I remember in Design school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we didn’t have the luxury of spending too much time going down paths that weren’t innovative or interesting, and certainly if we wanted to bring our best polish to the game, and still get the project finished for a grade, we wouldn’t spend time trying to build on old conventions…there was a race to be the next turtle-necked, whiz-kid. Indeed looking to the past was poor form.
And don’t even get me started on the design-review struggle sessions. Brutal.
But in the age of AI, we have the great pleasure of being able to explore every design trend, every past solution, utilize all of the best, bad, and ugly of design, all with wild abandon. Even the terrible design choices from our past have a place at the AI smorgasbord of solving what our future of technology will need.
We now have the whole of design history along with a mandate to build new products that have never been thought of before. But AI can’t learn it if we don’t revisit those nooks and crannies - the mundane along with the insane, so that when we ask it to help us be the dreaming innovators we once saw ourselves in design school, the result will be every bit as human as the pencil sketch idea that made it onto those historic napkins.
Find the bad designs, and then use your AI tools to craft them into greatness.
This is the moment where we have history in our hands…before we become the dinosaurs.