You can connect with me on LinkedIn, and I welcome any feedback you have about this talk!
Christina touched on how AI will change the experiences we design for our users. Now, I wanted to flip our conversation to our own experience — as creative people, how can we start considering the place of AI in our work?
I’m a visual artist, and I think a really good place to start every conversation is with a painting.
This is a painting in Panacea Bar on Johnston Street. I walked in there last month and saw this, and I was really moved; I felt very seen by whoever made it. Because everything is fucked.
This is the city where I’m from. It’s called Porto Alegre, and it’s in Rio Grande do Sul, the most southern state of Brazil. Last month, it was hit by catastrophic flooding that displaced over half a million people. Almost the entire city I grew up in was under a brown blanket of muddy water for three weeks. My immediate family and their 7 cats are well, but many of my relatives and friends became homeless and many of the places I loved are still covered in mud and dirt.
If you're an immigrant, you probably know what it's like to be far away when disaster strikes the places and people you love. This one hit me really hard because, for the last six months, I’ve been working at my job to learn about sustainability, to help grow our sustainability team, and to help our clients, our business, and my industry be more sustainable. But then shit like this happens…
…and my sustainability efforts feel a bit too late and a bit too small. I’m sure that if you’re a designer, you know what it’s like to feel a tiny bit helpless. We often become designers to make the world a little better. But sometimes, all we’re doing is improving touchpoints in some really broken systems.
Sometimes, our work is like this tweet from Erika Hall. Design is a field full of purpose-driven practitioners, but we need to navigate the gap between what the world needs and what we can influence right now in our businesses, in our economy, and in the world in general. And that gap is painful.