Future Casting AI Tools for Creatives
How to Face an Unknown Future
This week’s newsletter is from Henry Lee. Henry is an innovative interdisciplinary designer and researcher with a passion for creating human-centered experiences through a blend of research and design intelligence.
Creatives often face an unknown future.
Sometimes because we will define it through new design styles and paradigms, and sometimes because it is going to be defined for us through new tools, user wants, or delivery vehicles. Because of this, it can be hard to know how to best prepare for the future. New tools, software, methods, and trends are all a part of those possibilities.
In recent years, AI has presented creatives with an endless supply of uncertain futures, even threatening creativity as a future endeavor altogether.
In order to prepare for this, Futures Thinking can help make sense of it all.
Futures Thinking, or Futures Studies, is a set of tools, methods, and mindsets that encourage a proactive rather than reactive stance, allowing us to partially predict and pivot accordingly rather than simply react to the futures creatives face. Whether or not you choose to incorporate AI into your work, it will inevitably affect your work, and it is best to contend with it now instead of later.
In this article, I will share a few methods and exercises you can undertake to utilize Futures methods to prepare yourself for AI. These methods are already established and used regularly in Futures Thinking circles, but I’ve tweaked them to suit present needs. Adapt them according to your specific design processes.
The Futures Cone Applied to Your Design Process
Recently, I had the opportunity to be a Visiting Fellow at Georgetown University. I examined the intersection of creativity, AI, Futures, and policy-making. One of the workshops I prepared and directed for the university employed a slightly modified version of the futures cone, seen in Figure 1. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Cone visualizes four kinds of possible futures emanating from the present. The futures are:
Possible: the future that we think ‘could happen’
Plausible: the future we think might occur based on current knowledge
Probable: the future that is rooted in the present, in current trends
Preferable: a future we would like to have happen
The user of the cone chooses a time frame, usually somewhere between 5 to 50 years, and then begins mapping out possible multiple futures in relation to a specific topic. In order to prepare for the future of creative AI I suggest completing this exercise in the context of your design process and how AI will affect it.
For example, you could choose “sketching” as your topic, if you sketch often in your creative process. Then develop a timeframe and come up with a number of future possibilities.
What will sketching look like in a preferable future in 10 years when we consider the impact of AI?
What will sketching look like in a possible dystopian future in 10 years?
How will these futures impact your process of sketching?
Print out Figure 1, or place it on a digital whiteboard, and work from there.
Backcasting a Preferable Future
A method I tend to pair with the futures cone is backcasting, which isn’t usually concerned with predicting the future, but instead determining how to arrive at a certain future scenario by determining the steps to arrive at the preferable future.
Once a set of futures scenarios has been established through the futures cone, single out the preferable future and backcast it:
If we are to attain a specific future scenario, what actions do we need to take now to arrive there?
What actions do I need to take in a month, a year, or five years?
If your future preferable scenario includes AI, how can you take steps now to incorporate it into your process?
It could be as simple as taking half an hour today to search for AI tools that fit into your creative process. Or, if your preferable future leans heavily into creative AI regulation, a step you could take today is to review current AI regulations and determine what you can do to help those regulations grow.
Conclusion
Jim Dator, a founding futurist, said, “Most people assume there is a single future ‘out there’ that can be accurately identified beforehand. That might have been a reasonable assumption a long time ago, but it is not a good bet now.” It is important that creatives plan for multiple futures and acquire a vision for how they can respond to those futures, especially concerning AI.
The futures cone and backcasting are two methods that can be used to determine these futures and help you prepare. Whether or not you choose to incorporate AI into your work, it will inevitably affect your work, and it is best to contend with it now instead of later.