Like a lot of people, there are times when I worry about what other people will think of the work that I do. I worry about whether my participants will find my workshops utterly transformative, I worry that those few brave souls who read my blog will like what I write and think I’m both very clever and exceptionally funny, and I worry about whether the partners and clients I work with will think my work is dazzling and brilliant. Simple aspirations.

In the discussion around generative AI a lot of the debate has focused around this same binary - truth and falsehood. Many are worried that the ability of generative AI tools to produce images, audio, video, and text may be used, or is already being used, to produce lies. Fake images, fake video, fake audio. That these powerful AI systems are a means of obscuring the truth or outright lying. We need, then, to clarify just what a lie might be, and why there is something more worrying hiding in plain sight.

Quite early on in Dune, we’re given this encapsulation of the power dynamics at play in the universe. There’s the Imperial Household, headed by the Padishah Emperor, the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the major political body, and the Spacing Guild, the entity that controls all interstellar travel. The Emperor’s power is grounded in status and the strength of his feared Sardaukar army, the Landsraad holds power through the political structures it wields and the treaties and conventions it defends, and the Spacing Guild maintains its power by exerting a monopoly on space travel. Three simple pillars of power.

If bad actors decide to release an AI-generated or computer-manipulated video or images of Joe Biden doing something that would sink his chances at a second presidential term then the world’s attention will fall upon them and every pixel will be minutely dissected by the best in the field. If images circulate purporting to show microbes in the soil of Mars, they will be examined forensically by the world’s experts. In both cases, I suspect the truth will out. But what happens when it’s not the headline-grabbing images that are manipulated, invented, or created by AI? We’re taking in hundreds, even thousands of images a day - the vast majority of which we’re giving no second thought to. It’s here that we’re most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.

I’ve long advocated that, whatever field or discipline you work in, you should always be looking at what is happening elsewhere. That might be in neighbouring industries or practices, but it might also be in fields that are very distant from your own. As a learning experience designer, I’m keenly interested in the work of designers in a whole range of industries - game design, architecture, graphic design and, of course, product design. I’m looking at what’s happening in these different disciplines to see if there is anything exciting, interesting, or innovative that I might find use for in my work as a designer. What, then, might a learning experience designer, take from Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Design?

There is a scene about 90 minutes into Wim Wenders' enchanting film Perfect Days where our protagonist, Hirayama, is cycling over a bridge in Tokyo with his niece Niko. As the two of them cycle back and forth, weaving across the bridge in the sunset they call out, back and forth to each other, “Next time is next time, and now is now.” In a film that says very little explicitly, this seems like a pretty clear mission statement.

There is a big funnel.

A huge, great, hungry thing.

Being endlessly shovelled into one end of this funnel are lots of “things.” Books, films, music, TV shows, articles, websites, podcasts, activities, memories, jokes, conversations, meals, experiences, art.

At the other end of the funnel, there is a tiny, little trickle.

The trickle is orders of magnitude smaller than the great gouts of stuff being hosed into the big end of the funnel. That trickle is the work that we produce - the things we write, the lessons we teach, the art we make. Whatever it might be. That’s not to say that everything we do in our daily lives is the output of this great funnel, it is the distilled creative product that we make.

In his interview with Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki on the release of his masterpiece Spirited Away, Robert Ebert asked Miyazaki about the moments of rest in his films. Moments that showed what Ebert called “gratuitous motion” - a character sighing, sitting for a moment, looking to the distance. Moments that didn’t serve to advance the plot, or provide the audience with action, or provide comedy or drama in themselves.

Notebooks have been a huge part of my personal and working life for as long as I can remember. Almost everything I do, whether it’s writing, designing, planning, or thinking, begins on paper in some way or another. I find the immediacy and freedom of pencil and paper to be something that’s completely intertwined with the way that I think and see things.