Big Medium

"A machine that talks must be a machine that thinks." It's an assumption and a fallacy that's been with us for the better part of a century, since Alan Turing proposed his imitation game in 1950. The concept was simple: If a machine can fool you into thinking it's human in conversation, it can be considered intelligent. The idea has colored ideas and assumptions about what machine intelligence looks like ever since, from science fiction to Silicon Valley. Two problems fall out of this: 1) Chat is a powerful AI cliche with a gravitational force that pulls designers toward chat solutions before they consider alternatives; and 2) As users, we're often lulled into thinking that smooth-talking interfaces are smarter than they are. Don't get me wrong, chat can be just the right interface/interaction for certain contexts. But designers reach for it too often and often with unintended consequences for the user experience. Sentient Design is about more than prompts and text boxes. And just because a system speaks well doesn't mean it thinks well. (We make the same mistake with people!) A recent essay by Jorge Arango and a WSJ profile of Yann LeCun were good reminders of our faulty assumptions about machines that can talk—and how we might adjust our thinking to better meet reality. There are so many other truly meaningful uses for generative AI models that better fit their actual skills than to treat them as smart, reasoning answer machines (which they are not). "We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart—but that’s not true,” says Yann. “You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.” I linked up and shared some thoughts about those pieces here.... "Exploring the AI Solution Space" by Jorge https://lnkd.in/eYn9xgek "This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat" about Yann https://lnkd.in/eGAGxA9n

On-demand UI! Salesforce is piloting "generative canvas," a radically adaptive interface for CRM users. It's a dynamically generated dashboard that uses AI to assemble the right content and UI elements based on your specific context or request. More about generative canvas: https://lnkd.in/eNixdjMY I love to see big players doing this. At Big Medium, we're helping our clients build new interaction paradigms on similar foundations. It's exciting stuff! Sentient Design is about creating AI-mediated experiences that are aware of context/intent so that they can adapt in real time to specific needs. Veronika and I call these radically adaptive interfaces, and it's so much more than chat. Salesforce offers a great example. For Salesforce, generative canvas is an intelligent interface that animates traditional UI in new and effective ways. It's a great first-stage example of a radically adaptive interface—one that's well suited to the sturdy reliability of enterprise software. It uses all of the same familiar data sources as a traditional Salesforce experience might, but it assembles and presents that data on the fly. Instead of relying on static templates built through a painstaking manual process, generative canvas is conceived and compiled in real time. That presentation is tailored to context: it pulls data from the user’s calendar to give suggested prompts and relevant information tailored to their needs. Every new prompt or new context gives you a new layout. So the benefits are: 1) Highly tailored content and presentation to deliver better content faster (better experience), and 2) Elimination / reduction of manual configuration processes (efficiency). Never fear: you're not turning your dashboard into a hallucinating robot fever dream. The UI stays on the rails by selecting from a collection of vetted components from the Salesforce design system: tables, charts, trends, etc. The concept promises a stable set of data sources and design patterns—remixed into an experience that matches your needs in the moment. This is a terrific example of what happens when you sprinkle machine intelligence onto a familiar traditional UI. It starts to dance and move. And this is just the beginning. Adding AI to the UX/UI layer lets you generate *experiences*, not just artifacts (images, text, etc.). It yields entirely new UX and interaction paradigms. That's a big focus of our product work with clients these days and of course in the Sentient Design book. Stay tuned, lots more to come. More about Sentient Design: https://lnkd.in/ebgQerVG

It took all of three minutes for Google’s NotebookLM to generate this lively 12-minute podcast-style conversation about Sentient Design: https://lnkd.in/eg7JHDvr Bonkers, right? The script and the voices—along with the very human pauses, ums, and mm-hmms—all of it is machine-generated. It even nails the emotional tenor of the podcast format. I gave NotebookLM several chapters of the Sentient Design book manuscript, pushed a button, and this just popped out. The speed, quality, and believability of this podcast are remarkable, but they’re not even the most interesting thing about it. Here’s the bit that gets me excited: by transforming data from one format into another, you give the content new life, enabling a new use case and context. It’s a whole new experience for content that was previously frozen into a different shape. Instead of 100 pages of PDFs that require your eyes and a few hours of time and attention, you’ve got a casual, relatable conversation that you can listen to on the go to get the gist in just a few minutes. It’s a new format, new mindset, new context, new user persona… and a new level of accessibility. In Sentient Design, Veronika and I call this the “data whisperer” experience pattern. The data whisperer shifts content or data from one format to another. One super-pragmatic example is extracting structured data from a mess of unstructured content: turn blobs of text into JSON or XML so that they can be shared among systems. Machine intelligence is great at doing things like this—translation among formats. But this can go so much farther than file types. With generative AI, the generation tends to get all the attention. That’s a missed opportunity. Instead of simply generating artifacts, machine intelligence can help us generate _new experiences and interaction paradigms_. The “Pinocchio” design pattern is an example. That’s an interaction pattern that turns low-fidelity content into high-fidelity—turning the puppet into a real boy. Use the Pinocchio pattern to flesh an outline into text, zap a sketch into an artwork, or transform a wireframe into working code. Pinocchio is a data whisperer that elevates an idea into something functional. When you bake the design whisperer and Pinocchio patterns into the fabric of an application, its interface becomes a radically adaptive surface—a free-form canvas that adapts to your behavior and context. I wrote up a thing that shows tons of examples of design whisperers and Pinocchios: https://lnkd.in/eT3MMdUx With the data whisperer and Pinocchios patterns, you can create not only new content artifacts but new experience paradigms. You can liberate content and interaction from frozen formats, unlock new use cases, and help people move from rough idea to refined concept. All of this feels like magic right now, but it will soon become commonplace. Lean into it, friends, lots to explore!

Now available! Very excited to roll this out! Big Medium is offering private workshops to teach product and design teams to imagine, design, and deliver AI-powered features and products. It’s all backed by our Sentient Design methodology, a practical framework for designing intelligent interfaces that are radically adaptive to user needs and intent. We’ve been doing these workshops at conferences and with our clients, and now we want to share them with you. These workshops are available to organizations that would like to offer a private workshop for their design or product teams. These are measured, pragmatic workshops with zero hype. They provide real-world AI literacy and practical techniques that your team can use today—like right now—to imagine surprising new experiences or to improve existing products. You and your team will discover entirely new interaction paradigms, along with new challenges and responsibilities, too. This demands fresh perspective, technique, and process; Sentient Design provides the framework for delivering this new kind of experience. Here's the scoop: Our Sentient Design workshops are immersive, hands-on experiences that guide participants through the whole life cycle of designing machine-intelligent experiences. Here’s what we’ll do together: - Prototype a new product: identify, imagine, and design AI-powered features that solve real problems (not just “because AI”). - Learn to use machine-generated content and interaction as design material in your everyday work. - Use machine intelligence to deliver entirely new interactions or simply elevate traditional interfaces. - Explore radically adaptive interfaces that are conceived in real-time based on user context and intent. - Get your hands dirty working with models directly to learn their strengths and quirks. - Discover emerging UX patterns and postures that go way beyond “slap a chatbot on it.” - Learn the art of defensive design. AI can be... unpredictable (and weird, wrong, and biased, too). Make its weirdness an asset instead of a liability. - Adopt techniques to set user expectations and guide behavior to match the system’s ability. - Use responsible practices that build trust and transparency. The workshops mix it up with lecture (the fun kind), discussion, and hands-on exercises. You and your team will put theory into practice through collaborative design sessions, prototyping exercises, and critical analysis of real-world AI applications. By the end of the workshop, your team will have a solid foundation in Sentient Design principles and a toolkit of techniques and design patterns to apply in your work. Get more details, check out pricing, and reserve a workshop here: https://lnkd.in/edKzK3XZ

Ooh! Two tickets have opened up for this week's Symmetry 2024 design system summit in Pittsburgh. It's shaping up to be an inspired little event, thanks to the efforts of organizer Ben Callahan. It's about 50-ish people so it will be collaborative, intimate, conversational—investigating hard truths/challenges and exciting possibilities around design systems. I'm one of the facilitators for the day, along with these smart smarties: Nathan Curtis, Rebecca Garza-Bortman, Jeremy Keith, 🖤 Jina A., Adekunle Oduye, and Ben Callahan. Gonna be a pretty good way to spend a Friday, you should totally come. (And then join in the fun at Frostapalooza the next day, on Saturday.) https://lnkd.in/e9_CY2Hx