A while ago Karen Hao was on Radio 4 while I happened to be in the kitchen I was half listening to a youtube interview with Karen Hao while I cleaned the kitchen. Funny how memory plays tricks on us.

Right… anyway…

Hao was explaining how the term ‘AI’ is a blanket for a large range of technologies. She was explaining that saying stuff like ‘we need more AI’ or ‘AI will make us more productive’ is as vague as saying stuff like ‘we need more transportation’. Like do we need more bikes? More cars? More ships? Planes? Rockets? You get the point.

It’s the same with the word ‘design’. If I tell someone ‘I’m a designer’ they won’t have a clue what I do. I need to be much more precise for people to understand. ‘I’m a designer and I work with companies to improve how thier digital services work by understanding their customer’s behaviour better’ is much more of a mouthful but it at least narrows down which bit of design I’m (usually) in. Design is a vast sprawling cultural landscape, it’s embedded in everything in hugely varying forms.

So when we log into LinkedIn or hear the latest expert/politician/hype-booster saying stuff like ‘AI is revolutionising design’ it’s like they are saying ‘transportation is revolutionising infrastructure’. Like great… but what are you really saying? Are you sure? Or are you just repeating stuff you don’t understand. It’s mashing two broad umbrella terms together and expecting to it to be meaningful.

Better lanugage will help us build a better future

As an industry are we working out the impact of AI tools and services. What’s real change, what’s mirage? What’s the future, what’s hyperloop?

Vague language that obfuscates the nuances of two complex interlinked fields is only going to harm us as we work to build the future that makes the best use of AI technologies.