The Future of Design in Business
We’re inundated with a constant stream of content and opinion pieces on where the world of business is moving alongside the rapidly progressive technological advancements. We’re being challenged to question the creators of this technology as we become increasingly aware of the personal breaches of privacy on our lives, as well as the creeping “doom and gloom” perspective, that maybe this very technology we’ve created will take over our need to feel wanted in the workplace.
With this new ominous mindset looming, we’re seeing a value shift in the workforce, where we’ve begun to emphasize the importance of the creators, artists, makers, doers and pay less attention to the freshly stamped degrees that are being pumped out of academic institutions every second and every hour of the day. The “starving artist” may become fully nourished very quickly with this narrative shift, and as business owners, I believe it wise to prepare for this great feast.
There are varying opinions that lie scattered on the spectrum of how people feel about artificial intelligence. I’ve personally splashed back and forth over waves of uncertainty on the topic, yet landed comfortably riding atop the white cap, to see where we as humans can thrive in a world “controlled” by artificial intelligence. Let’s not forget, that these advancements of AI are being created by humans themselves, and seemingly, they have reached a point of no return, “well, we’ve gone this far, there’s no reversing what we’ve done, so how do we make it work?”
While some advancements of AI are incredibly powerful:
And others, seem to be another tool to fuel the lazy human’s agenda (or at least they haven’t yet realized how it could be used to solve a real problem somewhere in the world). I give you the bluetooth toaster:
So, which school of thought have I parked my bike? The Academy of creative flexibility.
It’s naive, I believe, to think that most traditional, existing jobs today cannot one day be replaced by robots and machines. I’ve written about this before in “Start with Who”, to highlight that job replacement fear is not a new concept, and dated back to when the computer was introduced and John F. Kennedy peppered his political speeches with fear on the topic (even further back, when the sewing machine was invented and the Queen feared for her sewing gal pals’ jobs).
What’s the solution then?
Taking a hammer to the traditional definition of “work”.
Which arguably, many new young faces have already begun to do across the world, where we are witnessing the rise of the “freelancer economy”.
Here’s where the artist becomes imperative to this demolition project. The artist has been swinging that hammer for centuries and taking hard hits at the traditional definition of “work”. Of course, only a portion of these artists are actually holding hammers, but the metaphorical hammer is ubiquitous in the art community, found in the underlying ability to see things differently, question the environments around them, and stand out by using art and design that challenges traditional thinking. It’s no longer enough to traditionally market yourself, let alone build your business riding on the coattails of social media in an ever-cluttered online marketplace. It will be the artist’s responsibility to take business and creatively frame it in such a way that can help not only the business stay relevant but the people within. We will need the artists’ way of thinking to be applied to every aspect of our business, in fact, in order to see where the potential for our people lies when their jobs are replaced. This is exciting. By applying this artistic frame to our models, we see the extension of where our human abilities can be stretched, when technology removes some of our usual tasks and we are given new creative freedoms.
I will conclude with challenging you to step outside and observe the physical world around you, question things that you might not normally care to question. Simply put, follow curiosities and realize that this is the potential and creative freedom that we may just be given when the technology workforce becomes entirely automated.