Designers make choices. They should be able to provide rationales for those choices. (Although sometimes they can’t.) Being able to explain the thinking that went into a design move to yourself, your teammates and clients is part of being a professional.
Move 37. This was the move AlphaGo made which took everyone by surprise because it appeared so wrong at first.
The interesting thing is that in hindsight it appeared AlphaGo had good reasons for this move. Based on a calculation of odds, basically.
If asked at the time, would AlphaGo have been able to provide this rationale?
It’s a thing that pops up in a lot of the reading I am doing around AI. This idea of transparency. In some fields you don’t just want an AI to provide you with a decision, but also with the arguments supporting that decision. Obvious examples would include a system that helps diagnose disease. You want it to provide more than just the diagnosis. Because if it turns out to be wrong, you want to be able to say why at the time you thought it was right. This is a social, cultural and also legal requirement.
It’s interesting.
Although lives don’t depend on it, the same might apply to intelligent design tools. If I am working with a system and it is offering me design directions or solutions, I want to know why it is suggesting these things as well. Because my reason for picking one over the other depends not just on the surface level properties of the design but also the underlying reasons. It might be important because I need to be able to tell stakeholders about it.
An added side effect of this is that a designer working with such a system is be exposed to machine reasoning about design choices. This could inform their own future thinking too.
Transparent AI might help people improve themselves. A black box can’t teach you much about the craft it’s performing. Looking at outcomes can be inspirational or helpful, but the processes that lead up to them can be equally informative. If not more so.
Imagine working with an intelligent design tool and getting the equivalent of an AlphaGo move 37 moment. Hugely inspirational. Game changer.
This idea gets me much more excited than automating design tasks does.