Leapfrogging into AI-Driven Futures with Mindfulness
Summary
In this article I draw upon my personal musings derived from several decades of professional experience. I emphasize the pivotal role of mindfulness in shaping technology-enabled products and services amidst the post-Covid-19 and post-Generative AI era. Reflecting on my journey, I assert that mindfulness is indispensable for avoiding costly mistakes, fostering sustainable progress, and ensuring ethical design. Rooted in social constructs and participatory methodologies, my approach advocates for embracing diverse perspectives and engaging in dialogue. By navigating complexity with mindfulness, I aim to deepen understanding and prioritize societal well-being in an ever-evolving landscape.
Cultivating Mindfulness: A Necessity for Designing the Future
In this article, I introduce the idea of mindfulness as a critical skill in the development of technology-enabled products and services in the post-Covid-19 and post-Generative AI future. My belief in mindfulness is rooted in three decades of experience helping global companies humanize technologies and democratize the design process.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines mindfulness as “the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.” I also propose that mindfulness can be cultivated in an individual, a team, an organization, a community, and an entire value chain.
The Significance of Mindfulness
As a design researcher, I have traveled around the world to study people, cultures, and change. I’ve learned that disruptive innovations often challenge established behaviors, habits, and mental models. It’s crucial for innovators to expand our awareness of the nature of disruption our innovations cause and cultivate foresight about the potential impact of design decisions on individuals, communities, and society.
Cultivating mindfulness is critical from the perspective of avoiding costly mistakes in the long term.
Design as a Social Construct: Unveiling the Connection with Mindfulness
Before I explain the connection between mindfulness and design, I will first explain the importance of design as a social construct.
I studied industrial design at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad in India between 1975 and 1981. After practicing the design of everyday consumer products for 13 years in India, I moved to the US to study Product Semantics at the Department of Design at The Ohio State University.
The term ‘product semantics’ was coined by Prof. Reinhart Butter (OSU) and Prof. Klaus Krippendorff (Annenberg School of Communication) in the 1970s. They explained that an object’s physical form has the potential to convey three things: something about the object itself, something about the larger context of its use, and something about the user who interacts with it.
Krippendorff and Butter challenged the famous tenet ‘Form Follows Function,’ coined by architect Louis Sullivan, with their own proposition: ‘Form Follows Meaning.’ This proposition helped me understand the scope of design practice beyond the minimalist tradition of creating an elegantly optimal form to serve a functional need. The mental shift I had to make from understanding design as a form-giving exercise to one of meaning-making seemed very intriguing to me at that time. The roots of my eventual discovery of mindfulness can be traced back to the curiosity I developed in the early ’90s for the meaning-making process.
Some of the books that shaped my interest in the psychological, social, and cultural context for design were: ‘Design for the Real World’ by Victor Papanek (a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this resource and energy-deficient world), ‘The Psychology of Everyday Things’ by Don Norman (design as a medium for communication and delight), ‘The Meaning of Things’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a commentary on materialism, American culture, and the self), ‘Material World: A Global Family Portrait’ by Peter Menzel (a comparison of images of material possessions of families around the world as a provocation for discussion about issues of population, environment, social justice, and consumption), and ‘Metaphors We Live By’ by George Lakoff (as a fundamental mechanism of mind, metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience).
During my internship at the leading design firm Fitch, I had the opportunity to understand the application of theories, methods, and tools from social sciences to the professional practice of design research. I started visiting homes for contextual research. Observing people in their natural environments led me to make another shift in my beliefs about design. My preconceived notions about the elegance and minimalistic characteristics of design, which I had learned in design school, were challenged. I was surprised by how the homes looked: unappealing and cluttered. I wondered what makes a cluttered home meaningful, safe, and comfortable for people. It dawned on me that what makes a home a home is not its beauty or organization. I came across a book, ‘House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home’ by Clare Cooper Marcus (a theory of what our relationship to our home says about ourselves: about the more subtle bonds of feeling we experience with dwellings past and present), which helped me gain clarity about living forms and spaces as social constructs.
From that point onwards, my designerly curiosity was directed towards understanding how design can be informed by understanding people’s meaning-making process. My past training in design through the synthesis of needs and aspirations and definition of jobs to be done did not feel adequate anymore in envisioning the conceptual space for design as a social construct.
Over the next three decades, I traveled extensively around the world, observed, and listened to thousands of people from different cultures and living conditions. I recognized that the artifacts we design are only props for people to design meaningful spaces and experiences for themselves.
The Evolution of Design Practice: Towards Social Imagination
Immersion in the life of diverse profiles of people and cultures has helped me arrive at a renewed understanding of the design process as follows:
Design doesn’t just start or end with designers; the seeds of design are incubating in social imagination. (Sociological imagination is a term used in the field of sociology to describe a framework for understanding social reality that places personal experiences within a broader social and historical context.) This imagination is continually shaped by lived experiences, legacies, memories, and narratives in media. The opportunity for designers lies in gaining access to and participating in shaping social imagination. This is achieved through participant observation and by engaging with people in a dialogue that encourages them to express their implicit understanding of their realities and imaginations. Designers must continue to engage with people, modifying and refining design even after the artifact is delivered to the market and people start living with it. A good design process, therefore, is a symbiotic and iterative collaboration between designers and people driven by a commitment to continuously improving our awareness of the context in which the design must live, perform, and evolve.
A big takeaway at this point was- it is not possible to design a meaningful product, service, or experience from the isolation of design studios or corporate R&Ds. Meaningful and sustainable design can emerge from interactions and dialogue with the people who have a stake in drawing meaning and value from it.
Co-Creation: Shaping Value through Collaboration
Another book that helped shift my focus from designing an artifact, image, or a service to creating value was “The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers” by C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy (a new way of thinking about including stakeholders in a collaborative approach to creating economic value). The concept of co-creation gave me a language with which I could communicate with multiple stakeholders in my clients’ value chain. Each of them belongs to a different profession and therefore communicates using their own language of thinking that draws concepts and terms from their knowledge domain. Each of them also understands value from a different perspective. For example, value could mean growth, profit, productivity, trust, social capital, delight, well-being, safety, comfort, etc. The point is that a co-creation process takes into account what value each stakeholder expects. Their expectations and needs are shaped by their unique context. Making efforts to become aware of that context will lead us to becoming more mindful.
Roots of Mindfulness: Lessons from Design Education
As I look back at the past 49 years since I enrolled as a design student, the humanist-idealistic zeitgeist of the mid-seventies at the National Institute of Design (NID) had prepared me to discover Mindfulness much later in my career. Amongst the lasting influences from that time was the Bauhaus’ mission to salvage our living environment from the ugliness brought about by the Industrial Revolution and machine-made products.
Another important influence from that time was NID’s emphasis on the students closely observing various communities and traditional crafts of India. One of the key influences that shaped our understanding of social and cultural context for design was The Jawaja project undertaken by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad in partnership with the National Institute of Design (NID). This collaboration between India’s top design school and management school was run in Jawaja, a drought-prone district of Rajasthan. As the team understood the area better, they found that the area had a 300-year tradition of leather-craft. The communities there were also skilled at weaving. And so they decided to build on these skills to develop sustainable livelihoods for the communities there.
Several design education programs worldwide have similarly recognized the need for contextual inquiry as a necessary phase of the design education curriculum. Over the past two decades, a very large community of AnthroDesigners (anthropologists informing Design or Designers taking time to study people) has been growing. This community succeeded in making the study of people, cultures, and forces of change an integral part of the product management process.
Advent of Artificial Intelligence and the Need for Mindfulness
Since the time generative AI emerged on the scene as a disruptive technology with immense potential, I have been paying attention to expert opinions about its future impact.
I am particularly interested in understanding if and how creators of Generative AI tools are helping everyday people understand its capacities, benefits, and limitations. While the industry is in a rush to integrate generative AI into its products, it is not doing enough to educate people with one voice. Instead, people are hearing contradictory voices such as:
“AI will be the most transformative technology since electricity.” (Eric Schmidt)
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate.” (Stephen Hawking)
“Generative AI is one of the most exciting and powerful technologies of our time, but it also presents new challenges and risks that we need to address thoughtfully and proactively” (Sam Altman)
“The danger of generative AI is that it lacks the ability to understand misinformation, leading to incorrectly equating correlation with causation based on incomplete/inaccurate data or lack of contextual awareness required to understand sensitive dependencies between data sets. The unintended consequence is technology shaping societal views on politics, culture, and science.” (Tom Golway)
The ambiguity about generative AI is leading to conflicting narratives in the media, which evoke mixed feelings in people such as fear, hesitation, curiosity, and hope. I am convinced that the development of Generative AI tools cannot be left to the technological genius of software engineers and profit and growth-minded business leaders. Creators of AI tools must form a practice of observing people in their environments, understanding their realities, and including them as co-creators.
Instead of following due diligence at the front end of the development process, I see the tech industry guided by a “Move fast and break things” mindset.
Product managers, under pressure to ship products, are increasingly relying on pre-existing knowledge, hunches, and internal hypotheses to conceptualize new products, features, and interactions. The problem with fast-tracking development and relying on easily accessible prior knowledge is that in this approach there is an implied assumption that people’s future relationship with Generative AI will be guided by the old mental schema.
In cognitive psychology, a schema is defined as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information.
Let us compare the ambiguity surrounding generative AI with the schemata of some of the established digital products: Google (search), Wikipedia (encyclopedia), Spotify (music streaming), Amazon (shopping), Travelocity (travel booking), and WebMD (information about health). There is a clear understanding in social imagination of why people need these products/services, how they work, and how to use them. People also know the boundaries of what each of these services can do.
A clear schema of generative AI has not formed in social imagination, and people are confused by conflicting conversations in the public domain about sentient AI.
The confusion is confounded when people hear doomsday scenarios presented to them. For example, Jeremie Harris, CEO, and co-founder of Gladstone AI said in a recent interview on CNN “AI is already an economically transformative technology. It could allow us to cure diseases, make scientific discoveries, and overcome challenges we once thought were insurmountable. And a growing body of evidence — including empirical research and analysis published in the world’s top AI conferences — suggests that above a certain threshold of capability, AIs could potentially become uncontrollable.”
A new report commissioned by the US State Department warns that ”AI could pose an extinction-level threat to humans.”
To gain clarity on two fundamental questions, How will people know whether generative AI is a friend or a foe? and What would being human mean in the post-AI future? I decided to organize a series of community dialogues between industry representatives and everyday people. From these dialogues, I have learned that AI has immense potential to exponentially improve people’s decision-making and creative capacities if the creators of generative AI products develop a practice of regularly engaging in dialogue with the beneficiaries of their creations. Such a dialogue will help them develop consciousness, knowledge, and an instinct for a mindful approach to creating value.
Consciousness and Mindfulness: Interwoven Paths to Understanding
To understand the connection between Consciousness and Mindfulness, let us take an example of how the mother of a newborn child develops mindfulness.
A mother’s bond with her baby evokes empathy; empathy triggers caring; caring drives her to vicariously experience her child’s thoughts, emotions, and sensations; She is always present and paying attention to her child’s surroundings, which makes her alert and ready to respond to any emergencies. A mother’s mindfulness helps her think ahead and be creative in managing her child’s development.
A mother’s instinct is a perfect example of the connection between consciousness and mindfulness.
I remember a class we took during the foundation year in design at the NID. It was called Environmental Exposure. We had to select a location in the city that had a distinct character and served a specific social purpose. We were required to regularly visit this location for an entire five-month-long semester and create a panoramic representation of the life in that environment over 24-hours at this location through sketching. We had to select multiple views of the site that gave a full understanding of all the activities taking place at that location and also at each location, we had to draw a 360-degree view through sketches.
I selected the Jagannath Temple for my project. I purposely chose to study the life in a temple because I am an atheist. I wanted to subject myself to unbiased immersion in an environment that I do not ordinarily visit.
Over the next several months, I drew sketches of all the locations and activities in the temple premises without trying to interpret, comment, or judge what I saw. The only purpose was to observe and sketch every detail of the environment.
Looking back 49 years later, I can recall all of my sensory impressions of the time- the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and the tactile sensations resurface in my awareness. Every time I recall those sensations I can freshly interpret what I experienced then. The immersion in the Jagannath temple is stored at various levels in my consciousness. It is obvious that the environmental exposure class taught me how to avoid my biases from interfering with my consciousness. This was possibly the first lesson that prepared me to be mindful.
Expanding Consciousness: A Gateway to Deeper Understanding
In this section, I discuss the relationship between consciousness and knowing.
Scientists and philosophers have attempted different definitions of consciousness. I created a definition that I find actionable as a designer. I call consciousness a potential for knowing. We gain and expand consciousness by being curious about, exploring, and experiencing our inner and outer worlds. I interpret Knowing as tapping into consciousness.
26 years ago I attended a series of workshops on the theme “Alternate ways of knowing.” Among the facilitators of these workshops were a researcher of Native American rituals and another master of Japanese Martial art Aikido. My key takeaway from attending these workshops was that there are multiple ways of growing our consciousness and tapping into it. Using different practices of directing our attention and sensing our environment can make different levels of consciousness accessible to us. These reflections made it clear to me that relying only on the information available on the internet for all of our needs will limit our ability to know all that there is to know. The Internet has information humans have consciousness. The Generative AI knows knowns; humans are curious about the unknown unknowns.
We rely a lot today on Google search for information. Google’ mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” will make the known accessible but I doubt if googling alone, or relying on Generative AI can help expand our consciousness. That leads me to another framework popularly known as Johari’s window
1. Known Knowns: Things we know we know
In this realm falls all the knowledge we have already acquired and are aware that we know it. Often, organizations work with pre-existing knowledge (known knowns) to design for the future. In the case of developing products and features for Generative AI, this approach is the riskiest, and the knowledge is less useful to envision strategies for the future.
2. Known Unknowns: Things we know we don’t know
Known Unknowns are unanswered questions about the things we know we don’t know and need to know in order to plan for the future. Organizations would take a safe approach to research when they work with knowledge gaps they are aware of. While this may be a good start to begin with what we don’t know, it does not guarantee being prepared for a future that may not be a logical progression of what we know.
3. Unknown Knowns: Things we don’t know that others know
Often design researchers will go into the field with a hypothesis and yet be open to being confronted with surprising insights that challenge their preconceived beliefs.
4. Unknown Unknowns: Things we don’t know we don’t know
This area is probably the most ambiguous and analogous to the current state of awareness about the future of Generative AI. These unknown unknowns represent real risks to any endeavor, since we don’t know what we don’t know, we are less likely to be prepared for it.
Continuously expanding our consciousness and deepening our knowledge throughout the development process will help us become more making design decisions mindful of consequences.
Harnessing Mindfulness for Ethical Design
So, you may wonder, ‘What is the use of mindfulness or observing without judgment in a design process?
While designers have to make decisions based on available information, we cannot ignore or dismiss the information that may become relevant in the future. Awareness without judgment allows us to create a reservoir of knowledge that stores a fuller picture of the present in our consciousness for future use.
Being mindful will allow us to envision future scenarios and multiple pathways to getting to that future with reduced bias. Unfortunately, the tech industry today is cutting back on investments in cultivating consciousness and moonshot projects. They are instead investing in product development based on old knowledge, assumptions, and hypotheses.
Generative AI is going to lead to a radical transformation of how we will think, decide, and create in the future. Leapfrogging safely into that future will require collective curiosity, imagination, and energy. Mindfulness will open up possibilities for better-informed ethical decisions. It will help designers of Generative AI-enabled experiences to become conscious of the diversity of values, traditions, and rituals from unfamiliar cultures and to be inclusive in our approach to design.
In conclusion, my journey through design, mindfulness, and technological advancement has been deeply reflective, shaped by decades of experience and insight. As we navigate this ever-changing landscape, let us remember the transformative power of mindfulness in shaping ethical innovation and sustainable progress.
In our pursuit of creating meaningful products and services, let us embrace diversity, engage in dialogue, and cultivate awareness. By doing so, we can forge a path towards a future where technology serves as a force for empowerment, empathy, and positive change.
Together, let us commit to harnessing the power of mindfulness in our work, ensuring that our creations not only meet the needs of today but also honor the aspirations of tomorrow.
