On the 19th of November, I was invited to Bloomberg’s ‘A New Paradigm: Redefine Design with AI’. The event was hosted by Bloomberg for their team but invites were graciously extended to other industry professionals by special registration. I want to thank Bloomberg for giving me permission to attend and write about my experience at this special event!
The event was held in the company's EMEA Headquarters in London and started with a lovely reception for people to network. Bloomberg did such a great job welcoming everyone with drinks and nibbles.
We were then invited to the main event with a warm welcome from Ash Brown (Global Head of UX) and followed by Christopher John (Engineering Team Lead & Co-Lead, Bloomberg Black in Technology), who talked about the importance of DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) and gave us a glimpse of the inclusive culture at Bloomberg.
This was followed by the main speaker, Grey Aper, who spoke about AI and gave us a live demo.
Greg is a globally recognized pioneer in the integration of artificial intelligence technologies for design; his work focuses on fusing human-centred methodologies with advanced AI tools to create a new paradigm of design techniques.
AI is short for Artificial Intelligence, it’s intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. In recent years it has seen popularity in usage and adoption by different industries - most notably in media and education.
When people think about AI they immediately think of Siri, Alexa or more recently ChatGPT.
The common consensus is that AI helps us with things like finding out what the weather is or setting alarms; other people think the extreme: that it’ll take over the world, steal all our jobs and leave humans absolutely defenceless!
For designers, many of them think that AI will reduce jobs and lessen their impact.
Grey’s talk was quite the opposite and gave us hope for a better tomorrow. He started off with debunking popular myths and stated very candidly that it’s up to designers to forge a collaborative relationship with AI; similar to a K-9 unit, where each possess strength of its own but work harmoniously with one another.
In his own words: “using Ai for innovation is not about getting answers. It's about asking the right questions. If you're not a domain expert, you can't guide it properly and you have no experience and intuition to spot the weaknesses and the opportunities buried in the data.”
Greg provided an insightful exploration into the future of designing using AI. He then did a live demo creating a dumpling company using ChatGPT, MidJourney, Figma and Runway tools.
This was just a small glimpse into the array of tools and potential of AI as more time would've been needed to fully realise the untouched potential of AI-driven design
After the talk, Bloomberg invited us all to a closing reception with drinks, nibbles and lively conversation. Throughout the event, Bloomberg shared their work openly and alongside the AI talk, I was very excited about the future of work. Thank you Bloomberg for the event, making me feel welcome; it was very generous and I am grateful!
Learn more about Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/company/
