“Intelligence is the ability to adapt” tells us the English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking who died in 2018. But adapt to what and for what ideal? In this world of information and knowledge available to all, of generative artificial intelligence, is it a question of embodying the “Educated Human” of the post-modern era and thinking that knowledge is a guarantee of an ability to adapt or should we deconstruct everything, refute all the teachings of the past as so many certainties that must be broken down, barriers preventing any universal inclusion in a wokist madness that would consist in denouncing all differences because they are inherently discriminatory and a factor of injustice. Will knowledge ruin us or save us? What role for design and design schools in this world when it comes to finding meaning at a time when science and social and economic progress are no longer enough to set the course. What will the Educated Human (EH) be tomorrow? What kind of leader will he/she be, what kind of design for this human?“
What contexts and adapt to what? or how Artificial Intelligence disrupts all our benchmarks and forces us to deism
If augmented robots and artificial intelligence replace Humans in terms of work, technology but also creativity, imagination, transmission and production of knowledge or even a certain form of sensitivity, mimetic at first, then self-generated tomorrow, then it is appropriate for the latter to ask the question that underlies all wisdom, all philosophy, all ethics: “what does it mean to be human?”. Beyond an extraordinary physical, work and production capacity, impeccable precision and quality of gesture, almost infinite knowledge and beyond any human genius, the augmented robot will tomorrow be able to do, act, think, reflect, learn and probably love. The robot augmented with Artificial Intelligence will turn everything upside down and force us to re-examine our relationship to work, society, knowledge, happiness, progress, values and, worse, love.
It will probably take time for the concepts of Eros and Agape to be distinguished in the humanoid robot, but it will learn very quickly from Plato and certainly surpass him. Already, some humans are in love with their humanized and “gendered” robot as they are with a woman or a man. Their robot-partner reacts, adapts and shows love in return. They plan to spend their life with him/her, recreating a specious gender distinction, certainly, at the very moment when some humans choose to be non-binary, neither man nor woman. The robot has the gender intended for it, which is absurd to describe a machine but practical and not very questionable, unless a few “wokists” start organizing meetings reserved for robot-women or robot-men on the pretext of some discrimination. It would be funny if the robot saved us from the negation of genders if this concept is important, the “non-gendered” or “non-binary” people present in society today rightly posing the interesting question of a new gender to be constructed but also of the absence of gender.
“What is it to be human?” If the robot has already stolen our love, let’s hope that it will not come looking for us, competing with us, surpassing us in the realm of our spirituality and metaphysics. A reversal of History and religious fatalism, the “human being” could distinguish itself by its capacity to conceive of God, to create him ceaselessly and ceaselessly. It is a deist or will have to become one in order to preserve its humanity. Its salvation will probably come from this formidable aptitude, this imperative need to think that something surpasses us, something above us, a great invisible architect who relegates empiricism to an accessory concept. The essence of being could be God. With all due respect to all atheists and secularists, lost for lost, “A Dieu vat” is the new credo in the age of robots, including for all the most convinced humanists. For Prometheus, it is about bringing back the fire he stole and giving meaning to God again. Should we see in the Olympic flame of the Paris 2024 Games that flies towards the sky the formidable symbol of this resurrection of God in this world that escapes us?
Is it about believing in God in the sense of religion? Obviously not, everyone does what they want and is free in our democrati societies to believe or not believe, it is not about talking about the God of religions, and/or evoking the legitimacy of this or that God, it is about evoking the imperative need to refer to something that is beyond us to sublimate what we no longer control here below. Science has lulled us into the illusion that we could understand everything, the tremendous economic leap since the industrial revolutions in that we could possess everything, Artificial Intelligence in that we could know everything, we must build new values, a new “ism”. The robot invites us to deism to preserve our humanity.
What about knowledge and the “Educated Human” as a post-modern ideal? Pico della Mirandola is a myth for what is all-knowing and an example for what is the hybridization of knowledge and its “union with God”. The “Educated Human” as a counterpart to the “obscure ignoramus” will be the one who beyond all knowledge and all wealth will know how to give meaning to all things, a meaning that surpasses him. The “Educated Human” as an ideal is no longer the one who masters knowledge but the one who is able to understand it and to master its principles for a design that surpasses him/her and that must be built.
“God is dead,” says Nietzsche, but let us be careful that it is not a robot that returns on the wings of the eagle. It is no longer the resurrection of Jesus that makes God, but rather the imperative necessity that we replace the latter on his Olympian seat. Robot or deist, such is our destiny.
Design, from Applied Arts to Strategy
For a long time, design was considered a discipline of Applied Arts, particularly in France, where its roots are born among the companions, the builders of cathedrals, the craftsmen of wood, glass, metal, fabric, printing… And its flagship establishments are still managed by the Ministry of Culture, little intended to work with the economic world except in the framework of patronage. It is a question of privileging creation, beauty and harmony, which is noble and to be saluted. It remains to be defined what is beautiful and what is not. Beauty only has the meaning that we want to give it. Is a Kartell chair beautiful? Perhaps, but does the question have any meaning? What is certain is that it has seduced and that it has produced a lot of added value for the company that designed, manufactured and sold it.
“The most beautiful curve of a product is the sales curve” Raymond Loewy tells us. The Kartell chair has generated wealth that has been redistributed. Its design is not unrelated to this. However, what does it mean to be beautiful in the case of a chair? All the speeches of its creator on “plastic and transparency that make design” are vanity. “Kartell is a family philosophy or a philosophical family. These are the people who alone and before everyone else had the intuition that only plastic could increase quality and give interesting and honest products for the maximum number of people.” Philippe Stark tells us on the Kartell website. It’s hard to be more abstruse. But, what a genius!
This cultural preeminence of creation over economics does not favor the recognition of an industrial design and a more systemic design, more strategic to resolve global problems that arise in any modern society. Common sense continues to think that design is limited to a few sectors of activity, beautiful tables, beautiful chairs, beautiful lamps… The emergence of design as a discipline of innovation, strategic and economic struggles to convince. As for design, a discipline of systemic management, the chapter remains to be written, even if the recent shift in “Social Innovation” testifies to this inclination.
Recently, all the design players were invited by French President Emmanuel Macron to the Élysée Palace. Finally, design was going to be recognized by politicians who never talk about it. Not a word about design in France when it comes to public or industrial policy. No program mentions it, ever. Finally, design honored by the President, what a great deal!
In fact, it was to celebrate the new table of the Council of Ministers, a piece of the Mobilier National, admirable certainly but which relegated design to the rank of accessory while companies have never needed to innovate so much. Is this contempt? No, simply a total lack of awareness of the scope of design maintained by many players who have an interest in cultivating their marginality in order to exist. Were designers offended by this? No, proving that they have not taken the measure of this discipline that has become strategic for companies and society in general. At the very place, the Council of Ministers room, where the future of a country, a nation and the world is at stake given the weight of France, the designers are present: They have made the table. Some have rejoiced, flattered like Marshals of the Empire, others more responsible and far from being desperate by this lack of recognition have returned to work.
Ambivalence, this quasi-antagonism between creative and innovative design, design of creation or strategic design, is firmly anchored in the culture of higher education and in many countries. Many schools and universities continue to develop this mythology of the designer-artist as a symbol of excellence, develop a certain form of marginality of the cursed artist who cannot be definitively understood since he/she owes his/her identity and salvation to creation which by essence is deviance and transgression. To create is to free oneself from reality and from others. It is also and in many establishments to distinguish oneself from society and in particular from companies. These embody capitalism whose greed we claim to denounce, as if the relationship to the economy and the production of wealth were a damnation. We need not look any further for the reasons why design is so little considered and has always been perceived as non-essential, or even a coquetry as we sometimes hear from incompetent professors.
From drawing to design, the new management schools
However, the nature of design, its perception and the work of a designer could profoundly change with the arrival of AI. Let us rejoice in this possible and profound change because we have no choice but to accompany this advent. In its technical aspects, design will disappear. Historically and culturally, drawing is the original object of the designer and the pencil his weapon. It is through the pencil that he defends his unique know-how, that he/she shows his power. This weapon is formidable. For the anthropologist, the mastery of the hand, the gesture, the pencil, the line determine the distinction, the limits and the supremacy of human over the animal. It is the hand and the pencil that make the difference and affirm the power and action that follows the word, the power to create, to produce images that transcend differences and cultures, that advocate for a certain form of universality. Drawing is the beginning of action, the first step of humanist values that count: acting, doing, building, undertaking. It represents at the same time as it sets the objective and the result to come.
Say “bottle” in Bantu and no one will understand, draw a bottle and everyone knows what we are talking about. It is the drawing that best represents the world we want to live in and allows us to understand it. It is an object of universality without completely freeing the culture of the person who is its author, it is universal and nevertheless distinctive because it borrows from a culture. Drawing requires a mastery like no other, it is learned technically. What about creation? Creation is that sublime moment when the hand and its pencil perfectly mastered go beyond intention. Then the hand becomes spirit, something that surpasses the technician who becomes an artist. The designer knows this sublime moment.
If drawing is a technique, then it will escape humans, replaced by more efficient AI, it is inevitable. Intelligent robots could appropriate all technical professions. What is the point of asking students to draw, make models, and work with their hands from now on if AI produces them with more relevance? What about all the design professions, if drawing is no longer the distinction that made it a discipline like no other? It must come out of its original artistic and artisanal shell. It must embody something more powerful, more decisive. Knowing how to draw is no longer enough. It is about moving from drawing to design: What meaning must be given to things, beyond their immediate function, in an almost spiritual, deist sense, since it is no longer about rejoicing in a beautiful drawing, the fruit of any computer, but about serving something that surpasses it.
It takes hours and hours of learning to make a graphic designer, an interior designer, a designer whatever their discipline and specialty. When we realized that the new tools of digital communication were not a matter of IT but rather of use, higher education design establishments have considerably changed their creation programs to introduce coding courses in order to master the design of mobile applications or other tools related to technological revolutions. Artificial intelligence makes all of this definitively obsolete. No need to code anymore, Chat-GPT delivers the lines you need without having to design them anymore. It takes 15 seconds to produce as many logos as possible thanks to AI tools available almost free of charge on the Internet. As much time to define the contours of a car prototype or an interior design. All professions are called into question, all learning processes are to be redefined. But it is above all the purpose of an establishment that must be rethought. Design schools are intended to become the new management schools. For the designer, the only way out is to move from doing to managing. It is the machine that now does for him, that knows and that will even produce knowledge, improve itself autonomously. And it is the whole teaching that must be reviewed. It is appropriate to free oneself from learning technical subjects to master, order, direct the production processes and be able to judge the result. The question, the problem, the system… become essential, where until recently we judged a drawing, a model, an image, an ability to do. For example, it becomes essential to know how to write a good “prompt”, a computer request for Chat GPT to have the most relevant result possible and to be able to judge it. Know-how-to-do replaces know-how. If one day, a professor tells you that he no longer teaches but spends his time testing the best training and AI sites available on the Internet, and to comment on them with his students, and guide them in their mastery, take an interest in him, he/she has a great future.
The designer, this ethical leader, this craftsman of meaning for a design that has become strategic
It is time to move on to the era of design. The designer no longer designs an object, a car, a toy, a washing machine… He/she uses AI to do it for him/her. So what is his role? To make it happen and give meaning. He/she manages mobility, education through play or pleasure, he/she has a health or social representation responsibility… For the company, he/she guides strategic development thinking focused on uses and progress rather than on needs and technological performance. He/she is the conductor of the company. He/she becomes its leader. He/she must become this manager of meaning at the service of society, companies, institutions, cities, countries, more broadly the world in which he/she wishes to live. The designer must imagine and build it, no longer draws its outlines but defines all the uses and the socio-economic systems that go with it.
“Companies of the 19th and 20th centuries asked themselves the question of what was technically possible and economically profitable, companies of the 21st must ask themselves the question of what makes sense” says Elsbeth Gerner Nielsen, former rector of the DesignSkolen in Kolding – Denmark. If the questions of technology and the production of wealth remain essential, it is now appropriate to question the meaning of technological progress and the generation of economic wealth as vectors of progress and to include them in more global, more systemic issues. For the company, modestly but certainly, it is necessary to have more inclusive, more universal objectives with the almost sublime and spiritual ambition of doing something that goes beyond its object and to rediscover through the making-do this sensation of the pencil that escapes and goes beyond the intention.
CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility – is significant of this tendency to aim for virtue. But, alas, this is just hypocrisy. It would be to claim that the company designs, manufactures and sells out of duty, which is a lie. It always does it out of interest. The company aims to produce added value and wealth. This redistributed wealth which means that in France and elsewhere, and despite the difficulties, universities, hospitals, roads, public services are free. It is this production of wealth that allows redistribution. This is what the generation of added value is for. The concept of mission-driven companies is just as ridiculous, that they are content to fulfill the mission of producing wealth. That is their only virtue. True generosity is the one we do not talk about. The time is right for design because many companies are forced to think differently about their future, to innovate to adapt to the radical changes in socio-economic contexts. Many industrial and commercial structures will have to review their model and question their development. It is absurd that students and some professors are wary of companies under the pretext of capitalism. The designer has the duty to help them change to serve more noble purposes than technological and/or economic performance. Companies will have to change because, in particular, public policies will become demanding in terms of respect for the economy of resources, carbon footprint emissions and other health and ecological obligations. Consumers will be too. This change will take place around the notion of meaning. The question “What is your job?” will be replaced by another “What meaning do you give to your company?”. And it will be necessary to give pledges of course, but with the sole objective, always and always, of generating added value. This need for meaning that arises for any company to order its development requires cross-functional, hybrid skills, between technology, management sciences and humanities. This hybridization of disciplines is the very foundation of the designer’s profession: Representing to gain support, bringing together, pooling knowledge and skills, sharing with the aim of building and generating progress. The designer’s vocation is to be the conductor of these changes.
The “Educated Human” – The Educated Human (EH) – as an alternative to AI
The “Educated Human” as defined by Peter Drucker, is this universal and ethical leader capable of pooling disciplines and cultures in the service of wealth production, “capable of federating local, particular, distinctive traditions in a commitment to common values, in a common concept of excellence and in the respect of all for each”, the opposite of current trends which would like each ethnic group, each race, each minority to be educated differently and to benefit from specific rights. This “Educated Human”, whose advent is accelerating as a response to the development of AI, responsible for getting things done when doing escapes him, has this responsibility to give meaning. He is the leader of tomorrow. It is not that of the humanist philosophers whose teaching is based on the tradition of wisdom and beauty of the past and whose reflection is today more occupied with combating the “woke” ideas that call them into question. These, unlike the humanists, want to destroy the references of the past, from which they rightly draw all the symbols of the oppression of which they consider themselves victims. They deconstruct. Deconstructivist philosophy, by dint of opposing everything rather than building, ends its revolution by returning to the starting point. The pigs in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, after hating humans as the absolute enemy, end up feasting at the same table. The “Educated Human” is inspired by the past, to make the present and the future. The leaders of the knowledge society, the one that goes beyond the era of capitalism and opposes the society of knowledge, act on the present and have the responsibility to build the future. They build. They imagine, represent, build and give meaning. They have the ambition of Pico della Mirandola, to bring together all disciplines to make the “union with God”, something that goes beyond them. This is the ambition that designers and design schools must have, to hybridize knowledge and skills for a systemic and strategic reflection on the challenges of progress.
Occupying these positions of “ethical leader” in companies is the ambition that designers must nurture, and for their students, design education institutions and their teachers who must understand that their role has changed. Transmitting knowledge is no longer their responsibility, they are outdated. Their role is elsewhere, to give students the “crazy ambition, that of the cathedral builder, to make a spire so high that it will reach the sky”. Otherwise, they disappear. And it is the robots that will return on the wings of the eagle.
Christian Guellerin
- Peter F. Drucker and Frances Hesselbein, Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today’s Leaders, Wiley, 2015.
- Georges Orwell, Animal farm, a fairy story – Londres 1945
- Pink Floyd, Animals – 1977 Pic de la Mirandole,
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Pic_de_la_Mirandole
- “God is dead”, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieu_est_mort_(Friedrich_Nietzsche). All the genius of Nietzsche, Declaring that God is dead is to make him/her exist. The mystery remains. (Editor’s note)
Thank you for the effort expended in research, writing and publishing.