When John Maeda’s book, How To Speak Machine: Computational Thinking For The Rest Of Us, was published in November 2019, ChatGPT was on version 2 and most of us hadn’t heard of it yet. It wasn’t until ChatGPT3 appeared in the summer of 2020 that it started to seep into the public consciousness. But as a designer and technologist with a long history of working with AI, Maeda had already glimpsed the future, both conceptually and practically.
John Maeda is an interesting hybrid of engineer and designer. After studying computer science at MIT, he completed a PhD in design at Tsukuba University’s Institute of Art and Design. With an early interest in combining computers and art, some of his works, like the Morisawa 10 Poster, are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. He returned to MIT as a professor in the Media Lab, working to foster cross-competencies between designers and engineers. Then he served as president of the Rhode Island School of Design (where my brother studied architecture). After RISD, he made a shift into the commercial world, taking influential positions at Automattic (makers of Wordpress), Kleiner Perkins (a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley), and Publicis Sapient (a global consulting company). Today, he has what might be one of the most important design jobs in the world: Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft.
Now that Pandora’s box has been opened and the explosion of humanistic AI has grabbed everyone’s attention, we’ll probably see an entire genre of books and other writings on the coming AI-pocalypse. But Maeda’s message in How To Speak Machine is one of hope. By outlining the foundational concepts of how machines work, he encourages us to be a little less afraid of them. In each chapter, he patiently and eloquently describes the qualities of these new digital machines and how they’re different from the old mechanical ones. They run infinite loops, they get incomprehensibly large, they effortlessly track everything, they reinforce what they’re fed, and they do all this without ever being fully completed. As you come to better understand these qualities, you realize the exciting potential and concerning risk of AI.
When I first read this book back in 2020, I realized the implications and was already recommending it to every designer I was either managing or mentoring. But it wasn’t until I started seeing those animated GIFs showing up on Twitter of AI generating working code and aesthetic graphics based on simple text prompts that it started to sink in how impactful this was going to be and how fast it was going to happen. That was already a few years ago, but it feels like the rate of acceleration is still increasing. Certainly anyone working in technology but not actually writing code should read this book — especially designers. It will help you better understand not only the language of machines, but the culture of our fellow human software engineers. As we enter this new phase of technology, engineers, machines, and the rest of us will have to communicate and work together to write a happy ending to this chapter of human history.
Before we dive into speaking machine with John Maeda, I want to give a shout-out to Mr. Tom Froese of the Thoughts on Illustration podcast. We connected through Substack over our Paul Rand episodes, and he was gracious enough to recommend Designer Sketches, resulting in a number of new subscribers and followers. So thank you, Mr. Tom Froese! I hope I can return the favor somehow, and I hope I can meet the expectations of my new audience members.
Outline
What, or who, are these machines? (4:01)
The coming zombie apocalypse (10:17)
Timely design and the myth of incompleteness (14:04)
Response to Surviving the AI Illustration Apocalypse (18:09)
Design makes everything palpable (24:33)
Links
How To Speak Machine by John Maeda (Goodreads)
Design in Tech Report 2024 by John Maeda (designintech.report)
Thoughts on Illustration podcast (Tom Froese)
Consider it done by Brian Bailed (world.hey.com)
What AI Can and Cannot Do for UX by Jakob Nielsen (Substack)
Learning how to speak machine with John Maeda