Design As Creation | Design As Consumption

On this episode of Design As, host Lee Moreau speaks with Omidyar Network SVP Anamitra Deb, educator and design researcher Jessica Meharry,  and co-editor of The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection and professor Anne H Berry. Subscribe to “Design As” on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.

Transcript

Lee Moreau: [00:00:01] Welcome to Design As, a show that’s intended to speculate on the future of design from a range of different perspectives. And this season, like everyone else, we’re talking about AI. I’m Lee Moreau, founding director of Other Tomorrows, and professor at Northeastern University. This past May, I attended the Shapeshift Summit at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where designers and technologists came together to try to get a handle on what responsible AI is and what it could be. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the space between creation and consumption. This is a roundtable in three parts. On this episode, you’ll hear from Anamitra Deb— [00:00:37][36.4]

Anamitra Deb: [00:00:38] One of the areas we work on is broadening that table. Who speaks for technology? How do we play a part in being the protagonist in a technological future? And how do we bring society to the table?  [00:00:49][10.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:00:49] Jessica Meharry, [00:00:50][0.3]

Jessica Meharry: [00:00:51] How can we reframe the design context or the situation in order to bring in issues with equity, with inclusivity, with bias right from the start? And so not just like an add-on checklist at the end.  [00:01:03][11.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:01:03] And Anne H. Barry.  [00:01:04][0.7]

Anne H Berry: [00:01:05] We know design is not neutral, technology is not neutral either.  [00:01:09][3.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:01:14] In this episode, we’re going to be talking in the space between creation and consumption, that tension. And what I’m thinking we should talk about here is a little bit of an academic framing. It’s about school. It’s about how we teach, how we judge, how those things work together and help to make us better designers. It’s really that interrelationship between making and consuming that’s always been part of the design process. We get a sense that technology can sometimes blur the lines between making and consuming, allowing some people to become more empowered creators, even when they don’t have specific technical knowledge or tools or even a design degree. They’re able to do more with a technology that’s available to them. In many ways, that’s a democratization of our craft and of our discipline. And that’s wonderful. But the question also is who does AI leave behind in this process? Who gets left out? And some of that are going to be us, people in the design community that don’t feel like they have a place, don’t feel like they can contribute. But there’s probably a lot of other people who don’t self-identify as designers who also won’t be able to adapt to these tools. And that’ll be a challenge that we face in the future. Let’s hear some more from the speakers at Shapeshift on this topic.  [00:02:26][72.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:02:31] I’m here with Anamitra Deb at the Institute of Design. It’s Thursday, May 29th. Hi, Anamitra.  [00:02:36][5.7]

Anamitra Deb: [00:02:37] Hi. Thank you for having me.  [00:02:39][1.2]

Lee Moreau: [00:02:39] Anamitra, thank you for being with us. I’d love for you to actually introduce yourself.  [00:02:43][4.1]

Anamitra Deb: [00:02:44] I work at Omidyar Network, which is an organization started by Pierre and Pam Omidyar, who are part of the Giving Pledge to really dedicate a big part of their fortune while they were alive to causes that would serve humanity. Omidyar Network is our flagship organization. And for a long time we’ve done various things. Sometimes we’ve done a lot of work in advancing impact investing in the world, which was this idea that you could have a double-bottom line way of thinking about marrying , you know sort of the market with social good. We’ve worked in various different areas whether that’s fintech or edtech or consumer tech or other ways in which technology can really play a productive part in human empowerment and really societal flurishing. And currently, we focus on sort of hardwiring humanity into our digital future. That’s kind of our tagline. And the reason we say that is because we think that technology, in and of itself, can make wondrous things possible, but it requires a shaping hand. It requires a guiding hand from intentional societal choices and from people using their agency and their collective power and intelligence to guide humanity and to guide technology in the service of humanity. So our our sort of the the thing we think about these days is just that we want technology to be in service to humanity and not the other way around.  [00:04:12][88.2]

Lee Moreau: [00:04:13] Paraphrasing a little bit what we were saying, you used the f the words power, prosperity, and possibility, which seems a little bit like a tagline, but very much embedded in everything you said, you know, as a foundation. How is the frame of that being used to mobilize internal resources as you confront some of the topics we’ll be discussing at the summit?  [00:04:32][18.7]

Anamitra Deb: [00:04:33] Yeah, that’s a great question. So, what we do as a philanthropy is we have programmatic sort of grant-making areas. We roughly divide that into two types of things. One is what will increase shared agency among society to actually tackle technological challenges and improve our technological future. And that can mean a couple of things. That can mean sort of how do we think about responsible innovation that puts people first? That can mean how do we broaden the set of people whose voices speak for technology. I think we’ve come to a point in society where technology is so ubiquitous, it’s in your cars, it’s in your homes, it’s in your relationships. There’s really no way of ignoring it, you know, whether you have pets or children, you know, you’re- they’re using technology in some way or the other. We just listened to someone downstairs talking about Waymo, you know. My father, who’s 82, rode in a in a Waymo in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago when he was visiting, and he loved it.  [00:05:24][51.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:05:25] He did, okay.  [00:05:25][0.1]

Anamitra Deb: [00:05:25] I mean, it was a completely otherworldly experience for him. I don’t think he could have imagined that 60 years ago when he was, you know, a young man. But you know, these are the things we can do, but but it requires us to think about collective choices. It think it requires us to think about shared agency. It requires us to think about how we expand the definition of expertise to include a lot of disciplines, areas and human experiences that all that weren’t always part of technological expertise, right? So one of the areas we work on is broadening that table, who speaks for technology, how do we play a part in being the protagonist in a technological future, and how do we bring society to the table? So that’s a big area of sort of how we work. The second big area of how we work is talking about societal governance. So some of this stuff is about codes, about design norms, about regulations, about rules. There is a process in which over time, for every industry, we’ve set rules. And those rules have been to ensure that we have transparency and disclosure, to ensure we have consumer protection and liability, to ensure that ultimately the industry’s working to promote the greatest good for the for the society that it serves. So whether that’s the food industry, whether that’s the pharmaceutical industry, whether that’s the transport industry, and now it’s the digital technology industry. And the digital technology industry has kind of got a free pass for the last 30 years. It in some ways it’s the last unregulated kind of wild west in America. And so one of the things we do is we promote a lot of civil society work, advocacy and policy and regulatory work to make sure that we are setting the right standards, we’re creating new norms, and we’re helping policymakers and regulators actually guide and shape, you know, in the same way that we shape markets, that we shape the the technology so that it sits in the public interest. So those are our sort of our two main lungs as we call it.  [00:07:22][117.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:07:23] When- as you as you were speaking, you said a phrase who and I’m just a little snippet here, who speaks for technology? And then you kind of flipped it and it’s almost like you’re saying in terms of regulation and rules, who speaks to technology? And a lot of that is about conversation, right? So how are you and within those two kind of main platforms, so much of that is about bringing people into conversation, who do you talk with most frequently? Like who are as you’re kind of building the the dialog, who do you look to you know, outside of Omidyar to engage with?  [00:07:55][31.8]

Anamitra Deb: [00:07:56] We work in two main ways, right? We work to fund organizations that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this front. So sometimes there are organizations that are building larger coalitions. At this point in the AI game, for instance, there’s a lot of concern about what it will do with automation for jobs. And there are futures predicted where it will augment human productivity. And there are futures predicted where it will replace human capacity and productivity. And we’re on the side of trying to make it sure that it is, you know, what we say cranes, not looms. And what that means is you want augmentation technology. You- cranes do things. They help us to build the skyscrapers that are around us in Chicago here in ways that we could never build on our own. Looms, on the other hand, were replacement technologies, right?  [00:08:41][44.3]

Lee Moreau: [00:08:41] Right.  [00:08:41][0.0]

Anamitra Deb: [00:08:41] They led to large vast scale automation and disruptions in labor forces. And we’ve seen that history take place again and again. Ultimately, I think in the medium and long term, we are believers that productivity is increased and and jobs are increased through the use of technology, but it has to be intentional and we have to think about the disruptions. So as an example, when we think about who speaks to and for technology these days, having the worker voice in corporate boardrooms, having the worker voice in the decisions that are made about what technology is is used to either replace them or to augment them, how the productivity that is created is shared is really important. So as an example, you know, the the the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild last year was a was an amazing example of actually using bargaining power to make sure that there would be a certain negotiated agreement on how the technology would be used, how the productivity would be constrained or enabled, and where the where the gains from that productivity would flow. And I think that’s the really important piece of this is when we broaden the table, we bring to bear new voices. So sometimes it’s workers and labor. We’ve had a lot of success in the last few years by bringing kids and teens and parents to the discussion about online trust and safety. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of our internet experience and our technological experience today are kids and teens. I have, you know, kids who are using the internet, who can use devices, and it really changes their lives in a way that we never had. I don’t know how we would have got through the COVID pandemic without streaming video and audio, really, stuck at home.  [00:10:16][94.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:10:19] Right and remote education and all the capacities.  [00:10:20][0.9]

Anamitra Deb: [00:10:20] And remote work and all the stuff that we do today, right? And and so that’s amazing. At at the same time there’s harm on the internet. There are dark experiences on the internet. There is predatory behavior on the internet. And some of that goes down to the responsibility that technology companies have in how they design the user experience, sort of what are the values they’re promoting? What do they allow and what do they disallow? And so a lot of the work we’ve been doing over the last few years is to is to advance organizations that speak for those values that try to make responsible innovation sort of a core mainstay of the way that technology is designed to try and change the defaults in the system, you know. So, for instance, you know, a lot of work on exposing dark patterns and defaults. YouTube autoplay was a great example of something that for kids was turned off a few years ago. So kudos to YouTube for doing that, because that changed the way in which the engagement algorithms worked when they were, you know, on YouTube kids, for instance. You know, this is because we’ve designed an internet over the last five or seven years, especially where the real incentive is engagement, because the monetization engine is through ads. So everything that’s been said about surveillance capitalism is about collecting data, tracking user behavior, serving them ads and keeping them, you know, having their attention hacked, having their attention stay on the internet as long as possible, it’s led to a set of perverse incentives. And so a lot of the work that’s been done by civil society, whether it’s advocates that are talking about what research and evidence they have on these dark patterns or on these product design considerations, whether it’s kids and teens and parents talking about the experiences they’ve had of harm, whether it’s, as I said, workers and others, faith leaders, veterans talking about what happens when algorithmic decisions leave out certain communities. What we’ve learned over time is that if you don’t broaden the table for who sees themselves working on and working with and working toward better technology futures in dialog with technology companies, in dialog with policymakers, in dialog with researchers and and people who create evidence and in in in dialog with storytellers such as yourself that are, you know, making these and putting these out in the world, you don’t get the change that you seek. You don’t get it if you only have engineers in the room. And you don’t get it if you only have coders in the room, because some of these are not engineering problems. They are complex problems of what happens when we are creating social policy with competing values. And we have to design for both privacy and user empowerment. We have to designed for both kids’ online safety and the ability to to scale products that are that are helpful. So so a lot of this comes down to how do we sit and negotiate and engage in dialog on these competing values. And what we do is we fund a lot of the groups, organizations and coalitions that are driving those conversations.  [00:13:14][174.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:13:15] So what I’m hearing is, you know, this is a little messy. Dialog is messy, conversations are messy. We’re here at the summit, you know, you’ve come a long way. What are you hoping to hear? Things just started, but what are you hoping to hear while you’re here for two days in these dialogs and conversations?  [00:13:32][16.6]

Anamitra Deb: [00:13:33] Yeah, what I’m hoping to hear is that people who are young today, especially, you know, we are at a university, we’re at a university focused on design, we’re a university focused on design for graduate students, which is pretty cool. That young people are really invested in making sure that they’re not shying away from the complexity of how to make technology work for society. That they’re actually invested in trying to figure out, you know, what are the dark patterns and what are the defaults and which ones work and which ones don’t. They’re trying to figure out where can technology and engineering solutions really help, but where are they not fit for purpose? And where are there really actually complex human systems into which technology can be additive, but it can’t be replacement? It can’t actually take the job of deciding for us what’s democratically good or what content or speech should be allowed, or how our relationship should be moderated. You know, when I think about technology as replacements for our relationships, for our conversations, I think that’s difficult. Those are really complex, we are complex. What I’m hoping to hear is that there’s both an acknowledgement of what technology can make possible, which is really amazing, and there’s an acknowledgement that it’s a complex system into which we are placing new technologies. Those systems are human relationships and human societies. And if we don’t have voices, and we are hopefully going to hear from a lot of voices that say that that’s important, that’s what I’m hoping for.  [00:15:00][86.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:15:01] The idea that human experience is both implicated in and also inflected by some of these technologies is for me compl as a designer completely obvious. But it’s important that we are making sure that that conversation is taking place in the development of some of this technology. We see a lot of conversation around the relationship between the developers, the deployers, and the end users of this tech. And there’s just not as much conversation as there needs to be. So I’m so grateful for the work that you’re doing. Anamitra, thank you so much for spending time with us. This has been wonderful.  [00:15:37][36.1]

Anamitra Deb: [00:15:37] Thank you so much.  [00:15:38][0.3]

Lee Moreau: [00:15:45] I’m here with Jessica Meharry at the Institute of Design on Wednesday, May 28th. The event starts tomorrow. Hi, Jessica.  [00:15:51][5.7]

Jessica Meharry: [00:15:52] Hello.  [00:15:52][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:15:53] Welcome. Jessica Meharry is a designer, researcher, and educator who develops justice-oriented design methodologies for professional practice. She’s currently a visiting assistant professor at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, where she teaches graduate courses on developing more equitable and liberatory forms of design studies and practice. Now that’s one way of doing the introduction, Jessica. How would you introduce yourself if you were going to take us down that path?  [00:16:17][24.2]

Jessica Meharry: [00:16:18] Sure. I mean I guess to distill it a little bit down, not quite so academic speak. Basically I’m a designer and educator who’s interested in how do we make products and services more equitable and just and then helping other designers do the same thing.  [00:16:34][15.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:16:34] Now in a conference on AI, how might that apply?  [00:16:37][3.1]

Jessica Meharry: [00:16:38] As you might imagine, AI opens up even more things for us to consider when we think about is something just or equitable. So we’ve been working a lot with students here at ID about what does it mean to work with AI as a new and completely new form of materiality, really, like it’s not paper, it’s not plastic, it’s it’s got all these other dimensions, even well beyond computers and internet and things like that. So we’re really working on like what does it mean to use this? What are the other considerations we have to think about? Because we, as we all know, left unchecked, AI can really have some harmful outcomes.  [00:17:13][35.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:17:14] As I was prepping for some of these conversations, you were one of the people that were highlighted as someone who’s really using AI with students and in the classroom setting, which I think we talk a lot in academia about the impact of AI in education, but we don’t always talk about using AI in education in a constructive way. Can you talk more about that and what your s-sort of vision is for that?  [00:17:37][22.4]

Jessica Meharry: [00:17:37] Sure, I’ll just use a couple of examples. So one of the classes that I teach, it’s actually a co-taught class with Politecnico di Milano, where we bring two cohorts of students together and we talk about AI and the futures of AI. So we do like a really intense workshop series, like what are the different qualities of AI, what are the potential ramifications, what are the harms, the benefits, and then try to imagine some futures around that and then design around that. So it’s really working through all these issues. And we’ve looked we talked to all sorts of different industry speakers and experts in doing that. So I learn a ton, the students learn a ton. Like, what are people doing right now? What needs to be considered? Like this year’s version was two months ago and it was all we’re designing for agents, you know, let’s talk about agentic AI and what does that mean? And it can be really challenging. It’s challenging for me, just like what and it’s challenging for students of what what kind of career do I have now as a designer? Where do I fit? And, you know, I just decided with some colleagues and as we were teaching, stuck basically starting last year, let’s just jump in. We can’t sit back and say, like, you can’t use AI, we’re not gonna do this, it’s evil, it’s bad. Let’s get our hands in there. And so on a second example is a course I co-taught with Tomoko Ichikawa, who’s also a faculty member here last spring, where it was two levels. It was a studio course where it was very open and we really just wanted students to explore all forms of generative AI. And we just kept logs and we shared tutorials and we just said what’s possible, what’s not. Turns out a a lot of things weren’t possible. So that sort of felt a little bit better, like, oh, actually, some of our strategic thinking and and problem framing, this isn’t gonna do that for us, but here’s some things it can do. And then the second level is we were looking at tensions in general AI more broadly, like what does it mean to use AI in healthcare? Many of our students are interested in designing for healthcare. What are the ramifications of that? What are the potential problems? You know, privacy, bias, security. And so it’s really interesting to work through that. I think it gave our students much more agency, like, oh, I I I think I know how to position myself with this, what I bring to this, what AI can do, versus we started the semester in a place of I think all of us a little bit more fear. And again, this was January 2024.  [00:19:50][132.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:19:51] The vision I have in my head as you’re describing it is that this may be a bit of a kind of creative free for all with all this Gen AI stuff. How do you bring the role of critique into the classroom, into the design school s as you’re reflecting on some of the outputs?  [00:20:04][13.5]

Jessica Meharry: [00:20:05] Great question. So we are number one, ask all of our students to be very transparent. When are you using it? When are you not? So like at least we just know what it what is it doing? Because part of what we talk about is discernment, I think, as it relates to critique and the value of still knowing what it is possible in order to discern what the AI output is doing. And is that first of all, is it truthful? Is it legitimate? Is it any good? Is it disgobldy-speak? I don’t even know. That’s not a word, but we — [00:20:30][25.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:20:30] We can invent words all day long.  [00:20:32][1.2]

Jessica Meharry: [00:20:32] Yes.  [00:20:32][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:20:32] That’s fine.  [00:20:32][-0.1]

Jessica Meharry: [00:20:33] And then actually in this class last year, I’m a big proponent of metacognition in teaching and having students reflect on their own creative processes. So we had them do that throughout the some semester where they were reflecting on when they were using Gen AI in the process and how that changed their design process. And then being visual designers as we were, we had them create illustrations of this. And I think that was incredibly helpful too. So to back to your question about critique, it it’s really being able to identify and being much more clear about what were your intentions, why did you stop at this point? What other paths could you have taken? And I think also that one layer of remove allows other students to come in a little better as well, versus just I like it, I don’t, but what if you used it this way? What if you used it that way?  [00:21:22][49.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:21:23] I love your use of the word intentions because I I think we think a lot about intentionality in other forms of craft of design, but that’s not something I hear a lot when we’re thinking about like the newest bleeding edge technology, that gets lost. Where where does that leave us?  [00:21:39][15.8]

Jessica Meharry: [00:21:39] I feel like my answer to a lot of questions is problem framing. As designers, that’s that’s where my work focuses on is sort of how can we reframe the design context or the situation in order to bring in issues with equity, with inclusivity, with bias right from the start. And so not just like an add-on checklist at the end. So I guess back to this question of intentions, that’s what I’m always working with students like at the beginning, being very clear about that and being really clear that we as designers are not just neutral service providers. And if a client does want something, we can challenge that. We also have our own politics, meaning, you know, broadly the word politics that we bring to a situation. And and how does that affect what we think we’re doing or not?  [00:22:27][47.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:22:27] I and of course politics when it’s framed by what could be a twenty-two year old design student is going to be very particular and thinking about the future in ways that perhaps my generation is is not so mindful of certain aspects of the future. How does that play out?  [00:22:43][15.8]

Jessica Meharry: [00:22:44] So I wil-I will refer to an assignment I have in another class. It’s a class called Politics of Design. And that the very first assignment is Politics of Me, which a shout out to colleague Ames Hawkins who helped me develop this assignment. But it’s basically the very first thing, it’s it’s reflecting on your own identity, positionality, where you come from, your belief systems, your education, and to your point, generational differences. Because now so many things come in. I learned so much, so many of our students are from other countries, what are their backgrounds? I learn about bias in other countries or things that I’m I didn’t even know that was existing. And then they learn about the United States context as well. So that kind of just helps sort of frame like you didn’t all come in here the same. And so how does that shape who you are in a design context? When you have a client come in the room, which so much of our work is client-based, how do they see you? How do you see them? What are the dynamics?  [00:23:39][55.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:23:40] On the creative side, if we, you know, we move from the the politics to the creative side, students surprise us all the time. I’m always surprised by students, like, wow, you how’d you come up with that? And and now we’re using some of these new technology tools that accelerate how far work can be pushed. Can you talk about how that surprise changes when we sort of supercharge it? I’m I’m using air quotes here, but like supercharge it with some of this new tech.  [00:24:04][23.6]

Jessica Meharry: [00:24:04] I think the supercharge, to your point, can speed it up a little too much sometimes. So an example, I’ll use a class we just taught, it was again that same studio class, but this spring again and we- it was more open-ended, it was about design narrative and rhetoric. But students, I saw the supercharging in action where they would come up with a concept and they were able to like flesh out a narrative that was set like set something like set in the 16th century and it felt real and there was a script and all these things that you would not have been able to do. And in some ways, that’s really amazing. It’s prototyping sped up, but at the same time, like let’s back up. What are we trying to do here? How did this really develop? You were able to do it so quickly, like conceptually, it might still not be built on a solid foundation. And so I think sometimes we kind of had to pull back a little bit, like and realize they were just gonna keep going. And we had to build in the brakes to question the the concept and the problem framing as well.  [00:25:03][58.7]

Lee Moreau: [00:25:03] Jessica, thank you so much.  [00:25:04][0.9]

Jessica Meharry: [00:25:05] Thank you, this was a delight.  [00:25:05][0.8]

Lee Moreau: [00:25:11] I’m here right now with Anne H. Berry, who’s a practicing graphic designer, a writer, and an educator. She’s also the director of design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the UIC, which is just up the road.  [00:25:24][13.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:25:25] Happy to be here.  [00:25:25][0.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:25:26] Anne I wanted you to be part of this conversation because we’ve been talking a lot about AI here the last couple of days. And we’ve been hearing different conversations around what that the implications will be for designers.  [00:25:37][11.5]

Anne H Berry: [00:25:38] Sure.  [00:25:38][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:25:39] Obviously that takes us to education. We’re here in a design school, but there are many different flavors of design school and types of design. I want to talk a little bit about the diversity of thought that we’re bringing to the future that we’re hoping to create.  [00:25:50][11.1]

Anne H Berry: [00:25:51] Yeah, well, I mostly have a lot of questions. That’s I guess what brings me to this conversation. Full disclosure, I have never used ChatGPT. I have never used a generative AI tool. So that might be a little bit different. And and it might be helpful maybe because ChatGPT in particular, I know is a is a very- can be a very useful support for people, just to say a little bit about why I haven’t used it. And that is, you know, I’m I’m a writer, and that becomes a topic that is in and of itself is really challenging these days in terms of the the ways in which AI is picking up all of these things that we’re publishing and writing. But I pride myself on my ability to write because I work really hard at it. And so, you know, my tendency, my own thinking is, you know, whether I’m writing a letter of recommendation or an email or a piece of writing that I’m gonna publish, it all just comes from inside. So that that’s just gives you a little bit about my perspective and where I’m coming from on all of this. You know, as an educator, this is certainly a very big topic. When I was transitioning between Cleveland State University, where I taught before coming to Chicago, so in between CSU and UIC, I was already having some of these conversations with my colleagues and even students about artificial intelligence. And I will say too, I think, you know, ChatGPT is different than generative AI. But we, you know, I tend to think of them as one lump thing, but I know that they’re very different and have potentially have very different impact. But we had students in our graphic design program at CSU who were coming to us asking, should I even major in this? Will I have a job? And I think I will say one of the the weaknesses of not being more inquisitive about using ChatGPT, and I guess maybe I’m speaking for myself, is that I don’t when those questions started coming, I didn’t know how to directly answer them.  [00:27:54][123.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:27:54] How do you respond, yeah?  [00:27:55][0.4]

Anne H Berry: [00:27:55] Yeah, I didn’t really know how to respond to them. I think I tend to have a this view of of our profession of design, because it’s already closely aligned with technology, like design and technology are just connected. And because we because our discipline has been tied to technology and we found ways of evolving, I mean the design profession is continually changing that it just seems that we will find other ways to work around whatever these technological trends are. I guess I don’t know if it’s fair for me to describe AI as a as a ch- technology trend, but I guess that’s how I-I-I think of it. Maybe that’s— [00:28:31][35.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:28:31] It feels very it feels very trendy right now. It may be a long term thing that we have to confront, but it feels really hot and trendy and sexy right now.  [00:28:38][7.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:28:38] It feels very hot, trendy sexy. And I think that the I think part of what makes us so unique as designers is our creativity, the creativity that comes from inside as opposed to even what we’re making. I mean, we are makers too, but there’s something about human interaction and communication that flows between people, particularly in the real world, that is still unique and special. And I hope that we always maintain that. But design as a profession, of course, has changed in many, many ways. So I guess my sort of default response when these questions would come up, questions and concerns was well, your creativity is the thing that makes you so valuable. And that is the thing that we’re going to work to maintain. So I guess that was my response in the moment, but it did start me thinking, well, I need to educate myself a little bit more and be thinking about this more. So in fact, when I was interviewing at UIC, I talked about a couple areas that I would am hoping to have conversation around. One of them being new media and AI, because I also know that I have sort of limited knowledge and understanding of how these programs work, that I I want to open up a conversation about it with faculty because I, you know, some of my faculty are experimenting using generative AI. Some of them are using ChatGPT. So I’m trying to approach it from okay, what can I learn from some of these conversations?  [00:30:09][90.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:30:10] I wanna go back to the the phrase that that you said to that student, which was like, I want to help you maintain your creativity or or to build your creativity, right?  [00:30:17][7.8]

Anne H Berry: [00:30:18] Right.  [00:30:18][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:30:18] That’s a two way street.  [00:30:18][0.4]

Anne H Berry: [00:30:19] Right.  [00:30:19][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:30:19] As an educator, you know that. It’s like that’s gonna be an investment on the part of that student. It’s also an investment on the part of you as an academic, the curriculum, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a lot of responsibility.  [00:30:29][10.2]

Anne H Berry: [00:30:31] It is, but I think, you know, I I’ve always felt that our job as educators is to really spark that interest in students so that it carries on, that they grab hold of something and that it motivates them beyond the classroom because there’s, you know, there’s only so much we can do within a two-year or four-year program. We can’t make people inherently curious, right? But we can try to find things, use the classroom as a way to inspire as a catalyst. I think sometimes students underestimate the power that they have or that underestimate their own abilities and what they can do with their design skills. So I I I sort of have thought about my role as an educator and trying to like guide them in that way or support them in that way, empower them in that way, as opposed to students being treated as just like passive people in the room who are absorbing content. Like they have a role to play in the classroom. So that’s partly also my approach to teaching, which I’m talking about. But I I see education as a two-way street, absolutely. So what students pull from that and what they opt to take with them in their careers is up to them. But I I hope that all of us as design educators are sort of opening windows and doors for the way students are thinking about themselves and their work.  [00:31:55][83.9]

Lee Moreau: [00:31:55] And then we have to invite this other thing to the party. This AI is there. So we’ve got this like exchange, this two way street.  [00:32:01][6.3]

Anne H Berry: [00:32:02] Yeah.  [00:32:02][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:32:02] And then this other thing comes new technology, which is always emerging and inflecting how we do what we do. Yeah. But that’s there at the table too.  [00:32:11][8.3]

Anne H Berry: [00:32:12] Right. And I think, you know, again, here, part of the challenge for me is that I I think that again, you know, I talked earlier about how design and technology, I mean, we’re just intrinsically inherently linked and we have been since our profession began. So that’s not anything new, but but I think I find myself more and more these days reflecting more on as we think about this, the various technologies that have been developed and are continuing to develop, where is the ethical piece of the conversation? Because I think that’s something that we as designers haven’t necessarily done very well. We jump on, I’m I’m speaking very generally here now, but we, you know, we jump on new technologies that I think that’s of course what we do, right? Like how do we integrate these things into our workflows? How can this help us? How can this help the way we teach, the way we work? How can this push our own creative activity? But how often are we slowing down and stepping back just to ask, like: Should I be doing this? So I guess that that’s also really the question that is bringing me to this conversation today is should we be why do we seem to collectively automatically be all in on this thing? I think, you know, it’s I look at Adobe and you know, as the Creative Cloud, you know, we’re all updating our Creative Cloud, and now there are these AI tools that are just like built into them, generative AI. And it does look great, you know, there’s so much amazing stuff you can do on the surface.  [00:33:43][90.7]

Lee Moreau: [00:33:44] Dazzaling, right.  [00:33:44][0.1]

Anne H Berry: [00:33:44] Yeah. And it’s like, you know, I have seen some presentations that are really impressive. And of course, you know, I understand what it feels like to then want to like jump into your software and like try some stuff, right? Because it’s new, it’s new tech. But again, it’s this question of like, well, what is happening on the other side of of all of this beyond what I’m seeing on my screen? Like, is there what is the impact that I I’m not seeing? You know, from the limited that I know and understand, like AI has this huge environmental cost. We don’t necessarily see and hear or talk a lot about that, at least not in design circles, not that I’m aware of. So I’m like, what where is that conversation happening? And then of course, you know, artists are they getting credit for their work? It it’s just I have a lot of questions. So I really wish that we could slow down a little bit. And I’m not here to say no to AI, but like let’s at least slow down and ask ourselves, like have some deep conversations before we just agree that because Adobe is putting it in our software and we don’t have a choice about it, that we should be using it. I mean, Sam Altman is out there saying, you better teach AI, otherwise your students are gonna be left behind. And I really take issue with that. Like who who is he to be sort of a dictating this?  [00:35:04][79.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:04] Imposing that.  [00:35:04][-0.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:06] Yeah, especially to educators. I find that I that that is one piece of this that I do find really offensive.  [00:35:11][5.4]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:12] So you bring several things to the table, right? You you’re cre- you talked about your writing, you’re a creator. Obviously as a graphic designer, couple decades of experience, not to like date you, but like you know, we probably buried the lead here with your introduction. And one of the things you’re most well known for is as one of the the editors of The Black Experience in Design.  [00:35:31][19.3]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:32] Yeah.  [00:35:32][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:32] A really important book that came out approximately five years ago. Is that right?  [00:35:35][3.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:36] Twenty twenty two.  [00:35:37][0.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:37] Twenty twenty two. God, okay.  [00:35:37][0.4]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:40] Its three years old. It feels like it’s been like ten years, but yeah.  [00:35:42][1.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:42] The brick.  [00:35:42][0.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:42] The brick yeah.  [00:35:42][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:42] That came out, right? Which was a compendium. So I think part of this like questioning and wondering and trying to look back at where we came from and how we use the tools when we learn them is also part about bringing together multiple voices and trying to understand where we’ve been, right?  [00:35:57][14.5]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:57] Right.  [00:35:57][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:35:58] Before we go somewhere else.  [00:35:59][0.9]

Anne H Berry: [00:35:59] Before we go somewhere else, there’s a lot of work to do in that space, especially like given where the country is in this moment, it’s from my perspective, it is a signal that that yeah, not only do we need to slow down, maybe we need to stop for a hot minute and really look at the profession. I mean, one of the things that worries me about AI and our and just technology in general is who it’s leaving behind. You know, I think there’s this notion that technology is neutral. I mean, we we talk that way about design and we know design is not neutral.  [00:36:37][37.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:36:37] Right.  [00:36:37][0.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:36:38] Technology is not neutral either. So what does that mean that we’re just willing to sort of accept these things that are being fed to us in a way? And we just, you know, we’re so focused on moving forward, and yet there is a lot to sort of learn about where we’ve come from when it comes to design history, there’s just a lot a lot that has been lost, and we’re we’re I think gaining ground in terms of our understanding that design history is much broader, maybe than the way we’ve been talking about it traditionally. But I would say it’s the same for technology and its influence and who is getting left— that’s the question. Who is getting left behind? And is there something we can learn about the past to help us think about how we want to approach these things in the future? And I’ll just speak and say it like, you know, I can’t speak for all Black people, but as a Black person, I see the potential damage that all of these systems and technologies can do to really cause harm.  [00:37:35][57.1]

Lee Moreau: [00:37:36] That’s worth saying. I mean, th this is not a conversation that we’re spending a whole lot of time focused on, right? We are the dazzling I think the the words I used before were like sexy or whatever.  [00:37:48][12.6]

Anne H Berry: [00:37:49] Yes.  [00:37:49][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:37:49] Like you know, like ooh, sparkly, wow,.  [00:37:51][1.8]

Anne H Berry: [00:37:51] Right.  [00:37:51][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:37:52] Fun, cool. Not this idea that this technology and design as well are not neutral should be part of this conversation. We are in a design school.  [00:38:00][8.5]

Anne H Berry: [00:38:00] Right.  [00:38:00][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:38:01] That should be part of the conversation.  [00:38:01][0.7]

Anne H Berry: [00:38:02] That should be part of the the conversation. And there is a tension too between design practice and design education. I mean, it’s it’s really interesting because these two things are so very much tied together. And we are like training students to be able to go out and work professionally, but at the same time, you know, educational systems, you know, bureaucracy moves very slowly sometimes. So we’re not always up to date with what’s happening in the dis- you know design practice end of the spectrum. But but I think that’s, you know, largely part of our goal in education, right? We want to make sure that our students when they graduate that they are qualified to like be in these roles and do these things. So I think that that sometimes adds, you know, if things are really happening in the the space of of professional design work, then there’s pressure for us as educators to make sure that we’re training students in these ways with these skill sets. So if everybody’s in the professional world, I shouldn’t say everybody, but if there’s, you know, people are using AI, generative AI, ChatGPT, whatever it is, then there’s a pressure on us, I think as educators to also be doing these things to make sure that, yeah, that our students have the skill sets and blah, blah, blah. So I think that’s another area where more conversation maybe needs to happen. How these two are influencing one another, and, you know, we want again our students to be prepared, but prepared for what? And this goes back to then the the point about like what is it that makes designers so valuable?  [00:39:33][90.7]

Lee Moreau: [00:39:34] This is not necessarily a time where the concept of hope comes to mind a whole lot right now.  [00:39:40][5.9]

Anne H Berry: [00:39:40] Yeah.  [00:39:40][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:39:41] May 2025. But what makes you hopeful? You’ve just within the last year taken this new role. You’re leading, big responsibility.  [00:39:50][9.8]

Anne H Berry: [00:39:52] Yeah.  [00:39:52][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:39:52] You’re looking beyond just the feet in front of you. You’ve got to have some vision there. What does give you hope right now, if I if I dare ask you that question?  [00:39:59][7.0]

Anne H Berry: [00:40:00] Well, I I think yeah, what gives me give me a minute to sort of think about how I want to say this.  [00:40:05][5.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:40:05] It might be an impossible question to answer too.  [00:40:07][1.4]

Anne H Berry: [00:40:07] No, I think I think there there is hope. I mean, so I think one thing I think about when I think about the future is futurism, Afrofuturism in particular, and these areas of design that are calling us to think about the world that we want to create, the world that we want to live in and the power of imagination. I recently read Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination and Manifesto, and it’s a it’s a book that I return to now and again just because I think it has this beautiful balance of, yeah, this is kind of where we are now, and there are challenges in acknowledging them, but also reminding us that we need to stay focused too on what the future looks like and that we do have a hand in it. We do have some power. I I tend to be a pessimist in the sense that I feel like, you know, things become inevitable and we don’t really have any options, but that’s really not true. And I think maybe that that is also one of the reasons why I enjoy teaching, because it it I don’t say forces a kind of hope, but it generates a kind of hope, at least for me, as I’m looking at the work students are doing, looking at the questions that they’re interested in, looking at the ways they’re thinking about technology can also be really inspiring. So it’s it’s not as though, you know, technology is bad, but it’s I think it’s just like let’s be more reflective about our practice. Maybe that’s the big sort of message that I would love-  [00:41:46][98.7]

Lee Moreau: [00:41:47] That’s been the theme this whole time.  [00:41:48][0.7]

Anne H Berry: [00:41:48] Yeah, let’s slow down. Let’s be more reflective. Let’s have more conversations. I mean, you know, not not to poo-poo human-centered design. I mean, it’s yes, we should be thinking about the people that we’re designing for, but I think there’s a way in which sometimes these processes and design make us think that we are approaching design in a way that is really being thoughtful of who our audience is. And there’s so much nuance when it comes to designing for other people. It’s not just the people, it’s the context in which they are living and working and being. And I think that’s a place where, again, Black and brown people sometimes get left behind. And a a particular kind of design process is not gonna solve for that. I think slowing down trying to really engage with people in the real world and engage with people that we’re either designing for or designing with in a meaningful way, that has real power. I think for me that’s part of what’s missing too in this conversation about AI. There’s something like is there a better way to I don’t know, interface between technology and like being in the real world that I don’t want to say creates a compromise of sorts, but at least brings these conversations together as opposed to like you’re either completely on board with it or you’re not. And there’s just something there are a lot of things that are really beautiful about design that happen in a very analog sort of way. I mean, there’s a lot of joy. So I don’t know, those are the kinds of things that give me hope.  [00:43:28][99.5]

Lee Moreau: [00:43:29] There’s there’s risk when we gain something new, like a new technology, we also lose something. I mean you prioritize, right?  [00:43:35][6.4]

Anne H Berry: [00:43:36] Yeah.  [00:43:36][0.0]

Lee Moreau: [00:43:36] You can’t do everything all the time. And so there is a risk of losing something. Anne this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time.  [00:43:41][5.5]

Anne H Berry: [00:43:42] Thanks for having me.  [00:43:42][0.6]

Lee Moreau: [00:43:45] Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at designobserver dot com slash Design As. You can always find Design As on any podcast catcher of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Write us a review, share it with a friend, and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer. Connecting with us online gives you a seat at this roundtable. Special thanks to the team at the Institute of Design, Kristen Gecan, Rick Curej, and Jean Cadet for access and recording. Thanks to Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt, and the entire Design Observer team. This episode was mixed by Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada. Design As is produced by Adina Karp.  [00:43:45][0.0]

[2532.0]