... It seems like there is a lot of anxiety about the tool: how AI interprets this, how AI outputs that, the bias behind generative AI, etc. I am not arguing that these are not important and vital aspects of critical design research, but I wonder if and when we will be able to look elswhere again to focus on what we are designing and why.
"With our standards lowered, the shift inwards has also become more pronounced. Where industry peers were once chatting about what they were making and for whom, we now seem fixated solely on what we're building with." is such a good quote. I encountered this problem a lot in the last weeks especially in exchange with young researchers and students approaching design research for the first time...
https://robbowen.digital/wrote-about/looking-elsewhere/

Looking elsewhere - Robb Owen
Against the backdrop of mass layoffs, LLMs, site-builders and vibe coding what does it mean to conscientiously build for the web, and where do we go from here?
Robb Owen DigitalImportant breaking news... A duck was flashed at 52 km/h in a 30 km/h zone by a fixed radar in Könitz near the federal city of Bern. (rts.ch) 😀
It is really not there yet, but I plan to add the headlines for shared articles and a ranking of meta-keywords on the right. The idea is to let the reader browse through the different countries and discover potential patterns in how couples of countries are discussed.
A very early UI draft: experimenting with Venn diagrams to explore how countries are discussed in relation to each other across Zeit and the New York Times. Basically, I am showing how many articles are tagged using the names of both countries and how many other meta-keywords they have in common across 1 year of news coverage from the two newspapers. 🙃
#wipwednesday