The improbable future of tech design
AI is generating many new ways of pushing creativity beyond the borders, and there are some designers who are leaving a visible footprint, sharing images that are the result of an uncommon prompt, generating “improbable” things.
Mario Alessiani, founder and creative director of the Italian namesake design studio, specializes in product, lighting, and furniture design. His clients include companies such as Umbra, Fabbian, and Axolight. Mario also teaches at the University of Camerino, IED Rome and Sichuan Normal University in China. His work has been exhibited at prestigious events like the ADI Design Museum in Milan, Eindhoven Design Week, and Milan Design Week, earning him awards like the IF Design Award and Archiproducts Design Award.
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One of the most interesting initiatives I found on the (good) use of AI is the ‘An Improbable Future‘ project. Before delving deeper into their reality, allow me to say that the fact that we can now generate images so easily is shaking the world with deep fakes and terrible standardized images; it is becoming like the cheap version of stock pictures.
This is normal if you understand how artificial intelligence works, because if you are not educated in prompts – the input text to generate a new image – you may end up creating a boring artificial image that doesn’t evoke any emotion.
On the designer’s side, this new tool has caused some damage. The abstract idea that Artificial Intelligence can create great output is alarming creatives and giving confidence to those who are not creative, thinking that they can finally save money by asking a screen to do the dirty job for them. This is a mistaken notion because AI is not an output machine, but rather a tool in the process. Like CAD and digital sketching made life easier for many, AI is doing the same; it simply changes the field of application from technical assistance to creative assistance.
The smartest AI users in the design world all have a common voice when it comes to saying that prompts are very useful during the design process, but not to replace it. Generating images with the right inputs can really help generate new ideas, test or play with them. For example, you can have an early render just from a sketch, saving the time taken by early 3D modeling, so you can already envision how it can be developed.
A similar opinion is held by the owner of one of the most interesting Instagram pages about AI: An Improbable Future. To give a brief idea of what this page is about, it’s a gallery of white-background tech products born from a judicious mix of information, and the output consists of things we are familiar with but have never seen before. I had the pleasure of having an insightful conversation with the mysterious designer behind this page.
I say “mysterious” because it is impossible to find information online, but I reached out to them and met an incredible professional with a very clear idea of what design is nowadays and where it is going, especially with the help of AI. I was immediately drawn to that Instagram page because it is so well organized and resonates with strings in my heart from my millennial background, filled with Nintendos and Sony Walkmans.
To better understand why those images are there, it is necessary to know a few things about the professional behind them. The story begins when the output images from the early adopters of Midjourney were chaotic. With the initial trials, things felt cold but they showed potential; we’re talking about something like two years ago, but it was worth a deeper analysis. So, after some experimentation and technological implementations, things started taking shape, and the outcomes began to be quite satisfying, a far cry from the first avocado chair we saw online in that period.
As an industrial designer, the focus shifted to the crucial point: intention. How can this be useful in the design field? The most intriguing aspect of this is that you can generate images no one has ever seen before. Instead of a Pinterest board, you have a plethora of inspiration that is exclusively yours and stems from the inputs you give to AI. Especially for tech products, since the touch screen came in, we’ve seen a sort of standardization within product designs, making it quite hard to find something more hardware-related if it doesn’t come from the past.
By doing so, you can have inspirational and unexpected images that can be very useful in an initial and inspirational phase, encountering combinations never seen before that can spark an unedited personal reflection. What we see in An Improbable Future is part of this inspirational process, organized in a coherent board full of new retro images that straddle the thin line between what we know and what we have never seen.
This approach, dedicated to the volume of things that are no longer just the frame of a black mirror, can truly evoke the essence of the great era of industrial design. The possibility that we have with these new AI tools easily helps to imagine that there is indeed the possibility to raise the bar of the creativity field by exploring the improbable to make new things happen.
