Artificial intelligence (AI) is a mystery and a wonder. It has the potential to help us solve humanity’s most difficult problems. AI is also vastly misunderstood by most people. For some, AI is a magical black box with the intelligence of a PhD. It knows all about everything, you just bring your problems and, voilà, your problems are solved. For others, fears of AI uprisings, loss of human control and Terminator-like scenarios cloud their capability to understand the present utility of cognitive computing.
When looking for ways to apply this cutting-edge, revolutionary technology, which can understand, reason, learn, and interact on its own, it’s crucial that designers understand AI’s capabilities and implications to a certain extend. This requires designers to understand data sources, understand what it means to do machine learning, and learn how to put those things together and deliver it up in a way where the only interface may be just a smart speaker.
The good news is, besides all that change, the fundamentals of design haven’t changed (yet). The core behavior of understanding what a user’s problem is and then solving for it, hasn’t changed. The requirement for collaborating with large diverse teams, hasn’t changed. The need for awareness of the potential negative impact of any design on people, societies, or the environment, hasn’t changed.
It’s the curiosity for this uprising new technology and the focus on these fundamentals, which will be key for the designers of the relationship age – where we will be asked to design new human-machine relationships.
Sammy Schuckert
Senior UX Design Lead at IBM, Data and AI Design
Sammy Schuckert is a Senior UX Design Lead at IBM working with teams on products that enable the development of AI technologies, like IBM Watson® Knowledge Catalog and IBM Watson® Studio. In the past he has co-founded and worked as the CEO at a sharing economy startup that later pivoted to become a company which developed a SaaS voice chat tool for remote teams. Sammy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Design and a Master’s degree in Strategic Design from the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd. At IBM he combines his unique entrepreneurial experience and his design education in helping product teams deliver outstanding user experiences that connect with IBMs business strategy. Outside of work Sammy is an amateur street and landscape photographer who enjoys hiking, reading books, and playing video games.
