Yesterday we launched Penny - an interactive AI to that predicts wealth in two US cities. Penny was born out of a desire to show a wider audience the amazing things that are capable when you apply AI to satellite imagery, and how it can be accelerated with GBDX. The result is a playful yet powerful example of where we see the future of our industry going. Its been my hope since the beginning that Penny would inspire curiosity and inspire others to come build amazing products. But for me, the process was also one of discovering the power of working with multidisciplinary teams. Teams that include not just scientists and engineers, but also designers and artists.
Penny started out with a simple question - "What if a machine could create the perfect city, what would that look like from space." From that question, holed up in a room at the beautiful studios of Stamen Design, we iterated on how to bring it to life. While I spend my days thinking about customer requirements as a product manager, the team at Stamen spends their time thinking about creating new platforms for understanding. In this case I was both the customer and the product manager, bringing challenging requirements around telling stories with interactivity while also appealing to users who would want to build their own tools.
One of those requirements was to encourage the user to wrestle with the concept of using AI to infer something about the human condition from space. The idea that the patterns in which humans organize themselves on the Earth's surface are strongly correlated with human well-being. As a geographer I think of this in terms of Place; the collection of physical, human, and cultural characteristics at a given location. By creating an AI tool to predict wealth just by looking at an image of a location, we bring into question the human and cultural aspects of Place. From here it becomes a short jump to questions of what it means to be human in a world where we increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to make decisions. Are these machines reflections of our subjectivity, or simply adept pattern-recognizers whose objectivity calls our own into question? These are tough questions. They have the capacity to hit a deep thread of human emotion. And that brings me back to that room at the Stamen studio.
I have always seen art as a means to stir emotion. I view artists and designers as alchemists, turning their mediums into reflections of what it means to be human.
As we face a future where we are creating technology to mimic human decisions, it is imperative that we consider how art and design can guide us. Not only to create meaningful work, but also to navigate how we relate to it, and how we present it.
As product designers that means drawing in our creative colleagues during the requirement and ideation phases.
That means creating features in tandem with those around you who have an eye for humanism. It means thinking about UX from the lens of whether it draws out the emotions we seek, not simply thinking about whether a button placement makes sense.
I encourage you to play with Penny and share it with your friends and colleagues. Let me know what you find - and more importantly, let me know how it makes you feel.
