🙋♂️ Wilbert on Design, April
Good morning,
I strongly believe that the biggest challenges and opportunities for designers are going to be on a system level.
Systems grow in complexity; every touch point is connected all the time
Behaviour personalisation increases; what you see is not what I see or what we see
This results in less control; it’s hard to design a blue print for something with a lot of dynamic parts, so design (as a field) also has to move the boundaries of design, where you aim for guidelines, intended behaviour, principles.
In this edition some examples of why we - as a design field - need to think bigger.
Protecting vision
Making a self-driving Tesla move into the opposite lane...with just stickers pasted on the road!
A car controlled by a computer it’s still limited by the sensors and rules and data we’ve put in.
People have always been great manipulators of systems. This video shows how easy it is to manipulate a system when you start talking to a system in its language.
We relying more on camera’s for a lot of services, this is a new domain for design, right now mostly driven by technological capabilities.

Facial recognition has been applied fearlessly into everyday scenarios https://t.co/MioBBfLgYK
What's real
A lot of platforms are having issues with filtering content. Because of the network effects and gaming a system a lot of 💩 gets the attention it doesn’t deserve. This as much a technical problem as it is a design problem. I don’t think there will be a simple algorithm to fix this, it’s more a systemic problem.
If you don’t design for it it from the beginning you will never be in control.
While most discussions are about Facebook I personally think YouTube has issues of a similar size. It’s the magic place where you can find someone explaining how to replace that tiny spare part in your car, but it’s also full of nonsense, spreading faster then a computer can stop it.
One AI – YouTube's recommendation algorithm – determines >25% of ALL internet traffic on mobile by picking what videos we watch… and steering the daily thoughts, feelings and beliefs of two billion people.…

"I'm so glad we let tech platforms eat the journalism industry. Now, I can sit and watch a live stream of Notre Dame burning while YouTube's fake news widget tells me about 9/11 for some reason.…
My reality is not yours
Snap showed some nice demo’s of what it can do with augmented reality. AR personalises reality. Again, we can look at the same object and my experience can be totally different from yours, just like a news feed.
What if AR meets all the problems Facebook and Youtube have? Would you let your kids use it?
hello @snap
"LSD had a great run tbh.… "
Generative tools
Design tools will enable more people to become a designer or take part in the act of design. It’s similar to what mobile camera’s and Instagram did to photography.
It could cause a wave of creativity when the same would happen to visual content creation (I’m not sure how to call this).
A peak into how men and machine will work together to make things.

Artificial intelligence: art’s weird and wonderful new medium
Stroke of Genius: GauGAN Turns Doodles into Stunning, Photorealistic Landscapes
Thanks
Thanks for reading and see you next month.
Wilbert