TikTok video #7446220519969410335

designers buckle up. This is two ways that the role of designer is going to evolve to fill the growing need that AI is creating. The first is fairly near-term, I believe, and that's designing agentic workflows. The second is longer term, and that's human-robot interaction as a job family that doesn't yet quite exist but will in the future. Okay, agentic workflows. What makes an agent an agent? So right now, typically when most of us are interacting with LLMs, you prompt the LLM, it responds to you, and that's it. It just replies back to you. It's called zero-shot prompting is typically how it's framed. An agent is able to, with one prompt or one set of instructions, to go off and perform a series of tasks to complete a much more complex goal, and that series of tasks is defined typically in code by a developer. Now, the best agentic workflows that the series of tasks is called the workflow. The best agentic workflows mirror the smartest things that the smartest people and teams do to accomplish whatever task at hand you want it to accomplish. Now, how do we figure out what the best thing is to do for an agentic workflow? Well, right now, the developers are defining that stuff. In the future, and I think in the near-term future, as agents become much more commonplace, we as an industry will need to begin employing much more rapidly the user research skills, the ethnographic skills of designers to go figure out what the right steps are to put into that agentic workflow. Because if you want your agent to be a super high performer, you have to get inside the heads of the highest performing people to really understand what are they thinking, what exact steps are they taking to perform at such a high level. And designers are the perfect people to go do that work. Okay, the next one, human-robot interaction. When I was in school, we called it HCI, human-computer interaction. That later transformed into user-experience design. It's all kind of the same thing. But I'm leaning on that HCI acronym and switching it over to HRI, human-robot interaction. So what do I mean by that? Robots are going to become very common, too. And we're going to need design patterns in place so that the robots know how to interact with people and the people know how to interact with robots. We don't have a lot of these patterns in place. Now, a bunch of patterns can be pulled from normal human-to-human interaction. At least that's what you might think. However, start to zoom out a little bit and consider all the differences and nuances in how people interact with each other from industry to industry, gender to gender, age group to age group, culture to culture, country to country. There is so much variability there. For example, the simple gesture of a wave might not mean the same thing in every culture. These types of patterns are going to have to be put into place. When you're working with a computer on a screen, you get a confirmation modal that pops up. Everyone knows what that is. Everyone knows what that means. Everyone knows what to do next. That's a very well-defined, very mature design pattern. We're going to need the same type of maturity in design patterns in human-to-robot interaction. We are not even remotely close to that because we don't have robots all around us yet. I think this is going to be such a fascinating field and fascinating job to have in the future. Just think about it. You're going to have all the pre-existing UX design problems because there's probably going to be screens on these robots. You'll have all that. You're going to have voice and audio design problems to solve. This is the really interesting thing. You're going to have gestural movement, tactile-based design problems to solve. You can start to imagine employing the skills of dancers or choreographers even to start to think about the human body, especially if these robots are bipedal, which it seems like a lot of them will be, to establish gestural design patterns that work cross-culturally that allow the manufacturers and the developers of these robots to be as efficient as possible so they're not having to build out different behaviors for all different cultures. We're going to have to solve these problems at a global scale. It's going to be a fascinating set of design problems to solve. What else do you think is coming in the future for designers?