironov/
already give us a glimpse into the future where as a design community our role and relevance will be questioned increasingly.

In future where we would compete and collaborate with AI designers - what would our role be? Does our humanity make us special? Does it give us a unique insight or a unique perspective that cannot be obtained with just data? Or is it simply the like the refrain of maintaining a sketch book where the fear of unknown makes us refer to something familiar?

I believe that theres probably a third way — not based on conflict or competition with technology but altering what our role should be. If technology and systems are able to solve problems themselves, we as designers might be able to use design thinking to take on larger and more critical roles — perhaps increasingly in a world driven by data and analytics, empathy becomes even more important.

Haruki Murakami in Dance, Dance talks of shovelling cultural snow — mundane tasks that we might not really enjoy but have to be done. So much of our time and collective energy as a profession today goes into shovelling cultural snow — which is probably served better and performed more efficiently by a machine learning application.

Roy.Studio works with brands, organisations and teams to build innovation through design.Learn more at www.roy.studio or connect with us at roy@roy.studio.