William Morris

"Katia : For me this is fundamental. Everyone who calls themselves a designer should have this sense of responsibility—to know that they have an impact on our shared reality, and they need to be mindful of that. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of a ‘sustainability consultant’ or an ‘eco-designer.’ This is every designer’s responsibility. We create things that all of us live with. If you call yourself a designer, you should have that responsibility embedded in your methodology. Tiago : I completely agree. We’re in a moment where we can’t afford not to think about the impact of what we’re creating. Whether it’s environmental, social, cultural impact—these aren’t optional considerations anymore, if they ever were. They’re fundamental to good design. Tiago : There are more tools available to us designers in every trade, with the advent of new digital technologies and AI and automation. But because it’s so easy to get concepts and ideas out these days—you can input a few simple prompts and design blurbs manifest automatically—technology is easily overused, and you’re obscuring, even killing the humanity behind the process itself. We need to remember that we are humans, designing for humans. Even for industrial or corporate design to thrive, it needs to be creative. The more industrialized, the more mass-produced an object is, the more likely there will be a mass of competitors already doing the same thing. Brands are commercial entities. They need that spark of creativity to make their products different. By relying too much on automated tools—which take as their point of departure what is available to the algorithm, so by definition what has already been produced–what you end up with is a compilation of other people’s ideas. It’s false creativeness. “It’s our role as designers to be curious by nature” For design to thrive, for a product to be truly unique, to make a lasting impact–and above all for it to be functional in the real world–you still need to go analog and actually do your own research, your own exercise, your own creative processing. Otherwise you’re just adding more of the same. That’s not what I would consider improving the world through design. Katia : We’re human. We have guts, we have senses, we have feelings that AI doesn’t have and won’t have. It may have a replica of that, but it won’t have the natural sense of these things. I’m not scared of AI. I’m sometimes scared of the people behind AI, because those are the people that will have the guts, the senses, the feelings to make it a force for bad or for good. William Morris wouldn’t think that AI is a bad thing per se. He would say everything needs balance. He didn’t deny industry—he embraced it in an organic way. Morris felt that industry could be improved, so as to put it truly at the service of society. We need to be able now as designers to incorporate AI in an organic and humane way into our practice. If so, it could be a tremendous tool for improvement. I’m hopeful, but skeptical as well."