A new kind of pair design

Talk

We all knew it was coming, and yet… all of a sudden, it seems that our design world is shifting so fast that it almost feels like someone is pulling the rug from under our feet. Some of the things that we had long hoped for are expanding so fast, machine learning, natural language understanding, refined vocal matching and synthesis, creative automation, design graph, iot networks, that this makes our designing context so complex and different every time. Even though we have acquired expertise, are we on the verge of systematic novel exercise in style with each new project? Can our creative misinterpretations still occur? How can we gain certainty when validating our design hypotheses? All which means that we are faced with maintaining our expertise under uncertain and shifting conditions and learning to dance with new partners.

A new kind of pair design is coming around, the delicate hybridization of machines and designers. Some talk of « augmented intelligence » when looking at how technology boosts our capacities in terms of research, analysis, and planning. So we’ve « just » learned to co-create with our project members, and now we are co-creating with machines that don’t think like us, that follow processes that we may not understand. Illustrated by a few recent projects here are some burning questions for today’s designers: Is it possible to share the decision making with all the project members, machines and humans? What kind of facilitation methods can we look for? What new testing methods can we invent for services that do not yet exist? How can think about the impact of our designs on people’s lives?