Artificial intelligence in the design process

Drawing a red circle is not design.

Rather, asking the question "What color best represents idea "x" and what geometric shape best represents concept "y" and ending up with the result "red circle" is design.

Whether you draw the circle with paint or colored pencil does not matter, whether you use a compass or the edge of a plate does not matter, and whether you paint it on paper or cardboard does not matter either; because the design here is the intangible idea that the graphic solution to your problem is a red circle.

If I ask it -through the keyboard and the necessary commands- the computer will draw a red circle, and it will never propose to draw a green square.

So, if I ask an artificial intelligence to generate the illustration of an orange puppy for a cereal box in the shape of little pink stars, who has designed the cereal packaging - the computer or me?

Before attempting to answer the question, there are a couple of things about the design process we need to explain. All creative expression is a reflection of the society that produces it, designers will design only the things that need to get designed, and we will do it from the things we know.

What technologies exist at the moment to make the object, what materials exist in abundance, are accessible or can be acquired to make the object, and what cultural, technological, political, economic, or social event is occurring in the world that might influence the public's perception of the images, and what is the most important thing to know about the object.

The Greeks did not produce skyscrapers because, at that historical moment, the means did not exist, but neither did the need or the desire to build high-rises. The languorous line of art nouveau, the geometric patterns and Egyptian inspiration of art deco, and the graphics of early video games in the 80s, are all examples of how every era, society, and art-technology movement directly influences the visual language of design objects.

Designers are ourselves, but we also are all the cartoons we watched as children, the museums we’ve visited, the programs we know how to use, and the signs in the town where we grew up. Inevitably our work becomes a visual inventory of the small section of the world around us. Artificial intelligence is a homogeneous collection of infinite catalogs of the images used to train it. If I ask it to draw a blue puppy, it will not do it on the basis of the same puppies as if I ask a person from France, Japan, or the UK. The three designers will obtain three blue puppies, different in appearance. But identical in content.

Because design forms, but it is also content. The best pieces of the design are those that, in addition, to being functional, tell a story, become part of us, and are more than themselves.

We could draw a red circle and use it as the logo for our high-end computer company, pay for all the advertising in the world so that the public thinks of our computers when they see a red circle rather than the flag of Japan. But wouldn't it be more romantic to draw a bitten apple, and say it's a tribute to the mathematician Alan Turing, pioneer of computing, who committed suicide by biting an apple poisoned with cyanide after being arrested for being homosexual, despite having saved thousands of lives during World War II? (Yes, that’d've been more romantic).

What is design?

I believe that design cannot be seen with the naked eye. It's hidden in the shapes, peeks through the colors, and whispers in the elegant strokes of a serif font with optical alignments instead of metric ones. Designing is thinking, counting, playing, experimenting, and destroying to build, discover, propose, question, compare, discard, and observe. It is not drawing a little blue dog selling little orange stars. It is asking “wouldn't it be great if a little blue dog sold this cereal, and wouldn't it be great if they were little orange stars?” Designing is a lot of things that technology can't do yet. And that's neither good nor bad. It's just an observation.

Until now, the tone of this text seems pessimistic about artificial intelligence. That is not the case. As a designer, I am excited to have experienced 2022 as the year of artificial intelligence. Asking Dall-e to draw something and seeing the results is fascinating -which, by the way, is playing, and designing is also playing-.

A designer worried that computers can now draw red circles is a designer who only knows how to draw red circles, that is, someone who knows how to create with his hands, but not with his mind; and in my opinion, he is a designer who does not know how to design.

Now, artificial intelligence and art, that's another story.