← Design Better
Design Better
The Brief: How our recent past should prepare us for the age of AI
00:14:47
n this issue of The Brief, we’re reflecting on what we learned about the past and future of design from our conversation with Paola Antonelli (The Museum of Modern Art), Mark Wilson (Fast Company), Kate Aronowitz (GV), Mike Davidson (Microsoft), and Meaghan Choi (Anthropic).
Loading summary
Transcript2 lines
- [00:02]
A
This is an audio version of the Brief, the Design Better newsletter that takes you deeper into the insights we've uncovered through hundreds of interviews with creative thinkers. I'm Eli Woolery. In this issue of the Brief, we're reflecting on what we've learned about the past and future of design from our conversation with Paola Antonelli from the Museum of Modern Art, Mark Wilson from Past Company, Kate Aronowitz from Google Ventures, Mike Davidson from Microsoft, and Megan Choi from Anthropic Looking back at 30 years of design roughly 30 years ago I was an undergrad sitting in our dorm's computer cluster, and this was before the days when most students had laptops. I ran into something I hadn't seen before. It was called Netscape Navigator, and it was one of the first commercial Internet browsers which our very first guest on Design Better Irie now helped to design. I clicked on one of the buttons, probably what's cool, and along with a nifty loading animation, the browser took me down some early Internet rabbit hole. I don't remember exactly where I ended up, but I do remember being blown away by the experience. As a computer nerd kid in the 80s, I had spent plenty of time with bulletin board systems and things like American Online, which we could access through a dial up modem from home. But this is very different. It was fast compared to what I was used to, and it felt like I could almost instantaneously access content from all around the world, even though the content online at the time was a minuscule fraction of what it is today. I had entered school to study product design, but this was for products in the physical world. Digital product design didn't exist as we know it today. The first use of the phrase user experience in a job title was Don Norman's role as a user experience architect at Apple in the mid-90s. Browsers like Netscape Navigator and then the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 opened up a new world of opportunities and challenges for the field of design. In our conversation with Paolo and Mark, we talk about the democratization paradox, design's loss of innocence, the fragmentation of the design profession, and the shift from tangible to intangible design. The Democratization Paradox Mark Wilson said, We democratized all the tools and we democratized none of the platforms. And that gap is just in a nutshell, kind of what's broken about the individual's ability to communicate. While design tools and capabilities have been democratized and everyone can now access design software, create content, etc. The platforms and systems remain highly centralized within a few large Companies Meta Google, TikTok, the early messy days of the Internet, GeoCities and MySpace have largely been tamed, which can make for better user experiences. But we also miss the wild creativity that came from having an infinite number of ways to express yourself online. Back then, your personal webpage could be a nightmare of animated GIFs, visitor counts, and autoplay music. Terrible for usability, but at least it was yours. Today, we're all posting in the same formats and are subjected to the same algorithmic rules for engagement. The tools to create have never been more powerful or accessible, yet we're increasingly creating within narrower and narrower boundaries defined by a handful of tech giants. Design's loss of innocence Paolo Antonelli said when in 2013 there was news of the 3D printed gun and I remember that my jaw dropped not at the 3D printed gun, but at my stupidity and naivety and having thought that design was such a positive force. Always right Design, just like any other human activity, can go either way. It can be good. It could be bad. It's important to understand that it's an application of human creativity. Therefore it is subject to those vagaries. The ethics of design have become more controversial over the past three decades, from the behavioral design of apps like Instagram and TikTok causing addiction and mental health problems, especially in younger users, to the dark patterns that trick us into subscriptions we don't want or sharing data we'd rather keep private. Even products that start with good intentions can go wrong. The founders of Juul, who came out of our design program at Stanford, intended to create a less harmful way of delivering nicotine, but ended up creating a product that got countless teens addicted to the substance. And we've watched as the same design principles that help us create delightful experiences can be weaponized to exploit human psychology. The infinite scroll that keeps you engaged for just one more minute, that turns into hours. Notification systems designed to trigger dopamine responses. We've entered this era believing design would democratize information and bring people together. Instead, we've often created systems that divide us, addict us, and surveil us. The fragmentation of the design profession, paolo Antonelli said. I think what happened in the past 30 years of fragmentation, so many of the designers that are here might not know of designers that instead you and I often publish or collect because there's been a disaggregation of the profession. Design has splintered into countless specializations over the past 30 years, and designers in different disciplines might not know of each other's work anymore. This fragmentation has created both opportunities. Designers are everywhere and challenges a loss of shared understanding. A UX designer working on enterprise software might have no idea about the design principles they borrow from the Bauhaus. A type designer might never cross paths with a service designer. We've gone from a world where designers shared a common foundation drawing, color theory, composition to one where some designers never sketch, others never code, and many couldn't name a typeface beyond Helvetica. The specialization has brought incredible depth to each discipline, but we've lost something in the translation, a common language that once united us from objects to algorithms, Mark Wilson said, I do think the most impactful thesis design of this time is the most invisible one, which is the algorithm. Technically, that's a sorting mechanism. It's essentially information design just spread across the Internet and every service we have. The invisible design of algorithms shapes every digital experience. This shift from tangible to intangible design represents a fundamental change in how design influences culture. We've moved from designing things you can hold to designing systems that can capture you. The algorithm that decides what you see in your feed has more impact on your daily life than most physical objects you own. Yet this most influential form of design is also the most opaque, hidden behind proprietary code, trade secrets and machine learning black boxes that even their creators don't always understand. We've handed over curatorial control of our culture as systems optimized for engagement rather than enlightenment. The question isn't whether algorithms are designed, they absolutely are. But who gets to participate in that design process and what values guide it.
- [06:04]
B
Wisdom scales slower than code By Aaron Walter I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Eli and I are pretty old. Between the two of us, we have more than a century of experience. You know, it's not something we normally share, as it's not really seen as an asset in the tech industry. Gray hair is a liability, or at least it has been until now. With age comes caution, temperance, and, as Arthur Brooks says, crystallized intelligence. When we're moving fast and breaking things, speed, resilience and risk tolerance are desirable qualities. Idealism underlies it all and drives progress, or at least that's the perception of it. I was swept up by that idealism in 2007 at south by Southwest when Twitter launched and it was the darling of the tech industry. The platform promised to democratize journalism and amplify the voice of the people. Social media brought us the Arab Spring, a Middle east revolution in Egypt and Tunisia, and a sense that we could build any future that we dared to dream. We all know how this story ends. Social media also brought us trolls, doxing election interference, suicide and depression, especially amongst teens and a new generation of anxious people. We have unintentionally created rage and sadness, machines repeating the sins of the past. As we press forward with AI, I can't help but see echoes of our past sins. We are optimistic, awestruck by possibility, and largely blind to the consequences. In 2011, Twitter felt like democracy's megaphone. Everyone's voice can be heard. As Mark Wilson recalled in our recent live episode of Design Better, the Arab Spring seemed proof that technology could liberate us. But as Wilson noted, we democratized all the tools and democratized none of the platforms. The asymmetry gutted journalism, eroded trust and concentrated power in a few opaque systems. The same pattern is forming around AI Right now, we're again cheering the removal of barriers to creation. Museum of Modern Art Design and Architecture curator Paola Antonelli told us that when she first saw the 3D printed gun in 2013, she realized her naivete and having thought that design was such a positive force always. Her reckoning that design, just like any other human activity, can go either way is an essential insight for every AI Founder Mike Davidson warned that AI is taking Mike Davidson warned that AI is asking for a kind of intimacy that no technology has ever demanded for. Mike Davidson warned that AI is asking for a kind of intimacy that no technology has ever demanded before. Here's what he told us. Technology has never asked to be this close to you before, and it's asking now. And as a user, you should think very, very long and hard about who you trust when it comes to using these products, because they're going to create incredible value in your life. But they're also going to require incredible amounts of trust. With that closeness comes extraordinary trust and extraordinary risk. We're using AI for talk therapy, for medical diagnoses, for financial advice, and some are even using AI as a romantic partner. As Megan Choi from Anthropic told us, people have adopted this technology shockingly fast when we know so little about it. Never before have we created a technology that we cannot understand. We have no idea how AI arrives at a conclusion, and there are no logs to review when a bot guides someone to suicide. These are superhuman black boxes of power. AI may not share social media's business model of outrage, but it shares its velocity once again. The incentives push us to move fast, to release before we reflect. And once again we risk forgetting that wisdom scales much slower than code. Can we design and build differently. If the social media revolution taught us anything, it's that moral hindsight arrives too late. Regulation lagged. Design ethics were treated as an afterthought. We optimized for engagement, not enlightenment. And by the time the side effects were clear polarization, anxiety, misinformation, the systems were too entrenched to fix. Megan Choi argued that the disciplines we need most now aren't new tools, but new lenses. Here's what she told us. I think we've learned over the past 15 years that technology policy, especially safety and privacy policy, is so important and so hard to walk back after it's out there. As we're quickly releasing this technology, I think we have a huge responsibility to try and put in the right guardrails. Of course we're probably not going to get it right, but it's still worth it. Spend extra time to figure out where we absolutely need to put them in. Looking back to our predecessors and social media, with all that optimism, we can ask, how can we do it differently now? This is the inverse of the move fast and break things mantra that defined the last era. It's slow design, patient design, the kind that assumes impact before intent. Mike Davidson put it we are on Team human, and if we can't help the human beings who use our product flourish, then we're not doing our job. Designers, developers and investors now share a collective responsibility to build as if people matter more than markets. Choi said it best the most important skill set we can all have is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That discomfort, the pause before deployment, the debate before shipping, might be our last safeguard against building something that could have a farther reaching impact on humanity than social media ever did. Essential skills for a great Future I'm concerned we have collective amnesia. Can we really build a great future with AI if we can't remember our past? I don't know that we can. That's why tech can no longer be only a young person's game. We need some gray haired thinkers in the creative process to act as our memory and foster debate. Where youth chases possibility and age asks why. Where youth delights in frictionless progress, age values the friction that forces reflection. We spent the last two decades idolizing speed and disruption. That won't serve us well with artificial intelligence. The philosopher Arthur Brooks calls it crystallized intelligence. The ability to see patterns, to connect dots across time, to slow the world just enough to ask the right question. That's what this moment demands. We don't need faster innovators. We need slower thinkers to read and share this episode with friends and colleagues. Visit designbetterpodcast.com and while you're there, you can become a premium subscriber, which will get you access to the brief newsletter in your inbox every month, plus ad free episodes, extra episodes every month, and so much more. Just visit designbetterpodcast.com DesignBetter is supported by Masterclass. Eli and I are lifelong learners. Both of us are always reading, expanding our skills and pursuing new interests, and I have a hunch as a design better listener, you're probably the same. The best way to expand your knowledge is with Masterclass, which lets you learn from the best to become your best. Masterclass is the only streaming platform where you can learn from over 200 of the world's best and brightest people like David Sedaris, Ryan Holiday, Anna Wintour, Shonda Rhimes, Martin Scorsese, and the late Jane Goodall. I learned a ton about business strategy from Bob Iger's Masterclass and Eli is a fan of Neil Gaiman's Masterclass on storytelling. Whether you want to learn to write, improve your public speaking, develop a mindfulness practice, enhance your creativity, or become a better cook, Masterclass has in depth expertise you can tap into anytime and any place. You can access Masterclass on your phone, your computer, your smart tv, or even in audio mode. You can just listen to the classes right now. Design Better listeners Get an additional 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com DesignBetter that's 15% off@masterclass.com DesignBetter.