Artificial Intelligence talks

Artificial intelligence (AI) covers software that performs tasks we associate with human intelligence: recognising images and speech, making predictions, recommending content or generating text. Much of today’s AI is machine learning, where systems learn patterns from data rather than following hand-written rules.

For UI, UX and product design, AI changes both what products can do and how designers must think about them. Interfaces increasingly show results produced by algorithms, which raises questions about trust, transparency, control and what happens when the system is wrong. Designers also need to understand the context and data an AI system depends on to design it responsibly.

The talks here span 2012 to 2019. Josh Clark’s Design in the Era of the Algorithm (push.conference, 2018) and Andreas Refsgaard’s Playful Machine Learning (UX Riga, 2019) deal directly with designing for algorithms and machine learning. Tricia Wang’s TED talk on the human insights missing from big data and Tania Douglas’s To design better tech, understand context argue for human understanding alongside technology. The collection also includes Tony Fadell’s The first secret of great design, Julie Zhuo and David Kelley on creative confidence, Jason Fried on managing for productivity and happiness, and Gustaf Alströmer on growth and referral at Airbnb. Patterns such as tailoring and good defaults are common building blocks in AI-driven interfaces.