The 44th Move — Deep Blue, Kasparov and the Future of (Visual) Design

In May 2015 I was invited to speak about chess and design at Digital Shoreditch in London. I had previously written a short blog post comparing chess computing with early examples of design automation back in 2014, but never published the post since the parallel between these two worlds felt far-fetched and overly simplified. There was no true anchor in reality to prove my point.

It was only after reading about the process that shaped The Grid that I brought the story back to life, focusing on the similarities between IBM’s Deep Blue and what could be AI-driven design tools of the future. The blog post eventually became an outline for my talk in London.

Watch the talk below:

What is “Advanced design”?

• A designer (or a group of designers) working alongside an artificially intelligent computer system, forming a kind of “super team” to generate the best possible output/artefact/system in a design project. The term has been adapted from Kasparov who coined the name of the chess equivalent “Advanced Chess” or “Centaur Chess”.
• In this new era, human designers will own and direct the design process; making key decisions based on intuition, intellect and by measuring options against each other. Computers will - through multiple new types of tools and features - generate options to support the designer, handle large portions of graphic production, offer real-time validation and simulate future scenarios/results.
• “Advanced design” will define a new era in the field of our craft as visual/graphic/interaction designers; enabling us to take human design capabilities further than ever, minimising the risk of error and failure.
• In this new context, humans will have to focus more on the things that make us human, which ultimately will remove us from the greasy conveyor belts of graphic production.

Notes to add:

• You are correct. Chess is fundamentally different to design. The game of chess have clearly defined rules/constraints and is played on a board of 64 black and white squares, using 32 pieces, where each piece has one or more predesignated move(s). While it’s true that there are almost endless possibilities for different types of games of chess to be played, design is something quite different in comparison. There are no “correct” answers in our profession, and our processes being made more complex by continuous ambiguity, diverse user behaviours, stakeholder politics and contextual variables.
• Having said that…
• I only believe this to be true to a certain extent, having worked with design for quite some time I know that most of our work isn’t always channeled through some kind of continuous, subconscious, intuitive *mastermind*, but very often through a *production oriented* auto-pilot style work mode that conveyor-belts out layouts, assets, icons and design specs. Most often, human brilliance is truly leveraged during the ideation of a design project, at very beginning — in the translation of *what is abstract* to *what is concrete and tangible*. We see human excellence expressed in great, innovative ideas, eye-opening research synthesis or in the definition of systematic rules. The rest is, well quite frankly, shit we have to get done to get something out on the market; moving from A to B (and/or C). You might disagree, but hey.
• Recommended reading (on this very topic): Travis Gertz “Design Machines”. You’ll find a bunch of overlapping ideas between our pieces.
• The IBM vs. Kasparov game taught us not to be naïve about the advancements in brute force (calculative) computing or artificial intelligence. Kasparov’s frustration and anger following the loss against Deep Blue almost feels cute today (I say this as a huge fan of Garry, it almost pains me to write that sentence). It’s likely that we — the designers—will underestimate the advancements in automated design in a similar manner, due to sheer disbelief or ignorance, the incapacity of imagining a future where we work in a different way all-together. It’s a pity. Instead we should embrace this change and make sure we contribute to get the tools we really need moving forward and discuss together what a designer of the future will actually do.
• The “44th move” per se represents the moment when a human being (Kasparov) realised he was facing a superior intellect (Deep Blue). I’m suggesting we’ll see a 44th Move in the world of design very soon.
• Looking forward it’s likely we’ll spend less time designing icons, less time creating grids, less time on layouts. We’ll do more user research, invest more time in conceptual thinking and spend more times identifying system rules for our solutions — as directors, thinkers and choreographers of the process — not producers.
• We’ll have to start looking at what is lost in our work today, what is missing (especially in the digital realm of design). Explore the full spectrum of human emotion to create more poetic work, more impactful work, more beautiful work.

This presentation was a natural progression of another piece I put together in 2014; On Visual Design, where some of the key inputs to this talk were introduced.

Thanks:
Giosue Vitaglione (my software engineer neighbor and friend in Monza, Italy, with a deeply rooted passion for AI and chess) and Todd Taylor of frog for support in building the story.

More:
You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts around automation and artificial intelligence in design.