Another example would be of postal envelopes. Being able to auto-sort the posts has been one of the oldest automation challenges in the industry. But it was difficult initially because: there was no fixed layout, people scribbled addresses on it, the stamps were put wherever. This led to the design of envelopes with text boxes, at least for the postcodes. And now, they have RFID tags on them, that machines can read easily in addition to written address for the last mile postman. But would we have postmen in the future?

Let’s walk into the future a bit. The next thing to be automated is most likely our cars. Now imagine what that kind of future would that look like. Not just the car and its interiors like dashboards would change, but also the environment around of it. The street signs and the traffic signals now need to interact not just with you, but also with the sensors of your cars. How would they be designed? How should they be designed?

We would also have help from robots. There would be robots in the kitchen helping you cook on the days you don’t want to. Now for this to happen, everything in the kitchen should be designed to facilitate this. From jars of spices to cartons of milk, the labels and expiry dates on them, the knobs of the stove to the taps of the sink. They would all need to undergo a certain degree of redesign.

We ourselves are going to be enhanced, with wearable cameras and sensors making us super-humans. Our speed of access to information from everything we look at, touch or interact with is going to rapidly increase. And it is going to require advances in programming and artificial intelligence. But design can greatly assist in this endeavour.

I have been interacting with a lot of programmers, and I discovered that many of them work with the assumption that the environment cannot be changed. So they do much of the heavy lifting to train their systems to access this world, that was never designed to be accessed this way. But that assumption is incorrect. Everything that you see around you, everything, has been designed by someone with a purpose. So it can be changed. Redesigned. I would like to encourage all programmers to poke us designers to start doing it.

Some of you might be wondering if it is a little premature to start thinking of this. Well, if you look at the rapid pace at which this piece of technology is developing, the need to design for it is already here. We as designers are always looking to design for our future, and making timeless designs is what we all aspire to do.

So let’s start doing that. Next time we start a project, to create or design something, let’s ask ourselves the question “Is there a possibility that what I am designing now would be accessed by an AI in the future?”. And if the answer is yes, let’s do our best to make our designs as AI-friendly as possible.