Design has
to add friction
in the
era of AI

Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? John Maeda talks about how to deal with the biggest challenge in contemporary design: AI. Is it really a threat to human creativity, or a useful tool? And what does it have to do with the ‘uphill thinking’ that Maeda asks of us all when it comes to overcoming our own inertia of thought?

In your Frankfurt lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd0kOadwCoM), you emphasised that people should not be afraid of artificial intelligence. But in Europe, many people are really afraid of AI because they don’t know exactly what will happen to their well-paid jobs. How do you see this from a design perspective?

 

J
M

There’s an essay on uphill thinking (https://www.figma.com/blog/uphill-thinking/) that I wrote because I realised that first of all, there are all kinds of professions that are impacted by technology with this new wave of AI. I realised that creative people are terribly irrational, and they don’t look for the easy path. They tend to look for the uphill approach, meaning this might take longer or this could be risky. You know, people who are impatient, like: I want it easy, fast, cheap right now, can be wonderful designers. And then there’s a group who are probably the leaders of the field, who don't do that, and often they fail.

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And why is that so?

 

J
M

You know, once in a while someone important has more money to invest in those uphill approaches. It’s very rare, because it’s risky. Downhill thinking requires very little risk. If design is all downhill thinking, then you should feel like you’re in trouble. There are lots of constraints that prevent innovative or high-risk design. High-risk in terms of trying to do something new. Uphill thinking is not something that any kind of optimising algorithm is going to be able to do. Because algorithms are designed to reduce energy in the calculation, minimise energy, therefore they go downhill; whereas we humans sometimes take the treacherous path uphill.

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So average designers might feel threatened by AI, while avant-­garde designers continue to go ­uphill?

 

J
M

Well, what is average is always changing because the conditions are changing. Can you imagine around 1990 when desktop publishing started? If you’re in graphic design, you knew that this new thing was coming and it was stupid, this computer thing, it had terrible fonts because everything was dots, bits and whatever. (…) You know, we—the average people who now understand this process—are telling you this. The average designers of that past are now replaced by the average digital designers of the present. So I would just argue that the average keeps changing. And no shade against the average, because I loved cutting things out. It was part of the craft you learned.

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Would you say that AI is just a new step in the evolution of human tools?

 

J
M

Oh, well, I think everything opens up new worlds. Desktop publishing to web was very hard because the medium entirely changed, a quantum change occurred. I think we’re in the same era of a quantum leap; before it was from print to web, now from web to knowledge. I would argue that this leap has now occurred. So it behoves everyone to understand. It moves creative people to speak more machine.  

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