Creative Next: AI Automation at Work

Amy Yoshitsu, a Founder and the Head of Design for Kleeen software, joins us to talk about their vision for using machine learning to automate a variety of design and engineering tasks for enterprise software.

She introduces us to the plans of her startup, Kleeen Software, which aspires to transform enterprise software by automating a variety of design and engineering tasks. Amy also talks about how Kleeen hopes to level up remote collaboration in the process, shared in part from the perspective of their own distributed team and model.

Memorable Quotes

"Imagine a world where the enhancement of the core features were part of a release all the time instead of just once a year."

"What makes software a good candidate for automation? Consistency. What makes good UX, what makes good code, or even good features? It is consistency. We were able to determine patterns and repetition in something, and that something may be a good candidate for automation if we can do that."

"When designers are creating wonderful things and working with engineers who aren't totally bogged down by the tedious tasks on their end, they can be excited about and engaged in making the product they're working on its best."

"The process is about making connections and determining patterns, and then the goal is to automate those patterns away."

"Our goal is that anyone can quickly make a high fidelity prototype of a flow or a product to clearly communicate their ideas."

"The skills that are gonna be important are critical and analytical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence. And the requirements for these will only grow, especially in the design world."

"Maybe technology could facilitate people having different experiences that are outside of the limitations of their body and identity. And maybe this will help people to understand each other and maybe themselves a little bit more."

"Enterprise spaces are more appropriate for this automation oriented approach than let's say the consumer or the medical product space."

"We start with the problem, we understand the data that we have right now around that problem, and then we back into the right algorithm for a specific situation."

"We are able to decompose UI and teach our system about these modular concepts."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Amy Yoshitsu, Co-Founder and Head of Design, Kleeen Software (AmyYoshitsu.com)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They're online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

Tatiana Mejia, Head of AI Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe and named one of 2018's top Silicon Valley women in AI, joins us to talk about the present and future of machine learning tools for digital designers.

Tatiana Mejia, Head of AI Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe and one of Silicon Valley Business Journal's 2018 top Silicon Valley women in AI, joins the show. She takes us into the world of Adobe Sensei, the company's artificial intelligence and machine learning technology that is impacting all of the software company's key applications. We discuss the design tasks that are already being automated, how business users will increasingly benefit from additional design capabilities, and how Adobe will help evolve the practice of design.

Memorable Quotes

"But even in the creation, it's going to make some of the more individual pieces easier to do. So you get the creative more in a kind of a creative director mode, rather than a production assistant."

"We're finding patterns, we're taking that computer vision and helping to enrich the information so that for the user, it just feels like magic."

"I think that AI is a necessary and important tool that will help us cope and meet the demands of, all of this content velocity, of being on 24/7, of having to stand out from the crowd."

"It's also going to lower the bar for some of these things that I don't know that a professional would think of as creative, but I would say as a business person, we may be intimidated by."

"The designer sets the creative intent. They know what they want to do. They may even create the first one. But even if you think about for production or post production, creating the variations, that's where AI is very powerful. It also helps with the ideation and being able to create all of those different versions."

"So you can do things like, for example, search for family, and then drag and drop in the color scheme you're trying to match, and you now you have all of the stock photography of families that are in the color scheme."

"So as we think about automation, the things that are easiest to leverage AI for are things that are easily defined and repetitive."

"What AI allows you to do is to figure out what you're trying to do faster."

"The biggest fear is they were worried that it would become homogenous. If everyone had access to these kinds of tools, would we start to see art look all the same?"

"We're not a broad-based AI solution like others in the market. You're not going to see an Adobe self-driving car. we're not going to be helping identify or cure cancer. But what you will see is dedicated tools that leverage all of the unique data that we have and the decades of expertise to help power creation, delivery, and optimization."

"One of the things that AI is going to do is make those beginning careers a lot more interesting."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Tatiana Mejia, Head of AI Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe (@TatianaMejia)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They're online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

AI isn't just changing the tools designers use; it is a new design material that can be harnesses to enhance the experiences we design. Josh Clark, founder and principal of design studio Big Medium, joins the show to discuss.

Josh Clark, Founder and Principal of design studio Big Medium, has spoken and published around the world on his notion that designers should view AI as their newest design material. Available to use in solutions similar to other existing materials like pixels, code, and papyrus, AI in general and machine learning in particular offer a compelling array of features and opportunities for designers to innovate and improve their designed experiences in important ways.

To understand the history and nature of design we invited one of the most important design theorists practicing today. Richard Buchanan, author of Discovering Design and a professor in the United States and China, joins the show.

Richard Buchanan, Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and also Chaired Professor of Design Theory and Practice at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai, joins Dirk and Jon to share his frameworks for design and creativity while exploring the past, present, and future of this profession that will dominate much of our upcoming Season 03.

From science to technology, and from society to policy, we are heading into a future of change, instability, and complexity. To explore these interesting times Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital Sam Arbesman joins Dirk and Jon.

Sam Arbesman, Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital, who professionally identifies as a Complexity Scientist, joins Dirk and Jon to explore the lattice of complexities facing us in the near and medium-term futures. Taking deep looks at everything from science, to engineering, to policy, to automation, Sam provides insight in a variety of directions, finally suggesting how we might best prepare for the post-scarcity Utopia we all hope will someday come.

Memorable Quotes

"When machines and AI are creating art and music, how do we think about credit? How do we think about copyright?"

"The earlier we begin having these kind of really philosophical conversations as a society, the better we're gonna be because when people are already losing their jobs for all these kinds of things, a huge swath of the population, then it's already too late. So we need to really be having these conversations right now."

"In technology we have to kind've actually move a little bit away from this kind of traditional engineering mindset and move almost towards a biological mindset and then take some of the ideas of how biologists might query complex biological systems and use them even for our own technological systems."

"I happen to be a big believer of when you're dealing with a complex system that doesn't necessarily do what you intend for it to do, you begin tinkering with it and kind of slowly but surely and iteratively changing that system to kinda get it closer to what you want. Because if you scrap the thing and start from scratch your gonna end up with another really large, complex system that you might understand even less."

"I can see okay we have the world now kind of on the edge of maybe huge amount of automation, loss of jobs. And then maybe in several hundred years we're gonna be in this kind of like wonderful post scarcity utopia. But between now and then there could be a huge amount of disruption."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Sam Arbesman, Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital (@arbesman)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They're online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

How does the rest of the world use technology? Author of The Next Billion Users Payal Arora joins Dirk and Jon to explore the use of AI and digital tech in diverse places such as India, China, Africa, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia.

Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users and Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, joins Dirk and Jon to share her research on the ways emerging technologies are used in developing nations. From teenagers in India to the Chinese state to gangsters in Brazil to Imams in Saudi Arabia, we get an inside look at the current and future impact of technology in important places around the world.

Memorable Quotes

"Look at India with a biometric identities scheme, which is the historically largest scheme in the world, which collects 1.2 billion fingerprints, iris scans, and links that with your background information, your bank information, your social media... And all this provides and reinforces your identity."

"We need to also understand that we can only celebrate automation when we have strong safety nets and strong security systems that allow us to reimagine our ways of living."

"If you want to win an election in India or any of the developing countries, you need to win the WhatsApp war."

"Some of the favelas, which are low-income settlements, were run by drug lords and gangs of all kinds who would force you to be on Facebook."

"If you look at say, Twitter, where 50% of young people are very active in Saudi Arabia, the most popular Twitter accounts are often imams themselves, because there's a lot of competition amongst these religious leaders to get the young people's attention."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Payal Arora, Author of The Next Billion Users and Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam (@3Lmantra)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They're online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

How are marketing agencies adapting to smartware and emerging technologies? Tiny Giant co-founder Kerry Harrison joins Dirk and Jon to share her perspective, including explorations in techs such as chatbots and neural networks.

Kerry Harrison, a co-founder of Bristol, U.K. marketing agency Tiny Giant, joins Dirk and Jon to talk about the work her firm is in areas such as AI, chatbots, and neural networks. A veteran marketing professional, Kerry also shares her thoughtful take on the future of agencies, how marketing and emerging technologies can synergize, and what marketers need to do in order to adapt to the changing face of future technology.

Memorable Quotes

"AIs will help dictate when to begin and end campaigns. Even the mix of content we create and also even the type of imagery we're using. And we'll also see AI begin to automate the timing and delivering of messaging. But technology such as like AI will also give us a new ability to measure as well."

"Outside of marketing of course, creative thinking skills are going to be needed to provide innovative solutions to some of the world's biggest problems."

"So whether your advertising or marketing promotes joy or whether it pulls at the heartstrings or whether it surprises people, or even if it enrages them, it just needs to make people feel something. And then I think if you don't feel anything, you don't do anything."

"Gartner predicted that 25% of customer service and support operations will use some form of chatbot technology by 2020 which was up from 2% in 2017."

"There's been a lot said recently about the death of advertising agencies, but I still feel there's a very much a place for agencies."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Kerry Harrison, Co-Founder of Tiny Giant (@copywriterkerry)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They're online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

Could the future of advertising actually make our lives better? Automat co-founder and CEO Andy Mauro joins Dirk and Jon to talk about his work in conversational marketing, an attempt to align value for customers and brands.

Andy Mauro, co-founder and CEO of Automat, joins Dirk and Jon to explore conversational marketing and the many benefits it offers for both their corporate clients and the final consumers who will engage with it. We explore the state-of-the-art in these methods and look ahead to a future where marketing and advertising may increasingly break toward value-added service for the consumer as opposed to the long tradition of disrupting and degrading our experiences.

Thanks to cloud computing and the Internet of Things, the smart home is on the rise. Yonomi CEO Kent Dickson joins Dirk and Jon to discuss the present and future of the smart home, and how it might become essential for you.

Kent Dickson, the CEO of Yonomi, the IoT company connecting the smart home, joins Dirk and Jon to explore the state of the smart home. With roots in home automation that goes back decades, the smart home of today leverages the Internet of Things and cloud computing to offer modular solutions that are affordable and easy-to-use. We come at the smart home from a variety of perspectives to better understand where it is now and is heading later, as well as how it might impact the environments where we work.

Memorable Quotes

"The home will be an API."

"Because the moment that the music starts playing at four o'clock in the morning because we assumed that that's what you wanted, yet you were in deep REM, that's, that's the day you start unplugging your smart home devices and none of us want that."

"You don't wake up one day, and say, 'You know what I wanna go get today? A smart home.' Nobody does that."

"And so one by one you get these things. They don't cost very much, you don't have to rewire your home for 'em, it's compatible with the home just as it is today, and before you know it, you do have a smart home."

"I don't feel like I have to have a computer science degree to make my stuff work together. It just works. And it does what I want it to do, when I want it to do it. And along the way, my privacy was protected."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Kent Dickson, CEO of Yonomi (@kentdickson)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They're online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is