New Years Resolutions

I come from a generation that had a bookshelf in the living room, among all the books and independently of what they were about, you’d find one or more dictionaries, and the ultimate prize used to be a collection of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a general knowledge ‘database’ first published in Scotland in 1768. Known for its scholarly approach and reliability, the articles were written by experts and scholars in various fields, and it was seen as a trusted reference source for everybody.

I was in my twenties when my father started losing his eyesight, he was a diabetic and had retinopathy. When he started losing the left eye, he went to get laser treatment, but something went wrong and he lost the eye, so when he started losing the right eye, he didn’t want to risk it and basically lived until he was completely blind.

It made me think of all the possibilities and made me wonder about all the new Gen AI professions that will pop up in the next 10 to 20 years. Forget prompt engineering, which is like knowing how to “speak machine” as a toddler, like John Maeda would say, this is a means to an end. What professions were born out of the industrial revolution? And of the Internet? What new professions and skillset’s will be born out of Gen AI? How many of those will be the future of music, and design?

Strong design brands seem to be having a tough time maintaining their relevance, it’s harder to create and sustain an end-to-end customer experience, dealing with changing market dynamics, deal with constant low-cost pressure. And perhaps we should not aim for it, Jeff Bezos apparently said “Amazon is not too big to fail… In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt.” Perhaps this was just IRMA’s time to go.

This revolution is making me recognize that all my design training has been a good investment, the more options and variety we have, the more important it is to know what you need and why. I am optimist about the disruption, and I think designers will not only survive, but thrive as true magicians. In the end, a deck of cards can be used in so many ways, but only a few people can do magic with it.

It was a different class, I understood why he thought this was important, perhaps the right way to teach someone how to play the drums. But I missed the music, the trying and learning by doing that Steven has done with me, and that takes me to my reflection number 2, a good teacher recognizes how a student learns and is prepared to go there to help him progress.

Because of the overuse of the promise of many similar solutions — you will have more free time to do what matters, people are usually distrustful and their first reaction is focused on all they see themselves losing, not winning. In this case, people saw beyond that, while discussing utopia and dystopia, they explored with us all the options and opportunities about what we were showing, they thought bigger, wider, long-term, it was very refreshing.

That moment, that experience that resonates with you in ways that so many times are personal and contextual, is a magic thing. Chasing it can become the ‘holy grail’, and therefore aiming for what is possible, for what is good enough will always be the challenge.

Designers have traditionally stayed away from these concepts, there are exceptions and I believe this is changing in the last 10 to 20 years, designers are more and more designing with a strong understanding of who is “digging the ditches”, challenging themselves and others to act with morality towards the larger community and the planet we inhabit, sometimes at their peril and even when they realize, they too, have ‘glass ceilings’. This is not just the work of designers, but we are part of the problem, and of the solution.

A future where the only thing the models can’t do is what they are doing now and we so much want to eradicate, humans will be the ones able to hallucinate and to laugh at the absurdity of it all. In this context, life would be creative, artistic, expressionist, experiential, exploratory in nature, chaos and madness redefined, just to stay human, outside of the loop in this case.