A new design era: How AI can power greater human experiences
The design industry stands on the cusp of a transformative era as Generative AI gathers increasing momentum every week and the industry continues to scramble to adapt to new ways of working and adopt new tools. All this set against speculation of machines replacing humans with no real understanding of the impact it will ultimately have. What is certain, is the greatest potential will lie in realising a powerful partnership between the two.
The modern day challenge — good versus great
In the digital age, designers face a paradox. New tools have increased velocity to achieve an average baseline of “good” experiences, while (generally speaking) contributing to the fall in number of “great” quality experiences. Standardisation has created a sea of sameness that lacks personality and stand-out. The risk we face with AI, is these problems will become magnified, creating further blandness in a world that desperately craves connection.
For businesses, the opportunity to truly stand-out and innovate — not only in proposition, but in the ability to create meaningful connections — is one of the greatest opportunities we have before us. Attraction, engagement, and affinity are must-haves for any successful brand in any industry and, through Design, AI can help to power the journey to “great”.
The role of design in any industry is to empathise, understand human needs and solve problems to improve lives.
How AI can help us to solve human problems
Before we jump in and start generating series of futuristic cats dancing on a moon made from marble*, or asking cGPT to project future opportunities for <insert industry here>, the question we must ask is, what problem are we solving and why? Design exists to empathise, understand human needs and solve problems to improve lives, and today is no different — we just have new superpowers at our finger tips.
Human x AI can create greater focus where it matters
Generative AI is a Swiss Army Knife of tools. It isn’t a replacement for creativity — it’s an enabler. From alleviating time spent on trivial tasks through to challenging the way we think, the industry is beginning to reflect on where designers’ time and effort is best spent and where AI can rid us of the low value and mundane. If we get this right, we’ll be able to use AI to focus more where it matters. To fill the blank page, drive greater creativity in problem solving, improve quality of experiences through better questions and better prompts, to open our eyes to new avenues of thought, improve product performance and speed up conception to execution.
Though we’re still surfing the tidal wave of change, we’re beginning to recognise areas where Human x AI is bringing new value to designers:
- Augmenting Design: to replace low-level tasks
- Collaborative Design: to incrementally improve the output
- Generation of Design: to generate ideas, content or new “synthetic” materials
- Self-Optimising Design: to increase performance through smart, self-improving systems
- Explorative Design: to identify new ways to imagine and create
These areas are fuelling the evolution of the design process in new and interesting ways:
1. Augmenting Design
AI as a utility worker
Reducing human time spent on low-level routine tasks like resizing images, formatting text, design documentation and writing draft emails, will enable designers to focus on strategic thinking, conceptualisation of ideas, and refining the story of design solutions.
2. Collaborative Design
AI as a co-pilot
Co-creating, co-researching, and co-designing towards a greater quality outcome by speeding up the rate in which we work. Through new tools, features and plug-ins, the design process has been hacked and improved — removing slow and laborious activities and increasing the effectiveness of the design process. Think documentation of a design component and research transcript summaries.
3. Generation of Design
AI as a creator
Design works best when tackled as a team — and AI can be one of your greatest allies. Using AI to generate “synthetic” material, we’re able to improve the outcome and standard of delivery. Not only that — we can do so at speed. Remember, the role of the Human is to guide — to empathise with users, understand the human nuances, define the destination, and set principles to direct the generation of a solution. Check out artists and illustrators training AI to generate an extension of their own style (check out exactly.ai), or the use of video generation tools to execute scripts as examples.
4. Self-Optimising Design
AI as a coach
Saving time in the design process is one thing, but self-initiating systems takes us to another level, moving the human to a facilitator role. Utilising feedback, behavioural data, analytics and trends, we’ll begin to see AI used to adapt and refine experiences to better serve their purpose – or as Pontus Wärnestål puts it, AI as an “agentive system”. Think setting up journeys around fraud prevention in banking or live testing feature performance in digital channels.
5. Explorative Design
AI as a pioneer
At more advanced levels, the introduction of AI can help to activate unchartered territories for a design team. Using the AI to disrupt the usual process with new and diverse inputs, we can begin to actively challenge the human creative process and lead us to new and differentiated outputs. The art will be in balancing the fear of the unknown with the comfort of the familiar to push towards unexpected breakthroughs in problem solving.
A watch-out
It is worth a brief mention, the current restriction on some Large Language Models (LLMs) means they rely on past data sets to generate material and there has been evidence to suggest built-in bias despite claims of neutrality. This is something we must all factor into our work. For more detail, see this article by Alexandra Jayeun Lee which gives a good overview of the biases of ChatGPT we should be aware of.
A new era of design
The role of designers will continue to thrive as AI is adopted across these 5 areas, and in doing so, welcomes in the new era of Generative AI Design. An era that combines Human x AI effectively to achieve greater experiences. AI alone won’t solve the lack of originality, complacency and missed opportunity — if anything it will promote it by making these paths easier to follow. So as experiences become more standardised through artificial means — it’s the role of the designer to be unapologetically human. To bring the heart, empathy, energy, and courage. To create wonderful worlds, incredible stories and memorable experiences that touch real people and solve real-world, wicked problems.
If you’re seeing other trends or use cases in your design process, do share in the comments below.
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@stevewhapshott
Director, Experience Design at Sapient
Authored by a Human, co-piloted by AI in research, drafting and image generation.
