Meetup recap: designing with data and AI

On Tuesday, June 4th, we brought back C°F Meetups with a new edition centered around AI and data design. Entitled “Designing intelligent cultures with data and AI”, the meetup featured three presentations by four speakers, two of whom were fellow designers from C°F. All three presentations tackled different topics related to design, data, culture and AI, offering diverse perspectives and instigating exciting discussions.

Iskander: New relations with generative things

The night’s first speaker, Iskander Smit, has extensive experience in digital spaces with a keen interest in exploring AI's impact on urban environments. He initiated Cities of Things and leads his own practice, Target is New, focusing on human-AI partnerships while publishing a weekly newsletter on the subject.

During his presentation, entitled “New Relations with Generative Things”, Iskander shared his thoughts on the evolving dynamics of human-AI partnerships, emphasizing the need for a new interaction language as AI integrates more deeply into our physical and social environments. Dubbed “Generative Things”, this new category of objects that have a relationship to generative AI are increasingly relevant to designers. Noting that AI is already slowly immersing itself in our lives, Iskander’s aim was to guide thinking about designing new interactions with these generative things, ultimately trying to make sense of the unpredictable future of human-AI partnerships. Key questions addressed included the nature of generative things, understanding their intentions, and the design challenges they present. 

The talk traced the historical development of intelligent devices and discussed the future of smart cities, where objects with agency can significantly impact urban life. An important point brought up was the challenges of co-performance with AI and the ethical and social dilemmas of AI's agency: questions surrounding who is responsible for the AI tools we use, what their priorities are, and their relationship to us are things that designers should keep in mind when collaborating with AI.

With these challenges comes the concept of designing for contestability to ensure transparency and user control. For this, Iskander highlighted Ethan Mollick’s principles for human-AI interaction:

1. Familiarize ourselves with AI’s capabilities in order to better understand how it can help or undermine us
2. Be the human: collaborate with AI while maintaining our ethical responsibilities
3. Treat AI like a team member, but define their role in the team
4. Assume that the current AI tool is the worst we will ever use

With these principles in mind, designing for unknowns becomes a less daunting task.

Finally, Iskander also underlined the importance of prototyping in real-world settings, such as community gardens, to understand human-robot interactions. He discussed the rapid advancements in AI, including the potential and pitfalls of AI becoming ubiquitous in everyday technology. The session concluded with reflections on the necessity of designing for unknowns and the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI interactions.

Kwan: Maker culture and culture maker

Kwan Suppaiboonsuk is a software engineer passionate about data strategy, computational art, and philosophy of technology. Her background includes working in biorobotics and human movement, developing computer vision systems for the smart industry, and participating in AI in Design, a collective that demystifies AI and challenges big tech narratives. 

In her presentation, Kwan dived into the intersection of maker culture and AI, emphasizing the importance of these perspectives in designing data-driven experiences. She highlighted the influence of her upbringing in maker culture, characterized by DIY, experimentation, and resourcefulness, on her approach to technology. Kwan also stressed the value of play, questioning, and radical inventiveness in exploring the boundaries and potential of technology, advocating for a collaborative and imaginative engagement with AI.

We can’t divorce the cultural context embedded in data from the information it presents, and this context has an impact on the design choices made throughout the data lifecycle. Kwan’s talk challenged the myth of data's objectivity, promoting a view of data as a raw creative material that should be used to create meaningful and collective experiences. She encouraged designers to recognize their role as cultural workers who influence and shape the cultural narratives surrounding technology. By doing so, designers can contribute to creating experiences that foster community and counteract the often individualistic tendencies of contemporary data practices, ultimately questioning what kind of cultures we are building with our technological innovations.

Luke and Maira: The multidimensional design space of embeddings 

Luke Noothout and Maira Ribelles are two designers we have at C°F who are enthusiastic about the possibilities that new AI techniques offer to designers. They have been working to explore AI's role in our work, and participating in self-initiated experiments regarding this subject.

Luke and Maira's presentation explored the evolving role of embeddings in AI applications, emphasizing their transformative impact on understanding and manipulating digital content. Beginning with C°F’s early ventures into sentiment analysis for weather perceptions, Luke highlighted how embeddings have shifted from niche to integral in our approach to designing with AI tools. Embeddings, generated by neural networks, represent complex digital content as multidimensional coordinates, enabling nuanced analysis and comparison that surpasses traditional tagging methods.

Moreover, Luke and Maira’s presentation detailed innovative applications of embeddings such as our experiments with visualizing forest loss through generative AI in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, underscoring how embeddings foster creativity and insight across diverse domains. Beyond static categorization, embeddings offer fluid, continuous spaces where different media types—text, images, sound—coexist, facilitating new interactions and perspectives. The Design & AI Symposium 2024 identity that we have been working on also exemplifies this aspect of embeddings: by leveraging them to create a dynamic visual identity we blended high-dimensional data with artistic expression to redefine how abstract concepts can be communicated visually. Ultimately, our journey so far underscores that AI, far from just a tool, serves as both material and inspiration for creative exploration in the modern landscape.

Conclusion

The three talks offered a wide range of interesting perspectives, and triggered a lot of engagement from the audience. With AI becoming more common and democratized, we find new opportunities in the way we can use AI tools in our day-to-day work. It is important to note that the development of these tools still depends on big tech since it requires large resources, but when we continue to explore them and question how best we can work with them, we have a chance to implement them in ways that are more community-oriented.

AI is slowly becoming a new tool for world-building, sense-making, and language-creation, but it’s also hard to predict in which direction it will go. This is why we should focus on the unknowns, and the expectations around how users will interact with AI. How do we co-perform with AI entities that have their own agency, and in which contexts? What kind of language do we develop to understand and interact with it?

While a priority and need is to build language for transparency, we can also build new languages for contestability. In this context, designers can play a key role in shaping these interactions, and educating users about the complex nature of AI and how it works. AI is indeed a powerful tool that we’ll be seeing more and more in day-to-day contexts, but it can also serve as significant inspiration and raw material for designers.

We had an incredible time hosting this event, and plan to continue with more in-person meetups in the near future. Engaging with the design and dataviz community is a top priority for us, so we hope to see you at the next edition of C°F Meetups!