Black Friday: Nothing For Sale Here
Are IDEO’s Layoffs the Death of Design Thinking?
I’m not sure how I missed this on November 3rd, I mast have been anticipating the big OpenAI conference on the 6th. This Fast Company article explains how IDEO, the firm who pioneered Design Thinking, has laid off over 1/3 of it’s staff. Is this just a bad economy, or has this trend run it’s course? I’ve read several article lately that critique Design Thinking. It looks great in the halls of Academia like Stanford’s famed D.School (and my classes), but it mostly produces recommendations and rarely produces actionable results.
I found that link in an article by Rei Inamoto, whose work I’ve shared before. He has another fascinating piece about the changing role of design and what creative work means when literally anyone can do it.
While Generative AI is creeping into Figma’s and Photoshop’s of the world, it’s also infiltrating Canva’s and Wix’s, the tools that non-designers use. Everyone, whether you are a designer or not, can now do something that is not just decent but pretty good. AI lowers the bar for non-designers. Does that mean that anyone can be a designer and everyone can be a creative? Yes, but it doesn’t matter.
On a similar front, I wrote a post over on Medium with my predictions about the design job market for 2024 based on my current research.
Adobe to Purchase Text-to-Video Rephrase
Well it looks like the acquisition wars have begun in the AI arms race. I don’t normally include Adobe in the roster of major players seeking world domination, but I did speculate in a previous edition of this newsletter that Adobe would probably make an Offer on Midjourney or Ideogram soon. However, with the Figma deal sill stuck in regulatory limbo, they’ve purchased Rephrase, a digital avatar company similar to HeyGen or D-id.com. Perhaps we’ll see this as a new feature in Premiere soon, or maybe a standalone application.
The Rephrase.ai team’s expertise in generative AI video and audio technology and experience-building text-to-video generator tools will extend our generative video capabilities — and enable us to deliver more value to our customers faster – all within our industry-leading creative applications.
Required Reading for UX Designers
Are you a UX designer who has accepted that you’ll probably be solving problems around AI in the near future? If you’d like to stay up to date on best practices and emerging patterns in the overlapping fields of AI and UX, you should probably follow this thread on Medium. I’ve written about the PAIR Guidebook before, (People and AI Research) a series of best practices from Google, and now the authors are updating and expanding those standards over the coming months and looking for your contributions.
The Guidebook is a living, breathing document and collaboration and testing the content is necessary to offer the most useful and timely shared advice.
To be honest, the reading is pretty dry and I’m not really excited to slog through it during my winter break. However, I am interested in being relevant as a designer and employable in the coming year, so I’m going to publicly state my goal that I’ll read the whole thing by January 1st.
6 ChatGPT Prompts that Feel illegal
I’ve been reading and practicing my ChatGPT skills everyday, like stubbornly polishing a crystal ball, hoping for a clearer vision. Last week I shared a cheat sheet from Anish Singh Walia and he’s back with a short list of really brilliant prompts. If you think your ChatGPT results are too stiff and wooden, try adding this:
“Hey ChatGPT, regarding generating writing content, two factors are crucial to be in the highest degree, “perplexity” and “burstiness.”
Perplexity measures the complexity of the text, and burstiness compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or more complex sentences alongside shorter ones.
Decoherence Free Trial: Image to Video
I’ve written about Decoherence before and I really like this tool. I received an email where there offering a free trial where you can turn an image into a video as in RunwayML and Pika Labs. So if you’re itching to get into generative video, don ‘t want to spend money and don’t want to use Discord, now is the time!
Try out Stable Video for free
Yes! For a limited time, come try out Stable Video for free, no credits or credit card required. This is an early research preview, so it is not always reliable. We will be doing our best to hold up the servers and get Stable Video in the hands of everyone.
Stability.ai Announces Text to Video
Better jump on that last offer from Decoherence, because the engine behind that, Stability.ai, hasn’t even released the tool yet. They’ve made an official announcement, and offered a download of the code base on Github, but for mere mortals like you and me, there aren’t any other options.
Free Midjourney Inspiration Roundup
I’m trying to be mindful and only post free links from Medium. Midjourney 6.0 is expected to ship before Christmas and include an improved style tuner, the ability to render text, improved image quality, and a web based interface. So if you wanted to improve your MJ skills before it makes a quantum leap, read on.
How does the latest version of Stable Diffusion (SDXL) stack up against Midjourney? Find out here
I’ve posted tutorials from Zack McTavish before and this one is also excellent if you want to see his workflow with the ‘describe, imagine all, upscale, vary, in-painting, pan, and zoom’ features. Check it out.
That’s a wrap! I hope you’re not out shopping today on this fine Black Friday, and instead are taking your advice from REI and choosing to #optoutside, that’s where I’ll be. Did anyone ask you about AI over dinner last night? Make sure you help them stay in the know by forwarding this newsletter.