Above: The new Shopify Design Team
Taste For Sale
I've not experienced this first hand, but my best guess is that right now inside every tech company, management are asking how they can get great designers to make all these new AI created things feel like something…anything!
You could create a product or an environment that designers want to work in! Or you could off them lots of money! And the later is certainly happening.
Let me give you three examples.
Shopify buys Molly
This week the Greenpoint based two-person design studio,
Molly announced they had been acquired but Shopify. With them, they are bringing some serious
NYC talent from Instagram and Airbnb to form a new in-house design studio.
I’m friends with these guys. They’re on the cold face of product design right now. They’re all about AI informed interfaces that adapt to who you are etc.
I like them a lot. But part of me thinks that joining Shopify was a missed opportunity. It’s early and there is lots to do. But there is no doubt at all that Shopify will deeply benefit from their product-vibe thinking.
Atlassian buys The Browser Company
The very boring, very rich, Australian dev-tools company, Attlasian
announced yesterday that they have bought the NYC based Browser Company for $600m in cash. Real cash!
There is some strategic value in owning a browser right now (will write about this next time), but Dia, their flagship product, has very few users.
It’s hard to not see this as a very big taste talent acquisition.
The Browser Company have
executed SO WELL on their go-to-market videos,
on-boarding, branding etc. for so many years. At least in my eyes, they set a new bar in product execution.
Would or will they ever build a successful browser? IDK. Maybe. But can they help Atlassian craft better feeling products and help them attract other great design talent? 1000%
Open AI buys Jony Ive
Old news by now, but same gist.
Open AI have been doing really nice job with the software, but they have to move into browsers and hardware (again, more next time on this).
Who do you call when you want to make some hardware that feels good?
Desperate for it to feel human
Why is this all happening now?
When things were about making products look good, it was fairly straight forward.
But AI is different. Everyone is pitching AI as some kind of human-like companion.
It’s in the name and it’s baked into the underlying philosophy that sits behind all this work.
And belief is that intelligence is ‘substrate agnostic’. It exists in our brains and it can (and will) exist on GPU’s given enough time and money and development effort.
Really, there is nothing uniquely human about intelligence. Or that’s the idea.
But of course, computers aren’t people and they don’t have feelings.
But this won’t stop the companies trying to make their products feel as human as they can. And designers are going to be the people to make that happen.
Alvy Ray Smith get’s it
Maybe the most hopeful, realistic, sensible, thing I’ve heard about all this was in
this brilliant interview with Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith.
You will like it because of the insane founding story or Pixar, plus there is a very nerdy discussion about what a pixel actually is (turns out I didn’t know!).
In the second half of the interview he talks about how, now matter how much compute power we throw at AI, it is never going to have taste, feel anything or making art that makes us feel something.
It was a very informed and balanced take. I enjoyed it a lot.
…
I expect that over the next 12 months, AI will continue to ‘feel’ more and more humanish. Designers and studios will get solid acquisition offers and there will be a serious race to see who can attract and secure talent that not only have a vision for how these products should feel, but also have the technical chops to make it happen.
As always, I feel a bit conflicted. I am happy that our industry and our peers are getting the recognition (and money) the deserve. But we're moving quickly and there are lots of serious questions about the AI tech that remain unanswered.
It's already been 15 months since I
asked the question of whether we should even be letting people design these products to imitate humans.
It's all happening - would love to know what you think.
Chat soon,
Nick
