Can you replace a human designer with artificial intelligence and machine learning? That's the question, more or less, which will likely plague The Grid long after the company launches its new website creation and hosting platform.
The Grid’s sales pitch is that creating a beautiful looking website geared towards your intentions shouldn't be harder than giving it content—images, videos, and text. But it also wants to be able to respond to your shifting demands. Want more people to share your content on social networks? You can indicate that's one of your goals and the site will adjust accordingly.
Unsurprisingly, this upstart has raised more than a few eyebrows, not least of whom are web designers.
It won't matter how many times its founders claim they aren’t replacing the designer, because to most people it doesn't make sense why you would try to replicate their skills through algorithms and AI, if removing the designer from the equation wasn't part of the goal.
It's a magical proposition for a website to be able to design itself with AI, but it begs the nagging question: what's the catch? The promise of any user being able to throw content at a Grid site and it intelligently understand what it is and present it in a way that's unique seems too good to be true.
And so far, the perceived catch is that this will come at the expense of the designer.
But people, designers specifically, who have a desire to create things will always do so, just try and stop them. There will always be a market for bespoke designs. That said, there are so many more people that just want a nice looking website without any hassle, not even the work of tweaking pre-built templates.
Even though the question of whether machines can replace human designers is a fascinating one to contemplate, it's just the wrong one to ask in the context of The Grid, because the idea is to take designers along for the ride, letting them occupy the role of creative director when using this nascent platform.
"Our AI is dependent on designers training it; the designers are still the masters; the AI just scales their efforts," explains founder Dan Tocchini. "As we release more details about The Grid's platform, how designers can extend and customize it by inputting their own creative best practices, the idea of replacing designers will be less of a concern."
What's it like to be the one responsible for designing a system that in turn automatically designs everyone's sites? Former Medium designerLeigh Taylor is taking a humble stance towards the scale of this project. "I'm not going to have all the answers, I'm not going to be able to generate every variation possible and even though the algorithms and AI that we're using take this a lot further, it's a framework that goes beyond a one-time solution," he says.
As easy as it looks, a lot of hard work was put into having a content backend decide what a piece of content is and how to display it. Tocchini spent years working on a new programming language based around his Grid Style Sheet. Since then, Taylor spent the last two years re-learning the fundamentals of design in order to understand how to train computers to think like he does—like a designer.
Part of the reason for asking whether The Grid and its AI will replace designers comes from consumers trying to make sense of what they’re seeing. It’s incredibly hard to get a grasp of The Grid quickly as you scroll through its own algorithmically designed website.
The inherently robotic system begs to be humanized and explained. The first question Taylor had to ask himself was if what Tocchini was attempting was even possible. Could he translate design intention into an algorithm that was always producing new and relevant results—something that satisfied a broad range of needs and desires? Once he was able to answer that, work could begin.
"There's a reason that we, as designers, design the way we do and avoid certain compositions or flows and generate preferences in our design approaches and executions," explains Taylor. "The problem is that we rarely ever have the opportunity to really ask 'why.'"
This move back to basics led Taylor to Roger Martin’s book, The Design of Business which describes a process of moving from mystery to heuristics to algorithm . "Mr. Martin explains that there's a way to apply previously learned methodologies to bring order to chaos and define usable 'algorithms' or processes," Taylor says.
All of the digging and research was to understand design even better and ultimately figure out how to simplify the process for people who don't care to bother with it—but still want an eye-pleasing experience.
For the most part, the process has been a lot of trial and error. After that, it became a work of refining those insights gained to be able to produce and implement useful algorithms.
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