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Understanding the past to prepare for the future
Summary
Interaction designer and educator, Erin Malone, takes a look back to the days of the emergent graphical user interface in her new book In Through the Side Door, Fifty Years of Women in Interaction Design. While discussing the new personal computer and some of the women involved in defining these new experiences, she recalls the disruption this new tool made to the world of graphic design and publishing with tools like the Macintosh, Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express and Adobe Illustrator. It was a time of existential change to an industry. Not unlike what we are experiencing today with the emergence of AI in all our tools. What lessons might be learned from the past as we look to the future? How might we future-proof ourselves in this new world? Join a lively discussion reflecting on the past to shape our future.
Key Insights
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The desktop publishing revolution took about 25 years to replace centuries of craft, but AI's impact on design roles is accelerating much faster.
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Early interaction design innovations at Xerox PARC heavily influenced Apple’s UI development, yet women’s contributions there remain largely invisible in public records.
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Women's workplace rights like credit card ownership and job protection during pregnancy were only established in the 1970s and 1980s, showing how recent gender inequalities shape design workforce demographics.
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AI is poised to automate many 'making' tasks in UI design, prototyping, icon creation, and UX writing, reducing these from people-heavy jobs to machine-driven processes.
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Design roles focused on strategy, synthesis, and planning are less likely to be replaced by AI and represent critical future-proof skills.
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The democratization of UX research risks being shortsighted if organizations dismiss the fundamental need for human insight and generative understanding.
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Bias and ethical concerns in AI systems, especially those affecting women and people of color, require ongoing attention and remediation.
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Balancing AI-assisted automation with preserving authentic human creativity and insight is a key challenge for the future of interaction design.
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Sharing messy, imperfect design processes publicly can demystify design, showing it as an accessible craft rather than a mystic art.
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Educational programs must evolve rapidly to incorporate emerging technologies like AI and multimodal design, while still grounding students in foundational principles.
Notable Quotes
"We can all do it. Making stuff is just a thing you do."
"If AI makes building trivial, the challenge shifts to figure out who’s best to decide what to make."
"Desktop publishing was the most disruptive change in an industry in the history of the US until now."
"Many of us need to catch up with how to position ourselves earlier rather than later in the coming AI landscape."
"There’s still a need for human insight to understand behavior and apply meaningful design decisions."
"Design automation will reduce armies of workers to maybe just a single operator of the machine."
"Those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it."
"AI is very biased. We have a lot of work to do to get the bias out before going further with many systems."
"Usability testing may be automated, but generative research—the deep understanding of humans—is unlikely to be replaced."
"Learning the fundamentals will be like learning the classics. You learn them once but may not use them every day."
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