The need for AI-friendly designs

Why we should start considering AIs as users.

I’m an Industrial Designer and lately, I have been working on projects involving artificial intelligence. During this time I have come across two observations that have shocked me.

First, is the unbelievable pace at which this technology is growing. This is in part attributed to the increasing computing power and availability of larger datasets, but also to this new found hype that has lead to large amounts of money being poured into the field. This is happening not just at the tech startup level, but also at the research level. A new research breakthrough is followed up by another one in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days. This has lead to a formation of a community of researchers who are constantly building on top of each other’s work.

Just to be clear, the focus of the AI community right now is not attaining sentience, but automation. As one of the leading researchers in the field, Andrew Ng, put it “think of the near-term impact of AI as automation on steroids”.

This led me to my second observation, that is how unprepared we are for it. The world we live currently live in is designed for humans — for human use, human interaction. But as we move towards automation, and as more of human work starts being replaced by AI, shouldn’t human-centered design be replaced by AI-centered design?

Let me illustrate with an example:

One of my friends at the Delft University of Technology has been working on developing a system to automatically read and process the UIC wagon numbers that are stencilled on the side of cargo trains. These numbers contain information such as country code, type of vehicle, etc. Now, she had a really difficult time developing this autonomous system because of reasons like: there is no fixed position for these numbers on the train, there is no fixed layout, they get smudged over time, sometimes they decide to paint these numbers in red on a brown wagon and more.

Now. if you think of it, the folks who designed these wagon numbers, designed them to be read manually by humans. They did not foresee a future where this task would be automated. If they did, they might have designed it differently. All I am asking is, let’s not make that mistake again.

Another example would be of postal envelopes. Being able to auto-sort the posts has been one of the oldest automation challenges in the industry. But it was difficult initially because: there was no fixed layout, people scribbled addresses on it, the stamps were put wherever. This led to the design of envelopes with text boxes, at least for the postcodes. And now, they have RFID tags on them, that machines can read easily in addition to written address for the last mile postman. But would we have postmen in the future?

Let’s walk into the future a bit. The next thing to be automated is most likely our cars. Now imagine what that kind of future would that look like. Not just the car and its interiors like dashboards would change, but also the environment around of it. The street signs and the traffic signals now need to interact not just with you, but also with the sensors of your cars. How would they be designed? How should they be designed?

We would also have help from robots. There would be robots in the kitchen helping you cook on the days you don’t want to. Now for this to happen, everything in the kitchen should be designed to facilitate this. From jars of spices to cartons of milk, the labels and expiry dates on them, the knobs of the stove to the taps of the sink. They would all need to undergo a certain degree of redesign.

We ourselves are going to be enhanced, with wearable cameras and sensors making us super-humans. Our speed of access to information from everything we look at, touch or interact with is going to rapidly increase. And it is going to require advances in programming and artificial intelligence. But design can greatly assist in this endeavour.

I have been interacting with a lot of programmers, and I discovered that many of them work with the assumption that the environment cannot be changed. So they do much of the heavy lifting to train their systems to access this world, that was never designed to be accessed this way. But that assumption is incorrect. Everything that you see around you, everything, has been designed by someone with a purpose. So it can be changed. Redesigned. I would like to encourage all programmers to poke us designers to start doing it.

Some of you might be wondering if it is a little premature to start thinking of this. Well, if you look at the rapid pace at which this piece of technology is developing, the need to design for it is already here. We as designers are always looking to design for our future, and making timeless designs is what we all aspire to do.

So let’s start doing that. Next time we start a project, to create or design something, let’s ask ourselves the question “Is there a possibility that what I am designing now would be accessed by an AI in the future?”. And if the answer is yes, let’s do our best to make our designs as AI-friendly as possible.