The Brief: How our recent past should prepare us for the age of AI

0:01This is an audio version of The Brief, the Design Better newsletter that takes you deeper into the insights we've uncovered through hundreds of interviews with creative thinkers. I'm Eli Willery. In this issue of The Brief, we're reflecting on what we've learned about the past and future of design from our conversation with Paola Antonelli from the Museum of Modern Art, Mark Wilson from Fast Company, Kate Aronowitz from Google Ventures, Mike Davidson from Microsoft, and Meaghan Choi from Anthropoc. Looking back at 30 years of design. Roughly 30 years ago, I was an undergrad sitting in our dorm's computer cluster, and this was before the days when most students had laptops.

0:36I ran into something I hadn't seen before. It was called Netscape Navigator, and it was one of the first commercial internet browsers, which our very first guest on Design Better, Irene Au, helped to design. I clicked on one of the buttons, probably what's cool, and along with a nifty loading animation, the browser took me down some early internet rabbit hole. I don't remember exactly where I ended up, but I do remember being blown away by the experience. As a computer nerd kid in the 80s, I had spent plenty of time with bulletin board systems and things like American Online, which we could access through a dial-up modem from home.

1:07But this was very different. It was fast compared to what I was used to, and it felt like I could almost instantaneously access content from all around the world, even though the content online at the time was a minuscule fraction of what it is today. I had entered school to study product design, but this was for products in the physical world. Digital product design didn't exist as we know it today. The first use of the phrase user experience in a job title was Don Norman's role as a user experience architect at Apple in the mid-90s. Browsers like Netscape Navigator, and then the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, opened up a new world of opportunities and challenges for the field of design.

1:41In our conversation with Powell and Mark, we talk about four, the democratization paradox, design's loss of innocence, the fragmentation of the design profession and the shift from tangible to intangible design. The democratization paradox. Mark Wilson said, we democratized all the tools and we democratized none of the platforms. And that gap is just in a nutshell kind of what's broken about the individual's ability to communicate. While design tools and capabilities have been democratized and everyone can now access design software, create content, etc., the platforms and systems remain highly centralized within a few large companies, Meta, Google, TikTok.

2:17The early messy days of the internet, GeoCities and MySpace have largely been tamed, which can make for better user experiences, but we also miss the wild creativity that came from having an infinite number of ways to express yourself online. Back then, your personal webpage could be a nightmare of animated GIFs, visitor accounts, and autoplay music. Terrible for usability, but at least it was yours. Today, we're all posting in the same formats and are subjected to the same algorithmic rules for engagement. The tools to create have never been more powerful or accessible, yet we're increasingly creating within narrower and narrower boundaries defined by a handful of tech giants.

2:52Design's loss of innocence. Paolo Antonelli said, When in 2013 there was news of the 3D-printed gun, and I remember that my jaw dropped, not at the 3D-printed gun, but at my stupidity and naivety in having thought that design was such a positive force, always right. Design, just like any other human activity, can go either way. It can be good, it can be bad. it's important to understand that it's an application of human creativity, therefore it is subject to those vagaries. The ethics of design had become more controversial over the past three decades, from the behavioral design of apps like Instagram and TikTok causing addiction and mental health problems, especially in younger users, to the dark patterns that trick us into subscriptions we don't want or sharing data we'd rather keep private.

3:32Even products that start with good intentions can go wrong. The founders of Juul, who came out of our design program at Stanford, intended to create a less harmful way of delivering nicotine, but ended up creating a product that got countless teens addicted to the substance. And we've watched as the same design principles that help us create delightful experiences can be weaponized to exploit human psychology. The infinite scroll that keeps you engaged for just one more minute, that turns into hours, notification systems designed to trigger dopamine responses. We've entered this era believing design would democratize information and bring people together.

4:03Instead, we've often created systems that divide us, addict us, and surveil us. The Fragmentation of the Design Profession Paolo Antonelli said, I think what happened in the past 30 years of fragmentation, so many of the designers that are here might not know of designers that instead you and I often publish or collect because there's been a disaggregation of the profession. Design has splintered into countless specializations over the past 30 years, and designers in different disciplines might not know of each other's work anymore. This fragmentation has created both opportunities, designers are everywhere, and challenges, a loss of shared understanding.

4:36A UX designer working on enterprise software might have no idea about the design principles they borrow from the Bauhaus. A type designer might never cross paths with a service designer. We've gone from a world where designers shared a common foundation, drawing, color theory, composition, to one where some designers never sketch, others never code, and many couldn't name a typeface beyond Helvetica. The specialization has brought incredible depth to each discipline, but we've lost something in the translation, a common language that once united us. From objects to algorithms. Mark Wilson said,

5:32The algorithm that decides what you see in your feed has more impact on your daily life than most physical objects you own. Yet this most influential form of design is also the most opaque, hidden behind proprietary code, trade secrets, and machine learning black boxes that even their creators don't always understand. We've handed over curatorial control of our culture as systems optimized for engagement rather than enlightenment. The question isn't whether algorithms are designed, they absolutely are, but who gets to participate in that design process and what values guide it. Wisdom Scales Slower Than Code by Aaron Walter I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

6:09Eli and I are pretty old. Between the two of us, we have more than a century of experience. You know, it's not something we normally share as it's not really seen as an asset in the tech industry. gray hair is a liability, or at least it has been until now. With age comes caution, temperance, and, as Arthur Brooks says, crystallized intelligence. When we're moving fast and breaking things, speed, resilience, and risk tolerance are desirable qualities. Idealism underlies it all and drives progress, or at least that's the perception of it. I was swept up by that idealism in 2007 at South by Southwest when Twitter launched and it was the darling of the tech industry.

6:51The platform promised to democratize journalism and amplify the voice of the people. Social media brought us the Arab Spring, a Middle East revolution in Egypt and Tunisia, and a sense that we could build any future that we dared to dream. We all know how this story ends. Social media also brought us trolls, doxing, election interference, suicide and depression, especially amongst teens, and a new generation of anxious people. We have unintentionally created rage and sadness machines, repeating the sins of the past. As we press forward with AI, I can't help but see echoes of our past sins. We are optimistic, awestruck by possibility, and largely blind to the consequences.

7:40In 2011, Twitter felt like democracy's megaphone. Everyone's voice can be heard, as Mark Wilson recalled in a recent live episode of Design Better. The Arab Spring seemed proof that technology could liberate us, but as Wilson noted, we democratized all the tools and democratized none of the platforms. The asymmetry gutted journalism, eroded trust, and concentrated power in a few opaque systems. The same pattern is forming around AI right now. We're again cheering the removal of barriers to creation. Museum of Modern Art, Design, and Architecture curator Paola Antonelli told us that when she first saw the 3D printed gun in 2013, she realized her naivete in having thought that design was such a positive force always.

8:31Her reckoning that design, just like any other human activity, can go either way is an essential insight for every AI founder. Mike Davidson warned that AI is asking for a kind of intimacy that no technology has ever demanded for. Mike Davidson warned that AI is asking for a kind of intimacy that no technology has ever demanded before. Here's what he told us. Technology has never asked to be this close to you before. And it's asking now. And as a user, you should think very, very long and hard about who you trust when it comes to using these products because they're going to create incredible value in your life.

9:17But they're also going to require incredible amounts of trust. With that closeness comes extraordinary trust and extraordinary risk. We're using AI for talk therapy, for medical diagnoses, for financial advice, and some are even using AI as a romantic partner. As Megan Choi from Anthropic told us, people have adopted this technology shockingly fast when we know so little about it. Never before have we created a technology that we cannot understand. We have no idea how AI arrives at a conclusion, and there are no logs to review when a bot guides someone to suicide. These are superhuman black boxes of power.

9:58AI may not share social media's business model of outrage, but it shares its velocity. Once again, the incentives push us to move fast, to release before we reflect. And once again, we risk forgetting that wisdom scales much slower than code. Can we design and build differently? If the social media revolution taught us anything, it's that moral hindsight arrives too late. Regulation lagged. Design ethics were treated as an afterthought. We optimized for engagement, not enlightenment. And by the time the side effects were clear, polarization, anxiety, misinformation, the systems were too entrenched to fix.

10:40Megan Choi argued that the disciplines we need most now aren't new tools, but new lenses. Here's what she told us. I think we've learned over the past 15 years that technology policy, especially safety and privacy policy, is so important and so hard to walk back after it's out there. As we're quickly releasing this technology, I think we have a huge responsibility to try and put in the right guardrails. Of course, we're probably not going to get it right, but it's still worth it. Spend extra time to figure out where we absolutely need to put them in. Looking back to our predecessors and social media with all that optimism, we can ask, how can we do it differently now?

11:22This is the inverse of the move fast and break things mantra that defined the last era. It's slow design, patient design, the kind that assumes impact before intent. Mike Davidson put it bluntly. We are on team human, and if we can't help the human beings who use our product flourish, then we're not doing our job. Designers, developers, and investors now share a collective responsibility to build as if people matter more than markets. Choi said it best, the most important skill set we can all have is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That discomfort, the pause before deployment, the debate before shipping, might be our last safeguard against building something that could have a farther reaching impact on humanity than social media ever did.

12:14Essential Skills for a Great Future I'm concerned we have collective amnesia. Can we really build a great future with AI if we can't remember our past? I don't know that we can. That's why tech can no longer be only a young person's game. We need some gray-haired thinkers in the creative process to act as our memory and foster debate. Where youth chases possibility, age asks why. Where youth delights in frictionless progress, age values the friction that forces reflection. We spent the last two decades idolizing speed and disruption. That won't serve us well with artificial intelligence. The philosopher Arthur Brooks calls it crystallized intelligence, the ability to see patterns, to connect dots across time, to slow the world just enough to ask the right question.

13:08That's what this moment demands. We don't need faster innovators. We need slower thinkers. To read and share this episode with friends and colleagues, visit designbetterpodcast.com. And while you're there, you can become a premium subscriber, which will get you access to the brief newsletter in your inbox every month. Plus, ad-free episodes, extra episodes every month, and so much more. Just visit designbetterpodcast.com.

13:46Design Better is supported by Masterclass. Lately, I've been thinking about what it actually takes to get better at a craft, not just grinding reps, but learning to see your work the way that a master does. That's the thing that Masterclass does better than anything else that I've found. I took Bob Iger's class on leadership and strategy expecting business tactics, and instead I got a Masterclass in decision-making under uncertainty, which if you're building products or leading a design team right now is basically the whole job. What I love is how directly Masterclass maps to the things that we care about as designers.

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15:04And every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's no real risk in finding out if it clicks with you. Right now, Design Better listeners get 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash designbetter. That's 15 % off right now at masterclass.com slash designbetter. Go to masterclass.com slash designbetter to get 15 % off. Design Better is brought to you by UserTesting. What does it look like to thoughtfully integrate AI into your design process? Well, at user testing's upcoming events called Crafted, you'll have the chance to explore exactly that. In Seattle and London, my pal and co-host Eli Woolery will be running a 90-minute interactive workshop called AI and Design Thinking.

15:52Designed to help you use a host of new AI tools, not as a shortcut, but as a thought partner so you can build with confidence using the tools shaping tomorrow's creative workflow. If you care about the craft of design and the role that AI should be playing in it, this is a conversation worth being part of. Visit events.usertesting.com slash crafted and use the code designbetter100 to save$100 off your workshop ticket. That's events.usertesting.com slash crafted. Use the code designbetter100 to get$100 off the workshop. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good.

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