Designing for Uncertainty and System Change

The UX and Service Design job get yet more intriguing, as AI is changing some of its fundamentals.

(Post Originally written for my more tongue-in-cheek page on substack)

I feel this post is much overdue given the massive pickup in public interest towards Generative AI that we all witnessed.

I feel somehow flattered to find some of my thoughts that were published on SDN Touchpoint, earlier this year, in a new document published by IBM global design team, UX for AI. In this set of guidance the authors introduce the concept of generative variability, the notion that the outcomes of an intelligent system are neither unique, nor set in stone by their very nature of AI systems, which are probabilistic as they make decisions based on probabilities and statistical calculations.

This quality is further exasperated by the fact that a typical AI system evolves over time, becomes “smarter” the more the user´s input, and thus gets to challenge the idea of UX strategy, the way that we plan for the future experience.

Illustration made for Touchpoint magazine, Issue 13, Smart Design

In the article I also explored the impact of AI from a system change perspective particularly on large organisations, as this constitutes the bulk of my current job at IBM.

At an enterprise level, AI is implemented to improve processes and workflows that are generally unsustainable, overly-complicated and costly. But the transformations it brings about usually trickles down through all layers of the organisational cake, which seems to be something most companies are still failing to understand or cater for, as beautifully explained by Joshua Gans, on HBR´IdeasCast. There´s lot of room for the tech-savy designers to positively influence and help their clients navigate this unchartered route.

It´s for this particular reason that I foresee an interesting future for Service Designer and UX strategists, as well. The job of making AI real will require system thinking, marked foresight abilities and a creative application of the extraordinary capabilities of generative solutions.