Artificial Intelligence, specifically machine learning, will likely cause a more significant shift for designers than the previous major design shifts from specifications to agile or from large screens to mobile devices. Designing AI will change the methods, tools, applications, and collaborators. Specifically, AI will bring us into an era of “teaching” technology. When specifying (waterfall), our craft was our limitation. When shaping (agile), collaboration was our limitation. With AI, our capacity to teach will be our primary limitation. We will need to develop new ways to articulate our design goals, such as through the creation of learning objectives and so-called AI utility functions.
This talk introduces designers to AI’s fundamental logic (learning), a few exemplary applications as well as how we might work with AI in a human-centered way. Importantly, as with the shift of jobs, as more work is automated, our design domain will change, bringing our attention to augmented human intelligence and human-machine collaboration. Lastly, designers will be charged with making this technology’s impact culturally positive.
