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| Braking cars on the interstate, copyright Stephen M. Frey |
What does cultivating design mean today as compared to over ten years ago about the time the last DC blog post appeared here?
Can I say I do not really know except I know a few things remain true.
Cultivating design or design cultivation as I call it here means seeing to learn and learning to see. For me design means reflecting on the who, what, where, why, and when of things and experiences we have everyday. What lies underneath the pen or pencil, or stylus we use to write, draw, sketch or muse in a sketchbook, an iPad, or touchscreen notebook.
It means asking questions about why something is the way it is. How did that something come to be the way it is today? In 2024, different forces come to play on the everyday that didn't exist in 2012 in the way they do now. In 2012, we were just two years into the last singularity event that occurred, the iPhone which truly ushered into the world unfathomable changes in everyday life.
The singularity event then changed how we communicated, amplified the effects of emerging internet based applications and standalone programs, social media as we know it today. The portability of the smartphone and iPhone untethered us from our laptops, desktops and more. It also fed the media streaming revolution and millions now more than a decade later, cutting big Cable with ad free services, only to transform in the last few years to streaming services with adds again.
But now, over a year ago now, another singularity came along that will no doubt transform our lives like the invention of the Smartphone and iPhone, those are large language models like ChatGpt, Dall-e and all the artificial intelligence enabled assistants and guide by the sides in all aspects of everyday life. Now we have new 'friends' we can ask advice, questions or tell them to draw pictures or make illustrations, do coding, answer phones and replace people performing routine jobs.
What does this mean for cultivating design, with this AI enabled assistants by our side? What does it mean to be original and come up with ideas when now we can brainstorm with the help of AI pretty respectable ideas and more? Hopefully, we can use these tools to cultivate better design outcomes that more solidly solve today's and tomorrow's challenges. But what do you think?
(A note, this was not enabled by any AI tools in any way. I'm sure it shows. But it is authentic that way. My writing about cultivating design is authentic and not assisted.)
