¡Ay, ay, AI!

Over the next few weeks or so, I am going to use this blog to capture some of my thoughts and experiences diving a bit deeper into AI. Up to this point, I have been a pretty casual user of AI. I would use it to help draft emails, cover letters, and the like, or use tools like Perplexity to provide richer summaries of technical or historical topics.

I tried using it in my job, but my few forays into using it for work always left me feeling a bit underwhelmed. Even though I worked in a pretty well-understood industry (video streaming), when I would try to use it to work through use cases, or suggest feature improvements, the output always felt junior-level at best. The use cases were ones we had already come up with ourselves or were irrelevant to what we were working on, and the feature improvements were similarly limited to things that any member of our team would have come up with.

Given this, I have been a bit struck by the absolute mania that has taken over the discourse on LinkedIn and other design channels. Somewhere along the lines, we have gone from “AI could be a useful tools in our craft” to “let’s throw all of our chips in on AI practicing the craft.” I tend to be a fairly skeptical person, and suspect that the stridency and absolutism I am seeing is a product of professional anxiety and insecurity, moreso than any indication that AI is now capable of creating design of great elegance or sophistication. Which is not to say that that anxiety and insecurity isn’t justified. Many of these tools implicitly, or sometimes even explicitly, suggest that our role as designers can now be done by a Product Manager+AI, and I have been around long enough to know that justifying the work we do has always been a major part of the job and we haven’t ever had competition quite like this.

This was the first image ChatGPT spit out, and is perhaps the perfect AI generated image to show where my biases lie. No notes.

So, with that in mind, I am going to dive into designing with AI to explore what is out there and investigate how these new and powerful tools might serve the craft I love and help me to become a better designer. My hope is that by exploring what is out there, using it in my design practice, and putting together some workflows, I will be able to better identify where the use of AI will improve the craft of design, and begin to grapple with some of my concerns about how, without major changes to how we operate design teams, we will train young designers to think through design problems rather than offloading that initial work to AI.

The Adventure Begins…

Sometimes you just have take a leap. Sometimes there is a clear reason for that need, and other times it comes from a more nebulous place of sensing that there is more to be gained from leaping than to staying where you are. For us, it was more of the latter.

We found out this February that, thanks to my wife being a certified “High Potential Individual,” we had the opportunity to get almost-guaranteed visas to work in the UK. There was no doubt in our mind that that was something that we wanted to do and felt we should do. We also were certain that it was something that really needed to be done before our youngest started school to limit the amount of disruption we put our kids through while taking advantage of this lifelong dream to live overseas.

Along with just cleaning out and packing up the house, we decided to add a light kitchen upgrade to the mix!

This meant that we had less than six months to: apply for the visas, prepare our home for sale, sell most of our things, certify our dog from moving to the UK, and say goodbye to many friends and loved ones we may not see again for a year or more…all while still working full time. It was madness, but felt like a noble form of madness. Beyond the logistical challenges, there was also the psychological and financial uncertaintay that were going to come our way. Christina and I had many conversations about the risks we faced moving to a new country with no jobs and no friends, but each time came to the same conclusion: we knew we would regret not taking this opportunity and we owed it to our girls to provide them with the richest experiences we could offer them, even if that meant a period of uncertainty, fear, and loneliness as we establish ourselves in our new home.

Saying goodbye to the 2 pallets worth of stuff we packed for our family of 4.

To take this project on, we needed to mine the depths of confidence in ourselves and each other and trust that with our kindness, humility, creativity, intelligence, and accumulated talents, we will be able to forge a life in Scotland that will be rich with all of the things we value and will do so in a way that will hopefully make our daughters proud one day when they realize what a batshit crazy thing their parents did to show them the world.

I was with HBO or some variation thereof for 9 years, so it was a bit wild to retire these badges.

We are two months into the adventure. We have solved a myriad of beureacratic, logistical, financial, emotional, and social puzzles, and taking every day we have here as a gift. We successfully made the move and were able to tie up all loose ends in Seattle, and have also gotten settled into a great flat in a beautiful neighborhood, started the kids in school, and slowly beginning to wade into the job hunt now that our higher-order needs are taken care of. I have already begun to meet some of the many talented local designers who have been very generous with their time and patient with a new arrival who is just starting to understand the local scene.

Haven’t quite gotten to the walking into the sunset stage yet, but feeling good about the prospects of making my mark on the local design scene.

Beyond networking and applying to jobs, I will also be using this period of down time to start thinking a bit more deeply about the state of design and starting to experiment with some of the revolutionary new tools that are coming onto the market and jotting some of those ideas down here.