Box102: Third Time Unlucky

08.11.23

DS087: I watch a good amount of let’s plays on From Software games. (I don’t have the skill or patience to play them at all.) Lots of their beasts and monsters have the most incredible fur and hair. It’s sort of scraggly and rough but still floats like it’s underwater. I tried to do something like that here.

I missed a week last Wednesday because as you may have seen, I had some pretty bad medical news. ‘Not as bad as it could be’ said my ever-cheery consultant but honestly it’s hard to look at the third time my leg has broken and not feel devastated. The details are tedious but essentially I was given a loose all clear in June/July and was even getting back to cycling. Then in mid-September I was in a lot of pain after a trip, left it a while before seeing physio who thought it was probably muscle but said to speak to the consultant if it didn’t get better. It didn’t. So now we’re back on action stations for a potential third surgery.

Design, u k hun?

The news leaked out this week that IDEO is laying off a bunch of staff and thinking about pivoting. Fast Company have done an initial post-mortem which covers all sort of things from AI, to the high rates they charge, to the in-house capacity that former clients now hold. The meta-narrative, which has been emerging for a while, is the retreat of ‘design thinking.’ While I’ve been avoiding looking at my phone I’ve caught glimpses of earnest posts on LinkedIn from people who like UX so I guess people are feeling a bit squeaky-bum time as the giant of the industry takes a decline.

It’s hard to place what this slight untethering feels like. As you might imagine, I’ve rarely approached the words ‘design thinking’ with anything but contempt but the hurting of the leviathan still hurts. Why is ‘design thinking’ so abhorrent? It proposes that design is just a thing you can do. You can do a 6-day course and call yourself a designer, you can follow these 7 steps or this double diamond and innovate better or something. Design is all about intuition and play and like almost literally any other profession; skill emerges through experience.

I don’t know anyone trained as a designer who calls themselves a ‘design thinker;’ they just happen to be a designer with a brain. I don’t know a single one that gets a project and reaches for their double diamond. This idea that an entire domain of expertise can be turned into a tool roll you can put in your back pocket and pull out at UX conferences is not only stupid, but actively harmful to the profession and the work.

What design thinking and IDEO achieved though is a broad, mainstream acceptance of design as an ontology; a system of understanding the world, of knowledge production. That knowledge is produced through the leveraging of the designer’s expertise to uncover new insights. Most often that takes the form of; ‘I wonder what happens if I stick this thing to this thing? Oh that’s interesting, that could be useful for this!’ In other words; intuition, play and experimentation. This is different to the scientific method of testing hypotheses in being open-ended and spontaneous.

Thanks to IDEO and others, design is everywhere. I’ve compared it before to how icky ‘the digital’ sounds to millennials and younger; it’s all just… stuff, there is no ‘digital.’ The question is what happens (and appears to be happening) when this is also true of design. When there’s no ‘design thinking’ because everything is just design now; we do design in policy, in health, in interactions, transport, systems, sustainability etc. etc. etc. Surely at some point everyone is just using design as they do digital.

This is where that flowering of real design needs to occur. The double diamond was a useful Trojan Horse to get it in the door, to get people to grasp what this weird, craft-like thing was. Now how can we get folks comfortable with dropping the formulaic pretence and getting used to imagination, play, experimentation and the critical avenues that opens up.

At least Dan Hill has a perfectly-timed salve that’s more representative of how I think design should work. One day I will do a proper thing on making people ok with imagination and play for design. I have a few speaking engagement coming up. Maybe that’s a good opportunity.

Recents

I had the opportunity to contribute to this year’s Common Design Studio, a project I help establish in my former role. I attended the briefing and then the feedback crits and made a five minute video about the theme this year; air. I was back on From Later here. And there’s a new job in our team at Arup for a marketing and comms manager here.

I have a lot of upcoming talks but If you’re in Copenhagen or thereabouts on 20th November please consider coming along to this amazing speculative design workshop we’re running with the Danish Design Centre.

On 24th November, I’m doing a small event on ‘Urban AI‘ with my Arup hat on at UCL. I’ve been working with folks in data science and digital at Arup to help develop an AI strategy for a few months. It’s been really fun and productive and (you know me) I’ve obviously been pushing the critical shift entailed by it rather than hyping it as new ‘productivity’ tools. Unlike some Foresight work it’s also been easy to get people involved because everyone has a conception of AI and wants to do something.

We’re also looking to work with a Wales-based creative on a project exploring the future of flood resilience in the country. Have a look here for more info.

Short Stuff

I too was a little surprised at how quick Noah Smith was to defend Marc Adreesen’s populist screed. Dave Karpf has stepped in to analyse Smith’s response. The crux of it is; the optimism/pessimism isn’t the key dimension so much as if you’re passive or active; in other words, you can believe that technology might do amazing things for us it’s just whether you think that happens through the mysteries of the market fully unleashed as Andreesen does, or whether it happens through strategic regulation and policy making that distributes the gains of technology fairly.
David Lowery is on Corridor Crew’s new ‘Directors React’ series. Not bothered about much but I adored the Green Knight so really interesting hearing about that.
Benedict Evans doing a bit of thinking about where on the Excel to Command Line continuum LLMs sit.
Apparent breakthrough in space solar.
You saw this but Boston Dynamics stuck a bunch of stuff together to give Spot personality.
The White House’s executive order on the safe development of AI. I need to go over all the stuff from the AI summit at some point. It’s obviously super relevant.

Ok, I’m drained, exhausted, distracted and also – to add insult to literal injury – have a cold coming in. I was supposed to be giving a talk today but it’s just going to have to wait. I can barely open my mouth to drink coffee. I love you though and thank you.

Box101: Heat Death

25.10.23

DS087: I have this thing where I think ‘oh I’ll just do a little smoke simulation’ or ‘a little water simulation’ but there’s no such thing. They take literally days.

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.

Box092: Everything happens eventually

17.05.23

It’s Giro, which I managed to catch the first few stages of before travelling. Mixed blessings; I love it but it makes me very sad that I am still trapped off the bike and in front of screens.

I’m about the only person not playing Zelda this week. Instead I write to you from a very nice hotel in Charlottenburg in Berlin at the tail end of just over a week of travelling the Germanic world. I know I haven’t written in a while and I know I say that every time there is simply no good reason; I’m just a busy person. Every week I don’t write it is harder to again the next week.

I’m going back to the office more which means introducing two hours of sitting on a bus into each day (as opposed to 50 minutes on a bike #carssuck). As of yet I haven’t found a good way to blog or do anything with that time other than look out the window, listen to podcasts and do some Duolingo; I cannot type on phone keyboards and no one has solved the navigation problems of switching between windows effectively.

Recently, a couple of people were (jovially) saying I was really opinionated and it struck a discord somewhere. We can never know ourselves of course (I was recently told in an organisational psychology assessment that my results suggested I could be manipulative and I was like ‘how would I know?’) but I don’t know that it rings true. The things I have opinions about are often strong ones, usually because they’re developing theories, folk-observations, bewaring others of respect for water or about how much I hate cars. But there’s a huge amount of things (most sport, epidemiology, archaeology, theology, set theory, the Greek classics etc. etc.) that I have no opinion on, largely because I am reluctant to develop an opinion on something I have no understanding of. In the midst of Covid I was very clear that I had no opinion on ventilation, vaccination strategies or macroeconomic responses. Also I find the intellectual-progressive tendency to tear itself apart over its opinions really counter-productive/revolutionary.

Like, I understand the criticism of the AI letter, but isn’t the spirit of it right? Isn’t the spirit of the AI Dilemma right even if you disagree for critical or intellectual reasons with the individuals? ‘We’ expend so much energy on each other while the other side attack immigrants, ban abortion and gerrymander elections. I was actually sort of happy about the vibe of ambivalence around the coronation in the UK. I was expecting anti-monarchist vitriol from everywhere but happily people seemed to generally leave each other alone to respond how they wished and in a way that made them happy (other than the obvious nefarious arrests); whether that’s a protest, ignoring it or standing in the rain. If this weird spectacle makes you happy; great, people spend all sorts of money on all sorts of stupid things to make themselves happy.

Anyway, a lot has happened to tell you about though I can’t commit to giving you any more hot takes or elite opinions. They’ve all been used elsewhere.

PhD

Last week I capped off the chunk of work I need for the upgrade; the more-than-halfway point that is a submission of a good chunk of the work. Mostly this has involved addressing the front-stuff; tightening up the methodology and introductory sections but I also wrote a new piece on how I’m using theories from other domains. The process is really not straightforward; I loosely collect quotes or notes on things as I read in a blank document then iterate over and over and over again, grouping and cutting until an argument starts to emerge. Sometimes I’ll spend ten minutes trying to get a sentence just right or grab at an idea I can’t quite vocalise properly.

Anyway, it’s submitted now and when I get back tomorrow I’ll review the feedback from Matt, Joe and Wes, make any further changes and send off to the examiners. Feels good to be having it done but I know that really it’s just firing the starting gun on a much bigger chunk of work to finish the whole thing.

Recents

Can you believe it’s been almost six weeks? I’ll try and rattle through recent activities as quick as possible but in no particular order.

I was in Milan to do a panel with Viraj Joshi, Alexandra Mihai and Simone Rebaudengo hosted by Domus Academy and the Speculative Futures Milan guys on AI and design. Easily one of the most fun and interesting panels I’ve done in ages. We laughed about the fun stuff and got serious about the serious stuff, and had a wonderful evening rave in the hotel lobby. It was also great to be back in Milan for the first time in years and just run into loads of old friends, meet some new ones and talk about design again. I forget sometimes that people think about me as a designer and want to talk to me about design, no middle management.

Malina and I did a class on speculative design for Milan’s ‘Service Design Masterclass.’ I was also the inaugural guest on the Service Design Network’s YAP podcast talking about design, futures and working at Arup. Back on From Later again with Rob, Syd and Viraj (once again) talking about cloud seeding and CGI and all sorts of nonsense. Did a good research-heavy design talk for the Service Design College. I’m sort of glad no one’s asked me to write anything for a while. I can use my words good with my mouth brain but writing is hard.

Closing event last night of regenerative futures with Anna from Ellen MacArthur, Allison from Space10 and Martin from Arup’s circular economy services team. All brilliantly hosted by Franzi, the European foresight lead. Also when will Apple sort out this absolute travesty of a photo system. It’s easier for me to screenshot a photo in Photos then upload here than to go through the export process. Heic is killing culture.

Anyway, I’m in Berlin because we’re at the tail-end of Arup Foresight’s Regenerative Futures exhibition and events here for Berlin Design Week. The team made a new film – ‘Common Ground’ – and we ran a small series of public and private events which were bloody lovely. Before that (last week) I was in Austria for Desired Futures 6. Three days of great talks and discussions from a who’s-who of futures nerds. On Friday I hosted Julian in a conversation about imagination which was great.

Julian is massive but then there’s two of me so it evens out.

I’m sure there’s things I’ve missed and there’s lots of the same coming up tbh. I know there’s like three talks next week and it’s really hard to keep on top of it all. I do try and share them in good course on the social networks. My phone is buzzing to say I have to go elsewhere so I need to cut this short.

Short Stuff

Sorry, a lot of this is old news.

Not a huge amount but a bit of insight on tech companies laying off or redeploying ethics teams. They say; ‘we’re developing AI responsibly anyway’ we say; ‘inconvenient cost in race-to-the-bottom of the market’
Also Washington Post mapping out the different camps in the AI debate and, importantly, what their financial incentives are.
I’m very much on the ‘Robots have never and aren’t going to take your job (but they will take the things you love)’ side of things, Noah Smith’s analysis of an analysis of why 300 million jobs aren’t going to be erased.
Brazil is looking to get Chinese investment to start a semiconductor industry.
Emily Bender on tech wsu – ‘critics say’ as a positioning tool
Matt Webb and Campbell Orme’s prizewinning LARES. Matt’s done a writeup here.
There is no AI from Jaron Lanier on his usual optimistic drive. Unfortunately, he assumes that given a fairer system, everyone will play fair. For example, one suggestion is that people referenced in training data (eg. illustrators of cats) be paid for their effort when a new thing (cat image) is produced. This fails to take into account all the companies that would just spam training data (with cats) to overweight their contribution and profit. Over and over again, problems with AI are problems with capitalism not AI.
Side FX from K Allado-McDowell, really thoughtful reflection on the beginnings of critical practice with AI.
Britain really isn’t doing so well in the eyes of the world.

Ok I love you, and it is easier if I keep up with these things each week so I will immediately start preparing next week’s letter for you ok.