The effect of AI tools in the field of design

New skills and tasks for designer working with AI tools

The letterforms have changed little over time. Without too much effort, we can read typefaces that are centuries old and use them today in republished form. But the design process of typefaces has changed fundamentally: Since the end of the 19th century, the process of type design meant only planning and sketching or drawing glyphs. Typefaces were produced by people other than the designer. Due to digitalisation, designers today can take over the entire production process of a typeface on their own. The design process is becoming more and more flexible with the possibilities to experiment, modify, refine, and correct for as long and as much as a designer wishes and through AI tools, designers could even hand over a growing part of the process to AI tools in the future. It has become difficult to name a linear, generally valid process, because the process is very individual. In this chapter, the interaction between designers and AI tools is examined and an outlook is given on the role that designers can and must take on in the future. The closely related question of whether AI tools can be creative is only briefly discussed.

Based on my own experiments and the analysis of similar projects, it can be stated that the creation of glyphs or complete fonts by AI tools is already possible. The question is not if, but how AI tools influence the type design process. As described in the previous chapters, AI tools can be applied in many areas of the type design process, such as the inspiration phase or spacing. Letters can also be composed into fonts directly from AI tools without adjustments, but I personally see my experiments with AI tools at this stage more as a source of inspiration before the phase of constructing letters. And it is not the usual passive inspiration, where you look at pictures and thoughts of others, but an active inspiration. AI tools can open up a wide space of imagination. For example, the writer K. Allado-McDowell says that AI has revealed to her hidden processes in her own thinking. AI should not be perceived as an external strange technology, but as a co-artist. The singer and artist Claire L. Evans, part of the band YACHT, goes one step further. She sees AI as an opportunity to teach the machine our values, our history, our community, and our influences, in order to then learn again from this machine how we work, what moves us, and which ambiguities are worth leaning into". AI is therefore also a tool to better understand us humans, and creatives can play a major role in this.

So far, the creative process has been dominated by visual images, ideas and thoughts. With text-to-image models, this visual part shifts and is followed by a verbalisation and writing down of the creative idea. Designing through language is a completely new approach for designers.

AI tools can be used by humans as excellent generators of images and ideas. Within minutes they generate images and create a gigantic excess. Designers can easily be attracted to this excess, so I noticed in my experiments how some AI tools captivated me with their so effortlessly generated images that I spent hours with them. But now the question is what happens to all these generated images and what they were generated for in the first place. As in my experiments, after using AI tools, designers are faced with the process of selecting certain generated images. In type design, the number of characteristics to choose from and their combinations is enormous, practically without end. Designers become curators and therefore the ordering authority, just as museums are in a higher instance. In this phase, the creativity of designers is reduced to the act of selection.

Through the increasing spread of AI tools and the democratisation associated with it, even amateurs can generate images en masse. In this excess of generated images, the digital is alien to the original, because a digital copy does not differ from the original form. The success of an idea on the internet is no longer based on its originality, but on how inventive and inspiring it is. The idea is further developed and shared by others in the digital space. The concept of creativity is changing and is less fixated on the necessarily new and original. Collective creativity is beginning to develop. The internet, unlike museums, is not forced to select and archives things equally. Hanno Rauterberg credits AI tools with liberating people from the paternalism of art elites. Creatives want to add meaning and significance to images and this distinguishes them from amateurs who uncritically press the image generation button and are happy to have generated a pretty picture. A future role of designers is to give deeper meaning to machine outputs. Evans and her bandmates, for example, set out to create something meaningful and entirely their own. Computers can only give answers, questions remain human.

According to some developers, AI tools should emancipate itself and be able to create on its own. AI tools can abstract design rules from data sets, but the creativity lies in the data. This means that AI tools rely on the performance of humans. To be truly creative, AI tools lack their own interests. The associated curiosity that drives creatives is completely absent and due to the equally lacking self-awareness, they are also unaware of their own deceptions. There is also the question of the validity of AI tools, because they can produce infinite forms but cannot complete anything, only break them off.

Another major problem that designers will have to solve in the field of AI is the alienation between humans and AI. Humans should not be turned into passive objects of rapid economic and social changes driven by digitisation. Humans need to become self-determined agents in the useful application and smart use of these wonderful technologies. The task of designers is to create transparency about the effects of AI tools. Designers are the consumers advocate and have to fight for the "humanization of technologies. They need to create a dialogue between technology and the living environment and understand what people need and creating ways to best meet their requirements. Here, designers become more like mediators who critically reflect on AI tools.

This requires designers to work together with developers, communication scientists, artists and others in interdisciplinary teams. There are very few people who have both the cognitive capacity to code at the level necessary to build and generate machine learning models and the specific kind of like aesthetic madness. We should always keep in mind that the computer is a useful tool for making images, but AI tools do not understand what they are doing. AI tools are therefore not our competitors, but collaborators.

Influenced by the thoughts of Hanno Rauterberg.