In the future, ai tools will be so intuitive that anyone will be able to express their ideas. Visually artificial intelligence will remove the need for designers, who are just good at sketching or rendering its similar to the way photography removed the need for painters who simply depict reality. Instead, its going to come down to creating designs and concepts that solve real problems, its going to be all about what you actually have to say with your design work, artificial intelligence has incredible potential for new design. Workflows weve been using the same sketching tools, the
Same 3d, modeling softwares and the same production methods for decades, and i wanted to experiment with something new. I made this concept using ai design tools. Now the ai didnt just spit out this final design, but ai was more of a creative assistant in this process. I used a free ai site called art breeder for initial inspiration. Then i took some sketches from that inspiration and brought them into viscoms sketch to render software to use ai to actually render the sketches. I 3d modeled in
Gravity sketch and then lastly, i did computational design in houdini to add in these branch-like growth simulations. One thing i want to make clear is that im mostly focused on exploring a new process here. If i wanted to take this design further, i would definitely want to test ergonomics and usability with lots of physical prototypes, and i would want to understand the use case and the problem that im solving, but think of this as a study about future possibilities of industrial Design and artificial intelligence tools to start i went to this free site called
art breeder and art breeder is essentially a tool that uses ai to create new images by blending a whole bunch of them together i knew i was going to design a shoe so i wanted to start with that as a base image then i cross spread it with a few other images honestly the results are usually kind of weird but when you’re trying to come up with something new weird is good youll also notice that these images only vaguely resemble a shoe there are lots of weird details and the designs are way.
more complex than they need to be but that’s actually a good thing for creating new concepts i want lots of visual noise and excess details its a lot easier to start complex and go more simple rather than the other way around there are also these sliders that you can use to make adjustments theyre kind of random and dont seem to make a whole lot of sense like what does it mean for this image to be minus 0.
28 organ like what is negative or the opposite of an organ i dont know i have no idea and if you actually look at the sliders weve got a really weird mix of things in here youve got a little bit of running shoe a bit of padlock some band-aid and of course i sprinkled in a tiny bit of leaf hopper in there too for good measure sometimes you can get some happy.
accidents that you never would have thought of on your own and i think that’s really the beauty of ai the whole process is very freeing its normal to have doubt when you’re coming up with concepts especially if you’re going for something new and crazy but when you’re just moving sliders around and you end up with an ugly design it feels less like its your fault you can just blame it on the stupid ai software i think one of the most underrated metrics of a design tool is how fun it is to use its.
so much easier to be creative if you’re not feeling anxious and you’re enjoying the work your mind opens up to more possibilities and you tend to come up with better ideas as you enter this flow state the randomness that you get from art breeder is useful when you’re creating new concepts but it would be nice to get a little bit more precision when necessary so for example the.
portrait creator on artbreeder is really precise so i know its possible with enough data what i love about this type of ai is that it captures the total collective experience from thousands of images its not just one individuals point of view but it can be millions of images created by millions of people and if done correctly the technology has the potential to democratize design of course i started to wonder if everyones using the same data inputs and.
everyones using the same ai tools we may end up making the same homogenized boring products i sat down with jordan taylor the co-founder of a new ai company called vizcom and heres what he has to say about it a lot of that actually does come down to the curation of the data that it was trained you might have one really good curator whos able to talk very well with the ai its going to become this kind of like.
back and forth collaborative process and that is the skill set and i also feel like the things could be a lot more personalized like say for example you you probably have everyone probably has like an inspiration folder on their desktop of just like thousands of images they just been saving and that’s based on your personal interest and things that you found interesting and the ai can learn from that and then generate iterations of those things it becomes a lot more about the designer the creator that’s talking to it to generate the.
things that are different from what you would see on a social media platform for example it would be kind of like old school college radio where djs would pride themselves on finding the coolest and most obscure music to share with others it could be a great way to get a diverse cultural perspective as well imagine combining two completely different things from completely different cultural contexts and applying the inspiration to a pair of shoes.
of course this should be done respectfully and with a proper understanding of those cultural contexts and this is really just the beginning right now its just a bunch of sliders on art breeder but not for long you step down you sit down at your computer desk and you’re like okay lets get started like uh how about we try starting with these radiuses around this size similar to the iphone and then i want it to be this big you can say it just like that and then.
it will like generally itll actually start morphing and like talking with you and say like how about this jordan theyre like how about this john you’re like uh i kind of want it blue maybe a few more millimeters this way the tangencies theyre kind of weird i think this is a clever way to look at it because right now were already talking to our computers all the time when were entering commands or using a mouse with.
3d cad modeling but were doing it in a way that the computer understands rather than us it can be very frustrating to get the tool to do what you want it to do artificial intelligence has the potential to humanize the way that we speak with our software tools i think in like 10 years for example someone you would call you look at an industrial.
designer or an artist now and if you were to look at the same person that has the same stature as them 10 years from now i think someone like a poet might be the best artist of the future because hes able to talk to the ai in the best way possible to generate things whereas before a painter might have like someone who can physically paint might have been the best painter.
at the time which is like in todays time because of the tool so i took some of my favorite images from art breeder and simply sketched over them i started by just tracing many of the features of the design but i slowly started to diverge from the source material i slowly started to see different shapes in the art breeder images on low opacity and just kind of went with it i think.
this process really helped me to come up with ideas that i never would have thought of on my own i really like this concept right here because it basically looks like a pair of crocs but worse somehow its like im using the most cutting edge ai technology and i managed to create something worse than a croc there’s something very poetic about that.
somehow im sure some footwear designers are screaming at their monitors right now but just relax im just exploring a process this is just a study the next step was to render these sketches i wanted to try vizcom the software that jordan taylor developed for this exact use case viscom adds value and shading to your line drawings of cars for you i.
tried to render my shoe sketches and the result was okay but its really meant for rendering cars not shoes i was able to clean up the sketch that i got from viscom a little bit in photoshop and come out with a decent result its definitely a lot faster than rendering by hand some heavy hitters in the industry have been using the tool with pretty amazing results including.
scott robertson and other well-known designers the ai is still young and needs more data and training before it can understand the subtle nuances like light source and value but its getting closer and better every day the rest of my sketches were all created using the old-fashioned way its a lot slower but i do look forward to the future that jordan envisions even though technical skills of industrial design like sketching and rendering will be less important over the next 10 years or so the quality of ideas and your knowledge.
of industrial design principles will be critically important for the foreseeable future luckily for you im offering an online course about industrial design principles visual storytelling and design language you can future proof your job against our ai overlords and im giving a special price to people on a first come first serve basis so check the link in the description and sign up to be the first to know about when this course launches back to the video one thing i want to make clear is that the benefits of sketching go far beyond being able to just communicate an idea.
visually it teaches you how to visualize and create three-dimensional forms in your minds eye i think that sketching will always have a place in communicating ideas quickly after i sketched the ideas out i picked a couple of the concepts that i thought were the most interesting and 3d modeled them in gravity sketch gravity sketch is this incredibly intuitive vr application that basically lets you draw in 3d it is one of the best tools that ive ever used when it comes to translating whats in my mind to 3d really quickly this tool.
doesnt really use ai but i think it will inevitably make its way into future industrial design workflows remember how i was saying that a tool being fun to use is really underrated earlier on in the video well gravity sketch is just a lot of fun to use it allows you to get into that flow state really quickly because its so intuitive after i finished in gravity sketch it came down to importing my favorite concepts into houdini where i created.
these branch simulations basically i wrote a script that causes a line to go from one part of the design to another along the contours of the mesh surface then i added some other nodes to change the way that the lines connect this piece is mostly just there to look cool but i feel like with some materials research and building some physical prototypes this branch-like structure could yield some really really interesting functional benefits and weight saving opportunities to the shoe maybe if i have a little bit of time between client work ill develop this.
concept a little bit further into a more fleshed out proper design process companies like autodesk are starting to explore this kind of computational design work and are integrating artificial intelligence into it they call it topology optimization where they try to make a part that is as strong as possible while using as little material as possible and it tends to create these very hyper-organic lattice structures but with ai it could end up going way beyond just creating structurally efficient lattices i mean that’s cool.
and everything but it can be pushed a lot further you could give artificial intelligence all kinds of constraints like flex weight and just hundreds of other constraints depending on the use case overall i found this process to be really fun and pretty useful i think that all of these programs have the potential to be integrated into future workflows of industrial design design has always been about what you have to say and the quality of your solutions but that will be the case in the future.
more than ever designers will no longer be able to rely on hot sketches or great visual communication skills ai will be doing all that for us overall i think that the future for ai and design is bright i can see a future where artificial intelligence is your creative assistant that’s pretty powerful the more people are able to express their creativity the richer and more interesting our world will be thanks for watching everyone and if you enjoyed.
this video please subscribe ill leave this really beautiful analogy by rafiq anadal that id like to paraphrase for you that i think really represents how we should deal with artificial intelligence in the future all new technology is potentially dangerous when humans first learned to create fire for example they used it to keep warm and to cook but they also used it to destroy if fire is left unsupervised or.
uncontrolled it could lead to massive destruction and its the same thing with ai artificial intelligence is a tool that we can lose control of or that we can harness to bring humanity forward the downsides of artificial intelligence are definitely at the forefront of our minds but that doesnt mean we should forget about the potential benefits thanks for listening guys.
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