Paolo Ciuccarelli: "Artificial Intelligence is a very effective partner for testing your ideas, it helps you refine them, choose a direction"

I have always been concerned with data visualisation; data is the material to which I give form, I give a meaning so that it is helpful for a particular user and for certain goals in a certain context. 

Unlike other designers who design with wood, metal and plastic, in my case the material is the data. Initially, my work and research focused on visualising data - recently, I also started to think, inversely, about how data could be useful to design. In 2010, I set up the DensityDesign research lab at Milan Polytechnic University to explore these themes, and in 2019 I took them to Northeastern University in Boston, where I founded the Center for Design, and amplified them. For the last few years we have been working on a research project that focuses on the role of data and algorithms in enhancing designers’ skills,  especially in the area of product design. We started by analysing data from the web and, specifically, reviews by users who purchase and use the products, to see if latent needs can be traced using this data. We also worked on similar sources in the project for the Salone.

I have two answers to this question. 

The first answer, which might sound obvious but is true, is that you can't not care. To qualify as such, this is part of the general interest that any designer should have in technology. What’s new is that we are dealing with a particularly sophisticated and dynamic technology, but design is still the same business: it was once iron forged in a certain way that was made available for that context, and those uses through dedicated interfaces, now it’s Artificial Intelligence, and our task as designers remains to devise interfaces that will make it available to different users for different purposes. The second, more pragmatic point is that it can be a useful tool for designers on two levels.

On one hand, it expands the range of options you can conceive of as a designer in ways that are not humanly possible. An expansion of possibilities in number, quality and depth when you have to translate a concept into a solution. Of course, the sheer range of options that you have to know how to navigate becomes a problem, but this is perhaps a further skill to be developed, rather as we did with the Internet.

The second utility is that AI is a very expert and effective sparring partner for testing ideas, helping to refine them, and deciding which of the many directions to take. Simply put, it is a kind of evolved assistant that broadens your horizons and helps you explore it, if a constructive dialogue can be established, which presupposes the development of specific skills and competencies.

No, I think it’s profoundly different. However, my judgement is somewhat skewed because I have never believed in the Metaverse, even though I have given lectures in the past to try to explain what use it might have, Second Life for example.  

There are undoubtedly professional fields, such as medicine or installation maintenance, in which the Metaverse and VR are helpful but I still don’t see an extensive use of these technologies, because the experience is too mediated, by devices that are still invasive and the needs to which it can respond are still not clear: an issue that AI  might be able to help us address. 

As for AI, on the other hand, I am more convinced that although not all algorithms and models will be equally useful, there will not be a bubble phenomenon.

When Publicis Group asked me to take part in developing the project for the Salone, I immediately saw an exciting and courageous operation. I saw in the Salone a reality with ambitions and a desire to try out something new. Something new, not in the rhetorical sense, but something new that went some way towards listening, a dimension that I’ve seen being tapped over time by the Salone through other initiatives, such as the Observatory with Milan Polytechnic University, which I was in favour of. The idea of opening up and mapping the design community also seemed very interesting in terms of my own research. The campaign is entirely based on listening to the different voices and conversations that build  the discourse of and on design, using AI first for analysing and classifying the text into categories and attributes and then, in a reduced parametric version, for creating a visual restitution of the collected data. 

The campaign is split into three phases with three different data sources. The first is a bottom-up data collection operation; we did a rake operation, collecting all conversations that complied with specific design-related queries as a general theme. We collected data from digital conversations, social media, blogs, and web pages and created a vast body of text which was then analysed and classified through AI. We used OpenAI's LLM [Large Language Model, Ed.] model to classify these texts and to create the different categories, starting with the emotional-rational category, which defines one of the most visible aspects of the campaign, the duality of the red and blue colours.

Within that dichotomy, semantic categories, such as aesthetic or functional, were defined and translated visually into the vertical scanning of the two main colour bands.

Finally, we analysed the balance of the sentiment of the discussions within the macro-categories, generating a geometrical phase shift, which restored the contrast or the non-alignment that exists in specific issues. The bottom-up procedure during the first phase was followed by a second, top-down phase: we decided who to listen to, defining which actors and voices were relevant in the world of design then, together with the Salone, we selected the most important international awards in the home living field, their juries, and all the awards given out, and activated listening to their conversations about design and conversations about them, adopting the same procedure as in the previous two phases. In the third phase, the campaign will go live. It will also come to life visually, becoming dynamic, repeating the process of research and analysis described earlier at the Salone, during the Salone, to listen to the discourse in the present tense. This phase could also take on a spatial dimension: we are working on methods and tools that should allow us to reach the community of those who frequent the Salone and those within it, in its spaces. 

A generative and transformative communication campaign, which, by listening to those who talk about design, will propel the Salone del Mobile.Milano community into the future of technology.