I had the pleasure of working with Marc Engenhart, co-author of the work”Design and artificial intelligence“, to have a conversation and dive deeper into the connection between artificial intelligence and design.

AI systems are no longer science fiction, but are widely used through machine learning. Algorithms take on design tasks and improve the user experience. However, there is a deficit in the theoretical analysis of intelligent design.

The book”Design and artificial intelligence“shows how the role and task of designers change when machine learning makes design decisions and the idea of creativity is modified. It provides valuable knowledge for designers to be able to use machine learning productively.

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What is AI changing?

For example, AI is changing how we deal with our digital heritage due to a confusing number of small digital artifacts that describe us as personalities. With the help of intelligent systems, we will receive a new form of orientation. It will be easier for us to find our way around large amounts of data that accompany our environment, our everyday life and our communication with others and thus also make it, so to speak, readable for us.

Intelligent systems will also provide us with new tools with which we can further develop our everyday lives and professions. If we, as a species hungry for knowledge, had the attitude that there were limits to new tools that solve problems, new methods, achievements, experiments and research would not have reached the present stage. AI is integrated into our everyday lives just like our profession and solves simple and complex problems with us as a new colleague.

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What are the limits of AI from your point of view?

I don't see any concrete precise limits for AI, just the associated responsibility to train it, to be interested in it, to train it in a meaningful way, to develop it into tools and assistants that have a high design quality. When designing and dealing with intelligent systems, we must be able to recognize if a trained system crosses a line, as is the case with discriminatory AI, for example.

When designing design products, intelligent systems expand interfaces into interaction modules that can better inform, assist and guide users with their needs. They are able to read users with their data or in their behavior, interpret this information and make an assumption about the person. Not only does the classic design of the user interface play a role here, but also the options for automatically redesigning this design in real time that personalizes the user.

In our book, we have introduced the term Intelligence Experience (IX) for this purpose. In this context, we are also talking about bias, so-called systematic errors in data and systems, and the resulting misinterpretations of intelligent systems, which may also lead to discriminatory systems. If discrimination is included in the effect of an intelligent system, the AI crosses a line, for example, which then clearly requires a correction for this explicit system. ‍

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What benefits does AI offer us, designers?

She arouses curiosity, becomes a valued colleague at the design table, who challenges and promotes our creativity and design quality, as well as concept and creation expertise, and only takes away from us exactly the work that has always bored designers — she demands our design expertise.

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Does artificial intelligence enrich or endanger the future of designers and why?

Yes, no, and possibly. AI enriches our most important competencies: design power, strategy, concept, idea and its evaluation of the function. It jeopardizes design work that requires little strategy, no well-thought-out concept, weak ideas and no questions for evaluation, as there is too little time available in the project, i.e. work that contains little competence and quality.

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What else would you like to tell readers?

We are eyewitnesses in the midst of a digital transformation of our environment and the world in which we live. What a great time that requires so much design expertise. As designers, we have expert expertise in design, aesthetics, information and communication design, such as legible and applicable surfaces that are used by professionals and amateurs. We are called to design these digital products and intelligent systems in such a way that we create a fascinating, helpful, diverse, inclusive and livable space in which we can take a big step forward and find new great ideas. Our book is written for all designers to learn to appreciate the design potential with and for intelligent systems.

Thank you so much for the questions.

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Interview: Patrick Marc Sommer