Algorithm-driven design

General Prog (Archived)
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Stumbled upon this article from Smashing Magazine, Algorithm-Driven Design: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Design. They seem to give a poor review of The Grid although the purpose of the article is not to review the individual services but to give an overview of the emerging technology.

I would love if some algorithms took care of the tedious tasks associated with managing a website. If I can give it some content and maybe just upvote/downvote different layouts I would be happy. But maybe the technology is not yet ready for it to be worth the money and trouble.

What’s your take?

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Interesting! This looks sort of the inverse of AB-testing: Instead of testing small changes out on a large number of people and deciding that way what ‘is best’, a human gives very rough design ideas, and a computer decides how this will look in detail.

I think this will fall into the same trap as most other procedural content generators: Everything looks equally interesting, and thus probably bland overall (there is nothing setting your website apart from the other thousand that were made using this AI).

EDIT: I’ve now read through the article, and it seems that my concern is noted and deflected:

Surely, as in the case of The Grid, rejecting designers from the creative process leads to clichĂ©d and mediocre results (even if it improves overall quality). However, if we consider this process more like “paired design” with a computer, then we can offload many routine tasks; for example, designers could create a moodboard on Dribbble or Pinterest, then an algorithm could quickly apply these styles to mockups and propose a suitable template. Designers would become art directors to their new apprentices, computers.

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