Recent updates / Environmental impact of a chatbot use / Design designs designers
As I thought was gonna be the case, it's taken too long to write another article.
Been freelancing
So, four months since Normally closed down. So far I've been able to keep myself busy as a freelance interaction designer and design engineer.
From February to April, I was working with JAAQ – who used to be a client of Normally's – on the design and prototyping of their product vision for mental health. Since April, I've been at Google DeepMind, as a design engineer in a small team that's coming up with new concepts and prototypes for AI interactions.
Earlier during this time, I was exploring permanent roles at sustainability-, data-, and/or AI-focused startups, as well as design studios with some knowledge in those areas. Got quite far down the line with a few, but got no offer in the end.
Luckily I'm getting opportunities to work on those topics as a freelancer and I'm not feeling too pressured to rush into a perm role. It looks to me that there's enough budget floating around for projects, especially around AI, to hire freelancers, but not so much for increasing the headcount. I might be freelancing for a bit longer than I initially anticipated.
Some of the stuff that got me thinking
Sam and Jony introduce io | OpenAI
I'm partly making a living from the generative AI hype that companies in Silicon Valley are pushing, so I write this with some level of embarrassment. But. If they genuinely thought this video would be cool, it really highlights how out of touch some people "at the forefront" in Silicon Valley are with the real world. If that's not the case, it means that they had to put out videos like this to maintain the hype, which is not great news either.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?
This piece suggests that the energy consumption and carbon footprint of an individual using ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots is actually quite small (at least in the UK). While this particular insight is welcome, there are plenty of other issues with the current Silicon Valley-led approach to AI model development, beyond just direct environmental impact. It's quite plausible that these could still end up slowing down the transition towards a truly sustainable and fair society.
design designs designers: an interview with Cameron Tonkinwise (part 1)
unknown pleasures: an interview with Cameron Tonkinwise (part 2)
This is a two-part interview with Cameron Tonkinwise, a design scholar who is one of the people behind the idea of transition design, by Paul Graham Raven. It clearly explains Tony Fry's definition of design as "a way to give ideas agency," and the ontological nature of how design designs people, and how designers are also designed, with some helpful examples. In the latter part, they talk about the challenges in future-oriented design practices of getting people to imagine different values and different pleasures from the ones they currently hold. An excellent interview.
I've been thinking about the feeling of working in this kind of hype. Where do we draw the line when everything is labelled as "AI"? What's the excuse I've used to allow myself to work on it and how flawed it is, etc. Maybe I'll put together a post about it in the future.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading.