I’m still less mobile than I was. I was really hoping the pain would have subsided by now. I feel like I’m improving but at no where near the speed I want. I’m travelling to Copenhagen in a month and really need to be on the other side of this. It’s meant more time at home so I’ve ended up watching television. I watched all of The Changeling which had some great bits in it and I really expected to get better but sort of flatlines and Silo which was great if a little predictable. It’s a good proper hard sci-fi thing though. I do hope they make a second series of The Changeling, despite the average reviews. It was getting very Lovecraftian at the end.
I read two articles side-by-side about the world of work in design. One; that design had become systematised and flattened, that the values of design such as individuality and intuition were operationalised for deliverables, targets and value. And the other suggesting that this focus on value undermined the confidence of design. Forgiving the tendency of many of these types of posts to conflate the broad, vast, complex and historical domain of design with digital products coming out of California, I found both interesting signals of a post-layoffs turn amongst mainstream design.
Chuánqí Sun’s article boldly states: ‘We have reached the heat death of design,’ citing a phenomenon similar to the Shazam Effect of music: The the mainstream adoption of a process, results in its industrialisation which results in it being flattened into a hegemony. Beyond merely the standardisation of tools and software that result in an aesthetic hegemony, it’s also a standardisation of careers, organisation and expectations of designers. Sun’s answer to this turn of events is to ‘design with courage’ and ‘educate those around you’ which feels like a low-ball response to his well-articulated systemic problem. After all, there are countless brave, bold and critical practices that Sun has clearly not engaged with or referenced because the ‘system’ he so well describes doesn’t let them in the door of the UX / digital product universe.
The second piece from Sara Wachter-Boettcher gives some great tips on how designers should reframe their work in large organisations. Again, it’s particularly US- and digital-product centric but Wachter-Boettcher does a great job contextualising the labour of designers in the world of Silicon Valley’s excessive growth, collapse and generally exploitative labour practices. A useful contrast or follow up would be perhaps studying the widespread acceptance and promotion of designers in policy-making in Scandanavia and the UK – how are they framing their role and talking about ‘value.’
What both pieces suggest is a crack in the edifice of big tech digital product design. The layoffs last summer, on top of the great resignation has a similar smell to the post-dot-com bubble that ultimately bred contemporary critical design practices as design researchers questioned their complicity in reinforcing technological norms and givens. I have to point out I’m intentionally under-exposed to the UX/product world. I’m not going to sweeten it up; UX is generally pretty boring stuff in world full of really interesting design so this may not be a signal of much, just two folks offering reckons but in the bigger picture of the tech lash, it’s interesting.
On another but related note note, there’s another great critique of Andreesen’s screed here. When I read the original manifesto it struck some discordant noise in my brain; you know when you’re like ‘there’s something to this that’s more than it appears.’ I think the first is that if you have to spaff out an angry, inconsistent and populist manifesto about how great the – hitherto – dominant, status quo organising logic of the wealthy world is, then it’s probably because you know it isn’t. And suspect that most other people are coming around to that conclusion to.
The second thing, which is in that critique from Good Internet is this sheer disconnect between how technology results in good outcomes. You see the same thing in AI all the time; lofty claims that new breakthroughs will improve society or tackle climate change but they never say how. A part of my PhD writing is about how big showcase demos of benchmarks are inevitably reported with how this or that algorithm’s remarkable ability to spot bunny rabbits in paintings will help solve medical issues, or how this one that can play a hard game really well will solve education issues but… how?
None of these people are engaging with policy or society any more than seeking to ensure their business remains unregulated. A few months ago I wrote about Sam Altman’s claim that things like ChatGPT would free us from doing so much work: Ok, but how? If we were, somehow, handed a product that increased ‘productivity’ by 20%, then by what mechanism would that make companies think; ‘Neat! We’ll give everyone an extra day off now that they can do what they need in four!’ Like, how? How can you be so naive as to think that that is how capitalism would respond?
It’s the same with Andreesen. He spits out of the site as us that technology has done so many great things (disputable) and that it will continue to but other than saying ‘growth’ a lot [brilliant work by Ben Grosser there] it doesn’t say how. Because he doesn’t know. And doesn’t believe it.
Recents
I wrote a little thing on AI and creativity for the 50th anniversary issue of Crafts Magazine. I’ll be in Copenhagen November 20th co-hosting a workshop with the Danish Design Centre on circular futures. Doing some big fun, silly and playful creative design work to bring the future city to life. You can sign up here.
Short Stuff
- I’ve been enjoying (as I do all her writing) Molly White’s daily updates on the SBF trial.
- Andreeson’s manifesto hasn’t gone down well anywhere I’ve seen.
- Henry Cooke has led on the BBC ‘Projections’ foresight report, ‘Things are not normal‘ which features a cast of luminary futures and tech folks.
- Rob Horning suggests that people seek out misinformation even if they don’t know it. It makes sense when you think about how we all accept confirmation bias on the Internet – why would you not seek out things that you consciously know are false to give your satisfaction for your worldview? I suppose this gets to a lot of the conversation around pizzagate etc; do they know that it’s made up but it’s a useful vehicle for something else? I remember reading an investigation of vaccine deniers that pointed out that the vast majority of people aren’t deniers but sceptics or cautious. For them the risk is real and so information that validates their fears is useful even if they don’t believe.
- 3D Gaussian Splatting sounds like exactly the type of thing I’d find fascinating and you wouldn’t but it’s essentially – take a 2D video and make a navigable 3D scene out of it. The implications spiral quite quickly once you start to think about how people might interact with video. What if you could pause a scene and spin around the characters? (As they do.) How might writers/directors have to approach movies more as games? What does that do for pacing, atmosphere, dialog and everything else? On the other side you could shoot a scene and position the camera later. This is similar to how The Volume reverses the produciton/post-produciton pipeline. Rather than shooting on green-screen and dropping in the CGI world after, you build the world first then film the characters in it.
- Automating processes might reduce productivity, accuracy and quality. Basically, because people take their eye off the ball. I’ve always been fascinated by the ‘what’s it doing problem‘ – where jet pilots, probably some of the sharpest and coolest minds in the world panic when the system stops doing ‘what it’s supposed to.’ There’s a line that’s crossed when automation gets good enough that human comprehension goes down and people get good at essentially performing a process rather than understanding it.
- Eryk Salvaggio visited the MOMA to see Refik Anadol’s unsupervised and wrote about the use of awe in AI artworks. Convenient for me. He also wrote a about ‘shadow prompting‘ where prompts are changed by the model behind the scenes to get ‘better’ results.
- Sure you saw the brilliant McKinsey recruiting ad but here it is again. Can’t see the show from the UK but the writeup is here.
Ok that’s it. Not a lot of unique reckons this week. I’m back on the PhD hard at the moment so that’s taking up intellectual labour in the morning. Work is balancing out a little bit from the massive sprint of the summer. I really notice the difference when you actually have time to think about what you’re doing; it’s just better work. Love you bye.