How to protect your design job from robots, according to three top designers

My family purchased Alexa (the personal assistant) in the first few weeks it was released. It’s now an integrated part of our life. We plan our trips, play music, get news… it’s insanely convenient.

As a user, you’re not touching or seeing anything with Alexa. Instead, you’re having a chat with an AI interface. But designers are heavily visually oriented, and Alexa is entirely voice oriented. For designers, that opens up a completely non-intuitive opportunity. What happens to visual branding? To packaging? To commercials in this context?  To succeed in these new, emerging contexts designers now have to move faster than the culture itself.

I learned the best lesson in future-proofing when we launched COLLINS a decade ago. I took our entire crew – just 7 people at that time – on a meditation retreat in the Hudson River Valley run by celebrated Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. When we got there, we quickly found out it was a completely silent retreat. SILENT. No one could speak. You could only listen.

So we listened to Pema for three days. And, among many things, she taught us this key idea: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”

Her philosophy is still in my mind. It taught me to embrace the fact that you don’t necessarily know where you’re going all the time. All that’s probably good as it forces you to be alert. The path does not go all the way. But that’s exactly where the adventure begins.

Better understand history

Natasha Jen, Partner and Designer, Pentagram

From looking at how much the world has turned upside down in merely 10 years – since the introduction of smartphones – I think it’s safe to say that the now as we understand it will never be the future.

We didn’t anticipate that we’d become so dependent on this device and all the ancillary services and industries born out of it. The way we eat, shop, travel, communicate, play has completely changed in a blink of an eye. We didn’t think digital-centric businesses would wipe out certain industries and create new ones. We didn’t think a foreign government would penetrate social media and meddle with elections. We didn’t anticipate Donald Trump would become the president of America…

In that regard, the concept of being future-proof is actually not that future-proof, and it’s kind of difficult to think about the future in an applied, assured sense, such as planning for your career. Who knows if artificial intelligence or bots might replace certain types of workforce that actually requires thinking like designers, for example.

I do believe that in a time where technology is so powerful, future is so unpredictable, and we seem so vulnerable, the only productive attitude is to have a better understanding about history, be more aware of our own relationship with the platforms that we engage with on a day-to-day basis, be curious about technological currents that seem alien, such as AI, robotics, cryptocurrency, bio-engineering, so we can think better in uncertain times.

If you’d like to speak to Brian Collins, Natasha Jen & Jess Brown in a round-table session, apply here for TNW New York tickets. Click here for more info on event, the amazing speakers and the venue.