Recently, The NY Times also reported that Carnegie Mellon University has the intention to build a research center that emphasizes the principles of artificial intelligence. Harvard Business Review started setting up the foundation for what it means for management, and CNBC began analyzing promising AI stocks. 

Artefact’s co-founder, Rob Girling, outlined the impact of artificial intelligence on design with questions like “Will machines take your job?” or “What skills do we need to compete against the machines?” He outlines criteria that will make some professions more vulnerable to AI automation. In the future, what will the designer look like? Learn about AI and the future of design in 2025 below.

Everyone will be a designer

Today, most design work is defined by creative intelligence and society. This skill sets demand empathy, problem shaping, creative problem-solving, negotiation, and persuasion qualities. The first impact of AI will be that more and more non-designers develop their creative abilities and social intelligence skills to increase their employability. Actually, in the Harvard Business Review article mentioned above, the good advice for managers is to act more like designers.

The suggestion for designers is that it's not just traditional creative professionals that will be trained to use "design thinking" techniques to get their work done. Designers will be not the most "creative" in the room anymore. To stay competitive, more designers will need additional expertise and knowledge to contribute to a multidisciplinary landscape that can lead to extraordinary specialties. 

For example, you can imagine a classroom where an instructor uses design thinking with new interactive framework tests to improve learning. Or a hospital designer/ administrator reviews the inpatient experience to optimize it for efficiency, ease of use, and better health outcomes. We see this trend emerging - the Seattle mayor's office has formed an innovation team to find solutions to Seattle's most immediate problems and concerns. The team is person-centered as a philosophy and includes designers and design strategists.

Designers as managers, not creators

A lot of online resources have pointed out how tools like Autodesk Dreamcatcher use algorithmic techniques to give the designers a more abstract interface to create. Given directions, constraints, goals, and a problem to solve, these tools can come up with hundreds of variations of a design for designers to choose from. Or keep mixing them until they come closer to a great design.

The meaning of this varies between design disciplines. In architecture, the parametric movement known as Parametricism 2.0 demonstrates the potential of enhanced technological creativity. Its implications have been explored in the gaming industry, where we design virtual environments and large virtual cities. Just take a look at No Man's Sky game - this game is based on a determined, procedurally generated open universe that includes over 18 trillion planets. Although No Man's Sky doesn't succeed as a game, it shows the direction that will ultimately dominate the development of virtual content - the designer's role will be to set goals, parameters, review and refine the AI-styled part.

The generated design techniques aren't particularly new, but deep reinforcement is a relatively new technique that has emerged in the past three to four years and is responsible for much of the excitement and recent progress. AI is considered a discipline. Google's DeepMind created an artificial intelligence program called Deep Q, which uses deep learning to play Atari games and improves ourselves over time, ultimately acquiring amazing skills as exploring unknown loopholes in the game.

The real breakthrough with DeepMind's Deep Q and its successor AlphaGo - the go computer program - is that AI doesn't have any domain knowledge or gaming expertise. And it doesn't even need someone to codify the rules of how to play. It just has visual input, controls, and aim trying to maximize its score. At that level, the game is an ideal testing environment for artificial intelligence to learn from.

This is where the role of the curator comes in. In the future, designers will train their AI tools to solve design problems by creating models based on their preferences.

For example, after years of working in the healthcare field, Artefact has developed a broad view of key issues in digital health design needed to change patient behavior. In the near future, the human can imagine a moment when data is imported solder goals.

The ongoing era of superstar designers

Since AI-driven parametric design allows designers to quickly and easily create variations of a design, the productivity of most designers will increase dramatically. Suddenly we'll be able to explore the vast number of alternative directions in a fraction of the time we need today. With increased productivity and better tools, amateur designers will easily create work that is acceptable - if not exceptional - and potentially puts pressure on prices for high-standard design service.

The design industry’s superstars are likely unaffected, while the barriers to learning and mastering the crafts will be decreased. There is a similar trend in print and graphic design in the 90s. The emergence of desktop publishing software eventually eliminated the end of the market. But it also creates a higher appreciation for designs from everyone, increasing demand, and differentiation for the best designers. 

Until AI has the ability to surprise us with completely novel ideas, superstar designers, and companies that invest in them will continue to dominate, increasing the value of design brands.

From traditional designers to virtual

A large number of people face competition with AI-assisted automation. So they will escape in the virtual reality world, fueling the growing demand for the virtual world, objects, and experiences. Hopefully, we can avoid this confusing scenario, but as virtual reality, augmented reality, and mix explode, it will become the next opportunity for design. It will not only challenge designers to interact in virtual reality to create and impart shared experiences but also require skills like social intelligence and innovation which are hard to outsource to AI.

In addition, the virtual world could create new demand for more traditional design disciplines, such as architecture, interior design, object design, and fashion.

Design AI, design the future of humanity

When humans and computers work together, they can do amazing things that no one can do alone - just look at Michael Hansmeyer's unimaginable form. With their millions of facets, these shapes cannot be built by humans alone, but they can redefine architecture.

While this is just one example, there are some undeniably compelling ways to amplify our creativity as individuals and within industries. I can see the potential for the future where our personal AI assistants, armed with an in-depth understanding of our influences, heroes, and inspirations, continually criticize work, suggest ideas and areas for improvement. A world where problem-solving bots help us see a problem from many different perspectives, through different frameworks. Where the simulated user tests the things we've designed to see how they'll perform in a variety of contexts and suggests improvements before everything is finalized. Where A / B testing programs continually seek to recommend small performance optimizations for our design work.

No longer a threat to the design profession, AI offers great opportunities for design, especially for those involved in the design of interactions we have with emerging AI systems. How do we design those AI design tools? How will we design intelligent services and platforms for our future? How should we design these systems in a way that helps us strengthen our creativity, our relationships with the world, our humanity?

This is an exciting opportunity for us to acknowledge and respond.

Source: Oreilly