In just a few years, we’ve gone from laughing at it to fearing it. By now most of us have come to terms with the fact that, like it or not, it is here to stay. Designers in tech face a unique set of challenges in this evolving landscape. As design practitioners, we must be adaptable- to the needs of stakeholders and clients, to our teams and professional partners, and to rapid changes in the technological landscape in which we work. In this article I’ll be looking at how UI/UX and Product Designers can create better AI-enabled Products, the design strategies to consider when building intelligent interfaces, and how design-in-tech might prepare us for the future of this technology.

AI-enabled products? What are those?

By “AI-driven interfaces” and/or “AI-enabled products”, I refer to mobile and web apps that employ large language models (LLMs) or other ML techniques as their primary technology. “Intelligent Interfaces” refer to the UI of these products.

In the last couple of years “.ai” is everywhere and it’s not unexpected, given that LLMs are getting more efficacious and reliable with each passing week. AI-enabled products can serve users for productivity, design, sales, marketing, business development, and probably many more use cases. I don’t know them all, but maybe you do! If not, just ask your favourite AI.

Something that underpins all of these applications is data. Data is the lifeblood of AI, it is what allows the product in question to function effectively. In turn, AI-led tech products continuously amplify the value of data by unlocking insights. This makes data analytics not just a category in the list above, but also a fundamental component of AI-powered tools. [Edit after DeepSeek R1: AI now also amplifies the value of data by training itself!]

Where does UX get on (and off)?

AI without good UX is like a Ferrari on display with the steering wheel removed– Impressive, no doubt. A fine specimen. But sit in there and you’ll feel a mix of disappointment, confusion and anger.

AI systems are complex by default. All the fancy neural networks, machine learning models, and data pipelines are impressive under the hood, but quite intimidating to the average person even on the surface. A well-designed interface abstracts the stupendous complexity that is AI, presenting users with more familiar and intuitive options for input and interaction. UX anticipates and accommodates the need for accessibility, usability and empathy in these otherwise “cold” systems. Data and code make AI smart and clever, but it’s UX that makes you actually want to use it. It’s what turns algorithms into tangible tools, creepy predictions into comforting conveniences, and raw computing power into refined experiences. Without UX, AI is just a jumble of intimidating potential; with it, AI becomes a partner, effortlessly upgrading the way we work and live. Think about the next time you see “Your New Productivity Co-Pilot”, or hopefully one with a more original name.

Designers, pay attention

Best practices! They make the design world go round. They keep us designers on our toes and make us mind our Ps and Qs. If you’re a designer of any of the varieties mentioned earlier: Welcome, I shake you warmly by the hand. These are the things you’ll want to stay on top of to sharpen your Intelligent Interface, make users love using your product, and don’t get spooked and/or confused as soon as the AI does something unexpected. If you are a different variety of tech person: You’re equally welcome to continue reading, to the benefit of all the designers you may work with.

1. XAI for days

The average user is going to be pretty skeptical, disoriented even, when they first start using your product. We want to make sure our users trust the product and its capabilities, feel confident using it, understand how it works (to a reasonable extent), and are able to interpret the output effectively. We don’t want users to necessarily need a tutorial or crash course to use the product (unless it’s really that specialised). We also don’t want them to have to verify the results through Google, ChatGPT, or another “better” tool. Following design principles of explainable AI (XAI) is how we get there.

Explanation

AKA “So creepy, how did it know that?!”

The AI should be able to explain how it arrived at its output. The explanation should be accurate, comprehensive and easy to understand (Phillips et al., 2021). While creepiness isn’t as much of a concern today as it was 2 years ago, explanation is still beneficial in creating confidence in the product, the brand and the technology. Providing appropriate evidence and reasoning for output helps users trust the efficacy of the tool without worrying about more technically dense aspects of what it’s doing and how it’s doing it.

Interpretation

AKA “That’s cool, but WTF does it mean?!”

The answers and explanations provided should be easy to interpret, understand and act upon. Your user may be an expert in the given subject matter, but in most cases it’s best to assume that the user is not an expert and provide output that anyone can understand and move forward with.

Knowledge limits

AKA “Turns out it AIn’t all that smart (haha geddit?)”

When the AI reaches the edges of its domain of knowledge, it’s best to communicate it effectively to the user. Follow-up questions are welcome. Don’t be overconfident in your system, and don’t encourage users to be overconfident either. Instead, help them to quickly understand what it can and cannot do.

Fairness and bias prevention

AKA “I think it thinks I’m a 35 y/o straight white man”

AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and the data is often a hot mess, with biases and hallucinations just waiting to happen. Bias prevention and other ethical guidelines need to be baked into the system, taking the form of self checks and effective communication on potential ethical issues within the responses of your AI. It’s easy for these biases to get politicised, which is likely to be irrelevant and antithetical to the purpose of your product.

2. Error handling and management

Errors– whether from the system or the user– should be met with clear, helpful messages that guide users forward without friction. Your product likely won’t have perfect outputs every time, and your users should feel comfortable with learning through failure without their workflow being adversely affected. When the errors come creeping, it’s only polite to be accountable for them, communicate the error in a way that’s easy to understand, and provide options for resolution.

Error messaging may take the form of basic error indicators, tooltips with an action button, and/or manual control panels as a layer of redundancy (Cornianu, 2025). Subtle, well-placed animations can help bevel the experience. General UX best practices for error messages are important here. The error communication should be visible, proportional to the scale of the error, and follow accessibility guidelines. Effective UX writing also shines through. We don’t want users to feel like they did something wrong (even if they have), or experience confusion about how to resolve an error. Well-designed error management protocols help users trust the system, build confidence as they use the product, and reduce overall friction in the experience. In the words of Roald Dahl, “smooth and oily as hair cream” (The Hitchhiker, 1977).

3. Usability, prioritised

Don’t make your users think. You can achieve that by paying attention to usability, a cornerstone of the UI/UX practice. With AI-enabled products, we need to think about usability from both the engineering and the design side of things. An AI-enabled product is essentially a smart partner that proactively anticipates the needs of users and provides just the right amount of information and context where needed — that’s the engineering bit. The role of designers is to ensure that the system as a whole is intuitive, efficient, satisfying, and easy to use. Interfaces must work to bridge the gap between fickle minded humans and cold, data-driven systems. The gold standard can be achieved when designers work closely and iteratively with engineers, paying attention to visual consistency, adhering to accessibility guidelines, writing effective UX copy, and even providing neat third party integrations that can supercharge your users’ workflow.

4. Feedback and inputs

So far, proactively getting feedback and inputs from users allowed models to improve and adapt, gain credibility, and gave the user a sense of agency in the interaction (Chaturvedi, n.d.). Only a year ago, most AI-enabled products had a now obsolete mode of user feedback baked into their system in the form of ratings or a thumbs up/down button towards each answer. These products had largely been playing around in uncharted territory, but that territory is quickly becoming more charted. Very soon, models can be expected to move toward more self-sufficient operation, as demonstrated by DeepSeek’s reinforcement learning and built-in Chain-of-Thought capabilities. This doesn’t mean that user feedback and inputs are no longer needed. Far from it, they will continue to have an important place in interaction design for AI-enabled products for the foreseeable future. However, they will need to diversify and take different forms as we move toward more intuitive formats of interaction with AI enabled tools. This is something both designers and engineers will need to stay on top of.

5. Iteration and collaboration

Designing for AI-enabled products differs from designing websites and apps in a pretty big, fundamental way–the outcomes and user journeys are uncertain. Unlike traditional design, where every user flow can be meticulously planned if designers so wished, AI introduces a wildcard element that makes it impossible to map out every single scenario. Nobody can predict, list, or account for every potential type of output the model may give us. In fool proofing this situation, Designers and Engineers must closely collaborate to guide AI’s potential outputs, keep things aligned with what users actually need, and provide output in ways the user expects it to. We will need to learn each others’ disciplinary principles, needs and, to some extent, skills. Siloed operation is fairly detrimental to effective product design and development today. For the AI-enabled products we will be creating in the near future, it could spell failure.

Where are we headed with this?

Just as I was wrapping up this article, DeepSeek R1 was launched. In the span of about a week, the tech, AI and ML industries may have entered a new era– time will tell, but I suspect we won’t have long to wait. I’ve written about Designers working with AI in the past, in an article that aged well but also became obsolete in barely a year. I looked back at my draft after the launch of DeepSeek R1 and realised that in the few weeks since I started writing this article, it already sounded a little outdated. Depending on when you’re here, it may sound even more outdated.

Rich Holmes on Substack

“Vibe coding” is the new trend that’s cropped up in product design (Holmes, 2025). When I first heard about it, it sounded a lot like something that people from other disciplines can get their fingers stuck straight into product design and promote learning. My view is that product designers will need to pay attention to the use cases of user experience, now more than ever. In the short term we might see torrents of new AI-enabled products that come into existence in a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” manner; user experience learning curves will be steep here. In the medium to long term, it provides insights on how we could refocus and refine the way we design AI-enabled products in a new age of tech.

A new layer of “multimodal”

Multimodal AI serves to allow AI-enabled products to communicate with users in more natural ways. Usually, this means you can type in a text input, record a voice message or video, or upload media files. Theoretically speaking, this enabled models to process all these forms of data in a way that seems more “human-like”. My personal view is that engineers and researchers cannot get complacent after developments they think will bring improvement to how easy a product is to use, when we just don’t know for sure that it will in fact bring said improvement. Processing data in a “human-like” manner may not ensure better usability of a product that already runs on non-human intelligence, is relatively unknown in its workings, and limited in its scope of interaction. Usability principles ask that the “multimodality” of these models extend beyond input possibilities, to also include output and interaction possibilities. There is a lot of scope for research in this area to understand what actually constitutes an intuitive AI interface, when AI is by default not an intuitive thing.

What I would like to see in the near future is a more visual and graphical mode of interaction that encourages more back-and-forth exchange with models before arriving at a comprehensive output that is self-initiated and self-evaluated by the model. Maybe it’s just me, but plain old chat-based interaction with an unknown entity leaves something wanting. It feels like a stopgap MSN Messenger-esque format that’s serving this purpose until we can figure out a better, more user-friendly way to get the best out of these powerful tools. And it’s time to start figuring that out.

The Third Paradigm

We’ve been in the early stages of AI-enabled products, and the people who have been making them are usually not UX specialists. Jakob Nielsen speaks of a new paradigm of UI design – Intent-based Outcome Specification– where we specify the outcome we want rather than specifying what we want the computer to do. In doing so, we hand over all control in the execution of the intended outcome to the computer, creating a somewhat one-sided “interaction” that is handicapped by the capabilities of the technology. So far, the most commonly employed interaction style has been the chat interface, since it helped account for the usability issues posed by these products. And so, the Prompt Engineers were born to paper over the cracks and “tickle ChatGPT in the right spot so it coughs up the right results” (Nielsen, 2024).

As AI continues to improve (itself?), we can expect a shift towards more complex non-command interactions, where systems don’t wait for you to click a button but anticipate your needs based on passive cues. We are right at the point where user research can step in, digging into existing user data to fine-tune these interactions, making AI-enabled products not just smarter but genuinely more usable.

Non-command interfaces mark a fundamental shift from the old-school “I click, you respond” paradigm to systems that sense and react to user behavior without explicit commands. Unlike traditional menus or GUIs that demand direct input, non-command interfaces are designed to quietly observe and adapt, blending seamlessly into the user’s natural flow (Nielsen, 2019). However, there’s still a lot to learn from the classic graphical user interface (GUI) playbook.

By combining the intent-based nature of AI interactions with the intuitive familiarity of GUIs (and some technical wizardry that I’m not qualified to elucidate), we can create systems that balance passive observation with user control. Imagine an interface that knows what you might want but still gives you the option to steer the ship when needed. By merging the best of both worlds, we can have AI that feels like it’s reading your mind while still respecting your agency. I believe that a fusion of non-command design and GUI elements might be the key to pushing Intelligent Interfaces into their next evolutionary phase.

References

Chaturvedi, R. (n.d.). Design human-centered AI interfaces. Reforge. https://www.reforge.com/guides/design-human-centered-ai-interfaces#recap

Cornianu, B. (2025, January 30). Training AI with pure reinforcement Learning: Insights from DeepSeek R1. Victory Square Partners. https://victorysquarepartners.com/training-ai-with-pure-reinforcement-learning-insights-from-deepseek-r1/

Holmes, R. (2025, March 6). Rich Holmes on substack. Substack. Retrieved March 10, 2025, from https://substack.com/@richholmes/note/c-98472653

Kashyap, R. (2023, April). I Don’t Know A Great Answer OR I Don’t Know, A Great Answer. Qeios. https://doi.org/10.32388/DFE2XG.2 Figure 4

Lipiński, D. (2024, August 13). Designing AI interfaces: Challenges, trends & future prospects | Pragmatic Coders. Pragmatic Coders. https://www.pragmaticcoders.com/blog/designing-ai-interfaces-challenges-trends-and-future-prospects

Moon, M. (2024, September 27). Google launches Gemini’s contextual smart replies in Gmail. Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-launches-geminis-contextual-smart-replies-in-gmail-140021232.html Thumbnail Image

Nielsen, J. (2019, May 4). Noncommand user interfaces. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/noncommand/

Nielsen, J. (2024, October 24). AI: First new UI paradigm in 60 years. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-paradigm/

Phillips, P. J., Hahn, C. A., Fontana, P. C., Yates, A. N., Greene, K., Broniatowski, D. A., & Przybocki, M. A. (2021). Four principles of explainable artificial intelligence. https://doi.org/10.6028/nist.ir.8312

Sunwall, E., & Neusesser, T. (2024, August 2). Error-Message guidelines. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/error-message-guidelines/ Clear change password.

AI + UX: design for intelligent interfaces was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

…A.I. is a concept to create intelligent machines that can simulate human thinking capability and behavior… [1]

Some will resist, some will get on board the hype train without a thought, some will cautiously venture and some will tilt their head skeptically because “it’s not there yet.” What started a few years ago as a blip on the radar of technology has started to turn some serious heads, and a lot of them. Designers are no exception to this; the implications of AI/ML in design are developing rapidly and we don’t really know what we’ll get even in the next month. This is exciting, terrifying, and awe-inspiring, all at once. We are in the eye of the storm, and it’s worth slowing down to enjoy the view.

So what’s all the fuss about?

OpenAI recently launched Dall-E 2, a system powered by GPT-3 that can create images based on text prompts. A new and improved version of Dall-E, this one is able to create imagery with staggering amounts of detail and artistic flair. It isn’t just compositing images from a database. It has character and creativity, often creating visuals with subjects doing things that no human, and hence no database, has probably ever seen [2]. Here’s a great video on why Dall-E 2 is incredible, and I recommend exploring the website too.

When I saw the website, I’ll admit that I was a bit rattled. It’s a frightening revelation that A.I. is able to create visuals with the artistry that most people I know simply don’t consistently have. Design is already firmly in the picture when it comes to A.I.; we already have a bit of an idea of how A.I. design works. This brings us to the question that is actually relatively young but feels age-old thanks to the rapid advances of A.I. and M.L.:

Are Designers and Artists really going to lose their jobs?

The short answer is no, they will not.

The caveat is that Designers will need to adapt and forge new relationships with technology [3].

Run for your lives, it’s the Big T!

Technology isn’t new to us- software has been a mainstream component of our discipline since the early 90s. If you saw a graphic designer who refused to work on Adobe Illustrator, you’d probably think they’re a red flag and wild card all rolled in one. The debate of relying heavily on software even exists today, at a time where Adobe Sensei is able to pull stunts with images and video that were unimaginable just 5 years ago. It is likely that designers will have a similar kind of learning curve when it comes to the boundaries and relationships between computer and designer. There will be growing pains and the new order will be forged in the heat of the uncertainties.

Jasmine Oh, in her article published on Microsoft Design, places this change in an actionable context:

… While A.I. will replace designers, it will replace the designers of today, not the designers of tomorrow. A.I. will become a design partner and tool that designers can use to meet ever-evolving workplace demands [4].

The creative field is poised for a few big changes in the next 20 years. I recently read an article on the Adobe Blog written by Linn Vizard on how the role of designers is changing vastly alongside the advent of new technologies [5]. She describes a new order of design which should strive to take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture, while allowing our A.I. companions and tools to carry out production of the details. This is an order that will slowly phase out space for what she describes as “Star Designers”, making way for Star Teams instead. Human centered design will be the name of the game, and this is already an ideology in which the concept of having a single glorified “genius designer” doesn’t quite fit in.

Where we earlier had multiple specialisations that created siloes within which designers practiced specialised crafts, we could soon have a more holistic design approach that seeks to design environments, behaviours, systems and experiences. The focus is moving from designing the image to designing the entire context and experience of which the image forms a small part. Designers and creative practitioners will likely need to go over and above to stay relevant. As Oh puts it, the Designers of Today will most definitely become obsolete, only to make way for the Designers of Tomorrow — those who are able to adapt and welcome this unified vision of design that A.I. could make a reality.

Hold your horses

Acknowledging that there have been staggering technological advances in A.I., Machine Learning and deep neural networks over the past 10 years, let’s also acknowledge the convolutions- for the purpose of this article, just one major convolution. A.I. Bias is here to remind us why there are a few reasons to hold our horses.

Bias in A.I. occurs when results cannot be generalized widely. We often think of bias resulting from preferences or exclusions in training data, but bias can also be introduced by how data is obtained, how algorithms are designed, and how A.I. outputs are interpreted [6].

This is an explanation of how biases occur in A.I., as told by Stanford cardiologist Dr. Sanjiv M. Narayan in this interview with Healthcare IT News. A.I. is a complex subject matter, so I’ll refrain from going into technical details (as I have throughout this article) and instead jump right into a few examples of A.I bias.

TW: References to Racism and Islamophobia in the next 2 paragraphs*

Abubakar Abid on Twitter: "I'm shocked how hard it is to generate text about Muslims from GPT-3 that has nothing to do with violence... or being killed... pic.twitter.com/biSiiG5bkh / Twitter"

I'm shocked how hard it is to generate text about Muslims from GPT-3 that has nothing to do with violence... or being killed... pic.twitter.com/biSiiG5bkh

While researching for this story, I came across a Vox article on some problematic trends that have cropped up in A.I., mainly to do with Islamophobia. I recommend reading it but TL;DR: the language model GPT-3 (also used in Dall-E 2) has an overt tendency to regard Muslims as being inherently violent. The tweet embedded above is a video posted by one of the researchers, Abubakar Abid. You can see that he even tried to tell GPT-3 that the Muslims he’s talking about are peaceful folk, and GPT-3 would have none of it.

Google’s Photos app, that uses A.I. algorithms to label images and provide us with those often annoying “memories”, committed a pretty big blunder back in 2015 when it labelled an image of black people as “Gorillas”. Granted, it has been 7 years since this happened (wow, I’m older than I thought), but it’s a bias that is so blatant that one can’t help but wonder what on earth was used to train these algorithms. Apparently, Google has recently fixed this issue (not really) [7].

A final and less distressing example that I’d like to share with you is that of char-rnn. Situated in a corner of GitHub, this is a multi-layer recurrent neural network that writer-scientist-engineer Janelle Shane has been training on various forms of output. She got this neural network to churn out a series of pick-up lines — yes, the kind you use at bars and various other public spaces to acquire partners for romantic and/or sexual purposes [8]. The results were quite entertaining, here are a few:

I want to get my heart with you.

You are so beautiful that you know what I mean.

Your beauty have a fine to me.

You look like a thing and I love you.

The first thing that struck me about these was that they sound like a bunch of nearly nonsensical yet somehow profound sentences strung together by a child who doesn’t fully understand what they’re talking about. In this case, that subject is romantic and/or sexual attraction between two adult humans. The keyword here is child.

Baby shark, doo doo doo doo

We know that A.I and neural networks are created over time, developed, expanded and trained. One of the reasons why many of us are fascinated by this field of study is because there is an allure to this process, something that makes it seem almost human even though that’s exactly what it’s not. But I think that it reminds us of ourselves — we too, as children, grew up from being small humans with still developing brains. We grew slowly and over time, we developed, we learned, went to school, understood how the world worked, started asking important questions and working to find important answers. But A.I systems and neural networks generally have to start at the beginning and, as it turns out, there can be intense growing pains.

Janelle actually wrote a book about the intersection of artificial intelligence with modern-day technology and society, and it’s called You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place (first published in 2019). I hope to read it soon and share my review of it, but don’t hold your breath because I read books at a laughably slow pace (hey, at least I’m trying).

There’s no overt indication that AI is going to destroy the human race and take over the world. In fact, here are 5 reasons why we needn’t and shouldn’t worry about that. AI Is being developed by many smart, big-brained folk around the world to help us, not to spell our end like Hollywood would have you believe. Take the Jaws Effect — Hollywood gave the world’s 1,000+ species of shark a horrible reputation and awful PR through the Jaws films, which painted sharks as a bunch of murderous monsters hell-bent on eating people. The movies taught people that “sharks intentionally bite humans, that human-shark encounters are always fatal, and that sharks should be killed to prevent future attacks.” What resulted was a culturally ingrained distrust, fear and hate of fascinating animal species that are an integral part of marine ecosystems. Following the release of the Jaws films, global populations of sharks and rays dipped drastically [9], an incidence that continues to threaten ocean ecosystems today. Oh, and by the way, “each year worldwide there are ~10 deaths attributable to shark attacks compared with ~150 deaths worldwide caused by falling coconuts.”

Not to draw a direct parallel with sharks and A.I, but Hollywood misleading people with theatrical mumbo jumbo is a recurring pattern that is highly avoidable if we could all just focus a bit more on reality. A.I is being researched and developed methodically and scientifically, showing us its wonders and capabilities along the way; the many ways in which it can make our lives easier, cleaner and more sustainable. Whether you’re a designer, a writer, a data analyst or even a restaurant owner, A.I. is coming to help you. It’s bringing us closer to a brave new world where there will be more opportunities and possibilities than ever before. It’s up to us to play our cards right and use this new technology for good, knowing what we know about humanities past mistakes with technology (and a few other things).

So buckle up and enjoy the ride with an open mind!

References

1. “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ; What Is the Difference?” Encora, 7 Mar. 2022, www.encora.com/insights/ifference-between-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning.
2. ColdFusion. (2022, April 22). How This A.I. Draws Anything You Describe [DALL-E 2] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1cF9QCu1rQ
3. Philips, Miklos. (2018, July 10). The Present and Future of AI in Design (with Infographic). Toptal Design Blog. https://www.toptal.com/designers/product-design/infographic-ai-in-design
4. Oh, Jasmine. “Yes, AI Will Replace Designers — Microsoft Design.” Medium, 9 Dec. 2021, medium.com/microsoft-design/yes-ai-will-replace-designers-9d90c6e34502.
5. Vizard, Linn. “Technology and the Evolution of the Designerâs Role.” Adobe Blog, 24 Jan. 2017, blog.adobe.com/en/2017/01/24/technology-and-the-evolution-of-the-designers-role.
6. Siwicki, Bill. “How AI Bias Happens — and How to Eliminate It.” Healthcare IT News, 30 Nov. 2021, www.healthcareitnews.com/news/how-ai-bias-happens-and-how-eliminate-it.
7. Vincent, James. “Google ‘Fixed’ Its Racist Algorithm by Removing Gorillas from Its Image-Labeling Tech.” The Verge, 12 Jan. 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai.
8. Shane, J. (2017, April 7). The neural network generated pickup lines that are actually kind of adorable. AI Weirdness. https://www.aiweirdness.com/159302925452/
9. Salazar, Maria. “If You Think Sharks Are Scary, Blame Hollywood, New Study Suggests.” Mongabay Environmental News, 7 Sept. 2021, news.mongabay.com/2021/09/if-you-think-sharks-are-scary-blame-hollywood-new-study-suggests.

A.I. + Designers (and pretty much everyone else) was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Navigating the Crossroads

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Understanding the importance of process and the mechanics of Art Thinking and Design Thinking is all great, but we’ve now arrived at the cloudy amalgamation of the two. The ideas shared in Part 3 are a far more recent articulation that I’ve realised with the gift of hindsight, and I hope that it makes as much sense to anybody reading as it does to me. Or maybe, in the most appropriate illustration of just how subjective creativity is, it will make no sense at all. I invite you to give it a try.

“Superprocess? What?”

This isn’t by any means a guide to using the ideologies of Art and Design as one unified process. Everyone’s creative journey is unique and I’d argue that even those trained to use design thinking tools will each have their own spin on it. I was lucky enough to be able to apply the ideologies and thinking tools I learnt at art school into my design career in a way that didn’t eclipse either knowledge base.

I like to believe that I’ve developed a kind of hybrid “Superprocess” in my work that combines the best of both worlds and delivers strong results. I liked using the term Superprocess because it had a nice ring to it, and also made me feel like I was doing something important. At the risk of undermining my achievements, I now think the reality was a lot simpler than that. I may be doing something important, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. It really boils down to simple observation and fervent curiosity, supplemented in large part by my keen interest in human psychology.

Tasty Inspo!

You may have noticed in Part 2 that I used a specific term while speaking about both Art and Design Thinking — Inspiration. I would describe inspiration as the feeling of cerebral upliftment that you get when you come across something that sets your mind rolling down the path of making connections. One leads to another, which leads to another, until suddenly you find yourself standing face-to-face with an idea that could significantly touch, influence, maybe even improve, the lives of others. To me, it tastes somewhat like honey. Please don’t ask why, I would not be able to tell you.

Inspiration is something that is imperative to Art Thinking as well as Design Thinking, but the difference lies in the way in which we go looking for it. Most Designers I know will have a list of bookmarked websites or open tabs that they’ll quickly switch to and start browsing- many even use Instagram. The obvious fact is that the internet allows an incredibly vast source of information at our fingertips, accessible anywhere and anytime we want or need it. This, however, is only secondary research. Primary research is just as important, if not more, in the quest for information that paves the way for inspiration. Enter, the human element.

Designers inevitably have their own methods of primary research that should not be sidelined, but an artist’s primary research is the defining element of my Superprocess. It comprises observations and interactions, perhaps even interviews. At its core, it examines the relationship between people and their environment(s) at a more emotional level, delving into the forces that drive interactions, the motivations, expectations and relationship, and the ever-changing relationships between these.

Most of us stand to gain from a creative process that emphasises the human element. In my case, it enabled me to understand people at a deeper level, solve problems with empathy. It also influences the way I experience my own environment. A walk through a bustling neighbourhood is as much a treasure trove of insight and inspiration as the internet, an evening at my favourite coffee shop becomes a fresh perspective on how people behave when they are lonely or nervous. If I was to oversimplify, my well-kept secret ingredient has always been the good old practice of people-watching.

I’d leave you with a word of encouragement to start the practice of people-watching and adopt creative thinking and similar processes into any work that you do. The purpose of this 2000-word brain dump was mainly to illustrate that creative thinking and the creative processes are not only meant for creatives. It’s about broadening your horizons and imbibing what the world shows you, converting that into useful insights and inspiration which can be implemented in interventions that make an impact.

If you have thoughts, opinions and ideas shared in this article, I’m all ears! Let’s learn together.

I hope you enjoyed reading this 3-Part article (3-Particle?) as much as i enjoyed writing it. I’m a graphic designer and I write about art, design and pretty much anything parallel to them and will be uploading every two weeks, or every month, depending on the humaneness of my employer. If you are my employer — don’t worry, I think you’re hella humane.

Stay informed!

A closer look at my two Weapons of Intelligent and Kickass Intervention

In Part 1, I wrote about my experience with understanding Art and Design as two starkly different fields that overlap and link in curious ways. I also spoke about Process and why it is important in the creative field and otherwise. I would strongly recommend reading Part 1 first, so that you have all the context you need. For Part 2, I’ll be detailing two kinds of thinking tools that have helped me formulate my Creative process.

Art Thinking

“How can we become more human? How can microbes safe (sic) the earth? How can we co-exist with technology as our second nature? Artists have always understood the power of questions. They transcend from spiritual to material, function to form, natural science to social science, in search of a best match of a theme, medium and expression.”

Excerpt: Art Thinking, Hideaki Ogawa, ARS Electronica Futurelab (1)

In my view, one of the most defining characteristics of an artist is the way they perceive the world around them. I have caught myself questioning and probing factors in my mind and environment, when answers are neither at hand nor have any bearing on my life. Art Thinking employs a controlled curiosity and a thirst to show humanity (whoever will care to look) what they often miss right under their noses. One of the time-honoured methodologies in Art Thinking that I’ve come to adopt is the good old observation-empathy-inquiry trifecta.

In the relatively short span of my career thus far, I’ve been able to implement Art Thinking in areas outside of traditional art practice and have come out with fascinating insights that have both informed my design practice and resonated with me at a deeper, more emotional level. Art Thinking has taught me to question everything I see, hear or think I understand, inquire deeply and enlist my empathic self to unpack the human element that accompanies every interaction. This will be important later.

Art Thinking tends to lead the thinker towards divergent conclusions and subjective insights that are often difficult to quantify. This naturally starts to make it seem counterproductive when dealing with questions and problems that require more concrete answers and solutions. I would not go so far as to say that this form of thinking can be manipulated in such a way that you can ask cloudy questions, meditate for a few hours and achieve an enlightened solution. Where Art Thinking shines brightest is in yielding inspiration. This will also be important later.

Design Thinking

I recently started reading Creative Confidence, a book written by David and Tom Kelley, brothers and Co-Founders of IDEO. One of the first concepts the book dives into is Design Thinking, which they describe as a human-centred methodology to design, innovate and build. IDEO’s articulated brand of Design Thinking described in the book is informed by 3 factors — Feasibility (“Coolness” alone will not take you far), Viability (Business and economic factors) and Desirability (the human factor). These 3 factors are employed over a structured 4-step process (Process!) of Design-driven Innovation:

1. Inspiration: A no-holds-barred exploration of the world around you or the experience of the target group. Use empathy to uncover valuable interactions and potential insights.
2. Synthesis: Organising/categorising the explorations and observations to find patterns, connections and parallels that help illuminate possible interventions and ways to intervene.
3. Experimentation: Prototypes! Iterations! They say you may scrap 50 ideas before you arrive at The One.
4. Implementation: Refine and plan. Take your work from your desk to the outside world and choose how you want to influence the way people make contact and then interface with it.

The Kelleys’ articulation of Design Thinking is highly valuable because it illustrates a lesser understood feature of Design Thinking- it is not only useful for the “creative/artistic types”. It can help managers and employers, teachers and engineers alike, to a very high degree. I consider Design Thinking to be one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal. It introduces structure into my thought process, without hampering creativity and ideation.

(The above paragraphs are a very condensed and simplified version of the methodologies described in Creative Confidence. I would massively recommend reading this book for a deeper foray into these methodologies and how they can be applied in your line of work.)

Art Thinking and Design Thinking are two separate tools that serve two separate purposes. There is no formula to contextually apply them, or to force fit both in a given situation. In Part 3, I will relate how my creative journey enabled me to take from both these tools and apply them in a way that complements both. Two processes come together to form my “Superprocess”.

References

1. Ogawa, Hideaki. “Art Thinking.” Ars Electronica Futurelab, ars.electronica.art/futurelab/en/research-art-thinking. Accessed 29 Mar. 2022.

Applying a decade of learning/training in technique, process and thought

Art and Design are two very different things. So different, in fact, that I’ve seen experienced professionals in the creative industry get visibly uncomfortable at hearing their methodologies used in the same sentence. So, to diffuse any tension you might be feeling right now, I thought I would start with a funny (and very embarrassing) story.

At the age of 17 I went for my college interview at the school at which I intended to start my creative career. I’d been drawing and painting for around 8 years at the time and knew that I saw my future in the creative field. This was my “dream school” because it afforded me the flexibility to figure out which part of the creative field I wanted to slot into. If I found the most satisfaction in painting, I would continue with that. And if I took a more keen liking to industrial and product design, I could move in that direction. It was all very exciting.

When my turn came, I went into the room carrying several thick binders full of my work. The panel took their time to go through everything and asked a few questions about the techniques I used to check if I knew what I was doing. There were pleasant discussions and their personable demeanour was a welcome relief to my nerves.

Then, the gentleman on the right said, “Okay Antara, your work looks great to me, but I have an important question for you.

“Can you tell me the difference between Art and Design?”.

And I couldn’t answer.

The irony was not lost on me; there I sat, with all my binders and portfolios, contesting my seat at an art and design school and unable to pinpoint the difference between art and design. Seconds later the true scale of the horror dawned on me — I did not know what Design actually was. I had at best a cloudy idea and, as it turned out, I had never articulated this nor had the need to articulate it to myself or anybody else. The entire experience was the kind where you’d promptly want to dissolve into the ground and disappear, so you’ll understand why my recollection ends here — I actually don’t remember anything more from that interview, until I came back out.

I know now not to be so hard on myself. At the time of this incident, I hadn’t had any real exposure to design and all my training had been in observational drawing. Those skills were already solid as stone and afforded me a reasonable amount of confidence in my creative abilities and thought processes. A good art and design school does not interview you to see if you already know, understand and practice art and design, but rather to see if your mind is wired to imbibe their teachings. Thankfully, mine was.

I also know now that the answer isn’t cut and dry, having been debated for hundreds of years, if not thousands (1). The image above is an excerpt from the article Art vs Design — A Timeless Debate from Toptal.com. An illuminating read — if you have 14 minutes to spare, check it out here.

It is the 21st of April, 2022. This is how I now understand Art and Design in my work and life:

Art Asks Questions
Design Answers Them

Art Creates Meaning
Design Solves Problems

Over 3 parts, I hope to relate my experience of receiving over a decade of training within the domain of Art and going on to practice Design for a living. I hope to cover learnings form both disciplines and the amalgamation of these learnings, share some of the insights that helped give my work meaning and grounding, and do my bit to settle the storm of confusion that often accompanies creative careers.

On the Importance of Process…

The two definitions above each contain a starkly different stance on the noun “Process”. One deals in the “natural” while the other speaks of a more inorganic and man-made concept. It is necessary to tap into both sides of this spectrum in a creative process. It seeks to be systematic and directed, but not deterministic; fluid and experimental, but not unguided. The creative process can take many forms and be applied to a variety of activities, tasks and requirements, in the sense that it is not limited to artists, designers and “the creative types”.

Anybody can benefit from creative processes, thoughts and value systems. What varies is the way you apply it and what you seek to gain from it. In creativity, process and outcome are independent of each other. However, by amending the relationship between the process and outcome, you can:

1. Arrive at a single concrete answer
2. Arrive at a group of possible answers and solutions with varying levels of efficacy, or even
3. Refrain from conclusively answering the question, instead illuminating new channels of thought.

If you were a mechanical engineer, you probably wouldn’t be relying on the third one.

Process of any kind can involve various ways of thinking to arrive at a conclusion, whether convergent or divergent. In Part 2, I’ll be speaking about the two tools that I most closely associate with my Creative process. I like to call them my Weapons of Intelligent and Kickass Intervention, or WIKIs for short.

Stay tuned!

References

1. Philips, Miklos. “Art vs Design — A Timeless Debate.” Toptal Design Blog, 8 May 2018, www.toptal.com/designers/creative-direction/art-vs-design.
2. “Process.” Oxford Languages, languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en. Accessed 29 Mar. 2022.

How Art Informed My Design Career : Part 1 was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My relationship with airplanes started on the National Geographic Channel, with a show you might have seen and loved yourself- Air Crash Investigation. It seems a bit counterintuitive, but these stories of air accidents increased my fascination with aircraft and the way they are built. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why I love them, but it hinges on the complexity and the sheer scale of human ingenuity that goes into each unit.

When I was between the ages of 3 and 10, my dad’s work would require him to travel internationally quite frequently. I have some vague memories of going to the viewing gallery at the airport with my mom and sister. I actually remember seeing an Alitalia Boeing 747 coming into land and coolly associating this sight to some current form of magic that must be freely available to Alitalia. I was probably around 4 years old at the time.

My true fascination came about after the MH370 incident. I’m sure I can attribute some of it to the media coverage in the weeks following the disappearance. There were all kinds of theories floating around, people saying they saw fireballs in the sky at various locations around South East Asia, and general commotion pervading news media about airline safety and the credibility of Malaysia Airlines (which, sadly, was not helped by the unfortunate downing of MH17). I was drawn to the story and, within a short time, had watched every documentary ever made on airplanes and aviation. In 2016, I spent around a month in Singapore visiting my sister. I had the daytime to myself while she was out at work and on one such day stepped into the wonderment that was the National Library on Orchard Road. I would spend full days sat in there reading books about aircraft engineering (and also about whales, but that’s for another post).

The Obsession

It is difficult to describe in a fundamental sense why I love airplanes, but I can tell you I find them absolutely beautiful, both visually and conceptually. I thought I would try to articulate this obsession in three points. Firstly, the sheer size of some of them. If you’ve seen an A380 take off with your own eyes, it seems to defy all logic. You look at an absolute monstrosity of a structure and think, “there’s no way this impossibly heavy and huge thing can take actual flight, defying gravity, and then proceed to stay there for so many hours”. But then it does exactly that. Which brings me to the second point- the fact that engineering has created this very tangible physical machine that can do what seems as close to impossible as anything.

Computers on modern-day aircraft do countless things in the belly of this beast that most of us will never hear about or realise it does. Much of this is to do with safety features, with layers of redundancy for each of them. This alone simply boggles my mind. Even if you completely leave out computers from the conversation, the basic yet impossible capability of this machine is achieved through simple physics a child could understand, taken precise advantage of by what I imagine are exceptionally sharp human beings. The airframe, wings and control surfaces are all designed to give you the maximum benefit of the laws of physics and aerodynamics.

The elegant solutions achieved through this beautiful thing called engineering all come together to result in my third clause - airplanes are downright beautiful to look at.

There is just something about the gentle curved shape of a composite wing that makes it difficult for me to take my eyes off it. It is not only engineering, but also design and to some extent, marketing. A quick sweep through a few aviation enthusiasts’ Twitter accounts will tell you that one of the reasons people like the A320 is because its Sharklets look “sexy”. Even the decision of naming it a “Sharklet” boils down to marketing chops. A Sharklet is more like a brand name for what is technically called a blended winglet.

The hump of the Boeing 747, the curved wing of a Dreamliner, the full-length upper deck of the Airbus A380, the gloriously elegant proportions of the four-engined “flying pencil” A340–600, the suave blended wingtip device of the A350 and most recently, the folding wingtips of the upcoming Boeing 777X family: these are a few of of the most beautiful and iconic sights in the world of civil aviation. These sights were not a product of form over function, but are all proof that designing an exceedingly beautiful aircraft is in the best interest of aircraft manufacturers. Beauty is incredibly marketable and as technology advances, the relationship between form and funtion starts to get very interesting. I say all of this is without even having touched the territory of business aviation, which takes aviation marketing to a whole new level and in a manner to which most of us would find difficult to relate. But on that brief sidenote: Bombardier Global 7500, you have my heart.

Life as an Aviation Enthusiast

These days, I like to keep a close watch on the aviation industry and on the goings-on at the aircraft manufacturers. I follow media houses that report on the industry, as well as YouTuber pilots who create content and tell stories about air incidents/accidents and what it means to be the person sitting in the cockpit (If you’re interested in this kind of content, I massively recommend Mentour Pilot on Youtube- check out his channel here. He also has an app where you can have discussions with aviation enthusiasts, pilots and others working in the industry).

There was a period of time in my early teenage years when I actually wanted to become a flight attendant. I never took it very seriously because I could see at that point that I was not going to grow tall enough. More recently, I’ve met people who became flight attendants and felt a stabbing sense of “if only”. Not only am I not tall enough just as I predicted, I also have multiple visible tattoos. Funnily enough, I can never imagine myself as a pilot. I have the utmost respect for pilots, but I’ve tried a few flight simulator games and felt tremendous surges of anxiety. And those were just on a mobile game. I shudder to think of the real thing. *Shudders to think of the real thing*.

Flying in today’s day and age is mainly a chore to most people and an evil to some. I can’t say if this would be true if I wasn’t as invested as I am, but for me flying is one of the absolute highlights of any travel episode. I’ve now spent so much time studying aircraft and the commercial aviation industry that when I fly, I find myself thinking of ground and air crew almost like colleagues. I observe them while they work and try to understand the reasoning behind everything they do. When we interact, I speak to them as politely as I can. You should too. Their job is a lot more uncomfortable than your middle row economy seat.

Food for Thought

I want to leave you with a perspective. When you fly, you are a very small part of the day-to-day business of the company that you fly with, and even the aircraft that you fly on. For each flight in each sector that an airline operates, there are hundreds of people (working people doing their jobs, not passengers) involved in the backend who are an integral part of helping you get where you want to be. I would not say every part of the industry is perfect, but it is an industry that operates on the backs of hardworking people trying to earn an honest living, taking you where you need to go and keeping you safe along the way.

The next time you get annoyed at a flight attendant for serving you too little water or wine, try and remember that their job is very far from being defined by that. If a landing is bumpy, don’t blame the pilot who brought you all the way to your destination safely- you can be assured that their rigorous training and skill is precisely what brought you all the way there and enabled them to land successfully in what was likely to be difficult weather/wind conditions. If you’re nice to the lady at the check in counter, she is far more likely to be nice to you. Flying is expensive, but be aware of what you are paying for. This incredible view just happens to be one of those things.

When I was fresh out of art school with an undergraduate degree, venturing my first steps into full time employment, I wasn’t yet very good at articulating whether or not I liked my new job, and what I liked about it; I didn’t even know what I was supposed to like and dislike. Moreover, since I was in a somewhat niche line of work (by Indian standards) as a graphic designer, I didn’t quite have what you might call a typical employment experience as far as Indian jobs go.

What makes you “Like” your job?

My dad had explained to me that there are a set of factors that influence job satisfaction — work content, work environment and work-life balance. He originally told me just two but in recent months I’ve felt the need to add the third as a hard requisite, rather than leave it in the “if’s and maybe’s” bucket that it had been relegated to. This was necessary because I’d been duped into believing that it can be any other way, or that it’s humane to expect work-life balance to be an optional afterthought that employers extend their employees. Make no mistake, it’s the employer’s duty to guarantee this, not the employee’s to petition.

It doesn’t take a lot to end up in a job that takes without giving, exploits, drains and leaves you no energy for yourself (or in my case, my 1.5 year old cat). A year and 8 months into my last job, my mental health had completely broken down and my physical health was hanging by a thread. Reserving the details, I can tell you that I was not living for my own self anymore. Time and dignity were both taken from me.

As you might notice, I’ve spent a few months battling a degree of animosity towards my former employers. I use the word “battling” primarily for dramatic effect of course, as my conscience is as clear today as ever. This is because I awoke to these truths and decided to take my life and career into my own hands. I set out with gumption and with agency to give myself the career I wanted. In other words, I jumped ship.

Build a Game Plan

A few weeks ago, I got a message from my friend, a UI Designer, who told me about his own unpleasant experience at his job. He had begun a new position with a start-up that designed and managed an app. The work was interesting, the team seemed experienced and there were learning opportunities abound. But as it does, within a fairly short time it became clear that the MO of this new employer was exploitative and unprofessional, creating an atmosphere that appeared egalitarian but spoke an authoritarian language. The unrelenting six-day work weeks, initially an approachable challenge, started to cost more and more. Finally, my friend chose to have no more of it and decided to quit his job, as he absolutely should have.

This isn’t an enviable predicament for anyone in any discipline, but I invite you to spend a moment thinking about the context of my friend’s career. Aside from depressingly low salaries, the job market for young creative professionals in India can be volatile, or at best, unpredictable. So, when it comes to jumping ship, one could do with a game plan.

In case this helps…

You might choose to leave a job for a bucket of different reasons — you might graciously part ways or you might have the need to flee. At any rate, it helps to give some thought into how you might navigate this situation if/when it happens. My own experience with jumping ship taught me that isn’t something you hope you’ll have to endure, but it’s an eventuality worth being prepared for.

Here are a few things I learned, mostly in hindsight, from my experience of jumping ship. I hope they come in handy:

1. Stay calm and think things through: Avoid resigning in a fit of rage. Even if you’ve really had enough of your job, it pays (literally) to stay put until you have another offer. You’ve already set your intention to leave, now try to look inward and help make it easier for yourself ride out the last bit.

2. Be honest with yourself about what you want: Before you even start shooting applications like an automatic weapon, think about what you want out of this next step. Ask yourself the difficult questions — Where am I in my career, where do I want to be in x years? This is especially important if you’ve been contemplating a change in disciplines. Spend some time putting down the things you want from your next job and let this inform your immediate career move. This can include organisation culture, how much you want to get paid and nature of the team (small, big, hard-ass, chilled out, etc). State what you want and then go get it.

3. Have a portfolio ready to go: Even if it’s not fully updated, have a recent version of your portfolio stored on your phone that you can send across any time you happen to come upon an opportunity. It’s a good practice to update your portfolio once a month even when you’re completely happy with your job — should you need to leave, you won’t have to spend a big chunk of time updating/redesigning a 2 year old portfolio.

4. Stay active and updated on LinkedIn: I really wish I knew this sooner, but staying active and attractive on LinkedIn is in everyone’s best interest. This not only makes you visible to recruiters, but also enables you to keep an eye on the job market, understand the existing talent pool and help you figure out your edge. If/when you suddenly need to enter this market, you already know the state of things.

5. Rainy day savings: Please just save money. This is so important. Even if it’s a little bit each month, just save! When you need to jump ship, this insulation is extremely necessary (unless you still live with your parents LOL, but even then, you should save).

6. Stay practiced on interviews and negotiation skills: You’ve been at your current job for 3 years when you decide to leave. Based on your general level of experience, you may be completely prepared for what comes next. If you’re still reading this article (?), I’ll assume you’re not. There are loads of resources, videos, forums and articles online that’ll help you brush up on interview skills. Even if you think you’ve got it in the bag, there’s always something more to learn here.

7. Try not to be in a hurry: You might be tempted to, but don’t just take an offer because it’s there and you want to resign. You’d be doing yourself an injustice if, in your haste, you didn’t spot the red flags in an organisation because you were in a such a hurry to leave the previous one. However badly you might want to resign, make sure the offer you’re getting is the one you want, and the organisation you’re entering is the type you want to enter.

8. Remember that your employer needs you more than you need them: The benefits here are twofold (love that word). If you no longer get fulfilment from your job and you’re just staying for the money, there are innumerable other sources for that. Similarly, if a potential new employer isn’t able to give you the work/environment/culture/salary that you want, you will find it elsewhere — all you need to do is be sure of what you want and ask for it. You don’t need your employer; your employer needs you.

As a creative professional in my 20s working in India, I never felt like there was enough information specific to our discipline that might help us navigate the thorny world of corporate employment in this country. This isn’t a definitive toolkit, but rather a set of patterns I’ve observed through my experience, blended with some really good advice from people I trust, modified to make sense in the context of graphic designers.

Are you a creative professional who’s experienced something similar to things I’ve described, or even something contradictory? I’ll ask that you leave a response, so I might continue to improve on these points, and more creatives stand to benefit. You’ll be credited (Yay!).

Warmly, A Graphic Designer Who Jumped Ship was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve always enjoyed writing. I distinctly remember as a child I’d wanted to become a writer before choosing the art and design world. Writing was something I knew I was good at, but also knew had the potential to bore me very quickly. Put into an academic context, it made no sense to choose it over the allure of art school. The happy accident happened when the same art school allowed me choose creative writing as a minor. But funnily enough, I might not have needed that at all; I enjoyed writing research papers and essays for my other classes even more than I enjoyed creative writing. I like observing things around me and reflecting on them, and these assignments called for precisely that- observation and reflection.

I’ve had this page on Medium for around 5 years, having started it for purely utilitarian reasons. I had hoped to use it as a repository for written work that I deemed good enough to publish and share with potential employers- I’m particular about writing in communication design and wanted this to be known. It wasn’t a big deal but, at any rate, this was my work too and my portfolio needed diversification.

I have now been working as a Graphic Designer for four years, and have recently got myself out of a really difficult job which spanned 2 of them. This particular stint had left me drained, burned out and almost hating the only kind of work I knew how to make a living doing. The stresses of the last two pandemic years had taken their toll as well. My mental health was compromised and I felt like I wasn’t at the wheel anymore. Still, I was lucky enough to have had the wake-up call to take back control of my life before it was too late for my mind and body.

It was time to get things done — I got myself the kind of job I actually wanted, resigned the last one, took a month-long break and, very fortunately, met good people who gave me good advice at the right time. Setting the intention to turn this page into an active blog was just one of the improvements made in the past month (yes, of course I meditate now). It seemed a natural fit for somebody who enjoys writing and has far too much going round in her head at all times. And so, here we are!

I’m choosing not to delete any of the works (Pieces? Articles?) that I’ve already uploaded here, partly because I’m actually somewhat proud of them and learned a lot while working on them, and partly because I’m consciously choosing not to be a perfectionist. This work is already 5 years old, it’s not perfect and it is a little bit embarrassing to leave it here. But one of my big learnings from art school was to document process and development. Take a look if you feel like, I don’t mind. *Shrugs nonchalantly* Maybe you’ll even find some of it interesting. Maybe I’ll inspire you, or maybe you’ll be more curious about what exactly the hell it is that people do at art school. Whichever it is, make sure you let me know.

Happy reading!

Having just completed my first large scale, self driven art/design project, I was able to look back and reflect on the ridiculously nerve wracking fifteen week long journey that it was. There were the usual things — feeling hopeless while in the midst of it but now looking back to see how much I have learned from the pressure, gaining confidence in carrying my own project through autonomously, and so on — but there was also a fresh insight into something that I had never consciously encountered before, something that could have only occurred to me over a lengthy process and plenty of confusion. A new perspective on the artistic process, and the journey it takes you on.

At this point, I feel the need to address my understanding of the distinction between a design process and an artistic one. This might not be a universally accepted definition, but it is the understanding that I have achieved over the course of my design education. During a design process, structure is important. There is a research stage that focuses intensively on engagement with specific target groups and finding the needs of these groups, followed by ideations and iterations, which gradually leads into prototyping, testing and further refining of the prototype. While I did loosely follow the same structure in my process, I knew fairly early on that I was going to create an art piece as my final output, and this meant recognizing at that stage how I can manipulate the set and expected process to be more humanized, more relatable and better fitting within the lines of what constitutes art.

I’ve understood art as an empirical and divergent practice or thought, or as something that prompts the same. I have developed my artistic practice around the act of bringing art to people, bridging the gap that is almost always present, humanizing the work that artists do and creating work that is relatable to a larger, varying audience, as opposed to the usual concerned few.

In tandem with this understanding and practice, I tried throughout the process to include the people in the process as much as I could. One of the inspirations for my project was the artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, whose sits in the areas of autobiography, human connections and creation of mythologies from lived experiences (https://www.artsy.net/artist/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum). Taking inspiration from this artistic rationale, I went about engaging with and observing women, who became more than subjects. They were the content; they were the art itself as, at the time, I was simply representing them.

The piece developed, as did the artwork contained within it. All the materials, explorations and techniques developed as I prepared to carry out the execution of the final piece. In the middle of this rush of activity, I started to realize that the reins were no longer in my hand. I may have been making the decisions and choices, but the motive, the voices whispering in my ear and prompting me to go in a certain direction, was the process. Every interaction I had had up to that point, every epiphany, every experience and every sight and observation that I had taken note of, physically or mentally, seemed to be contained within a repository. It was no longer my repository, but that of the piece itself. This repository became the brain of the piece I was creating: the process.

The process became something that influenced every stroke and smudge that my hands put into the final execution, without my providing concrete conceptual validation behind it. I would not be able to reason out why a certain thing looked a certain way, but the process was the guide, with its all knowing repository on the subject I had spent weeks studying, researching, exploring and observing. I and many other skeptics and uncertain critics of the field of art would have contested the conceptual weight and relevance of, say, the emotional rage contained within a thick stroke of paint torn across a canvas. On looking back, I now know better than to ask “what does this thick stroke mean?”, but rather appreciate the representation of the repository of knowledge, that is the process behind a piece of art, its brain.

I would never have thought so deeply and come to this realization if it weren’t for the assessment juries that each Pre Thesis student’s project was put through. Understandably, being students, we are required to provide conceptual reasoning for every chapter of the journey of our projects and our output. Faced with these questions at the third and last of these, I thought as quickly and deeply as I could, hoping to dig and find the answer that these three experienced practitioners in the field of design were looking for in me. I, a Year Four student, presented them with an art piece that surfacially seemed to need too much conceptual linking and verbal guidance to rationalize all the visuals and imagery presented in it. Right there I realized that this was where design (or design process) ends and art (or artistic process) begins.

The artistic process led me to the creation of that detailed repository, which in turn informed every aspect of the piece, from its construction to its colours to its imagery. It would be futile to take someone through each and every one of these linkages, but it might well prove far more useful to introduce a viewer to this repository of knowledge gathered and allow them their own connection and contemplation with the piece. I would go as far as to say that the process itself then becomes the output. The piece is simply an expression of the process and its repository, but I could very well take the same repository and create a wholly different visual.

This for me is the beauty of the artistic process. While the general trend might be to look at process as a decidedly important means to an end, the artistic process in my practice is a guiding force that dictates every aspect of the output. It is an entity with a mind of its own and, if allowed, can be the most powerful aspect of art itself. Going forward from here, I think for the most part that I am glad that the confusion and chaos has paused for now, but this chaos provided me with a better knowledge of carrying out a large scale project than I did at the start of it. I am equipped with this beautiful new understanding of the artistic process and its role in my work, and I am convinced that chaos was the only thing that would have led me to this understanding. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see which direction it throws me in next.

Merpeople (lit. people of the sea)[1] are commonly understood to be mythical sea creatures that are top half human and bottom half fish. Legends of mermaids and merpeople have been around for approximately four thousand years and with the sheer vastness of Earth’s oceans, it is easy to see why (Radford, 2014). Merpeople have been described as being benevolent in some cultures and malevolent in others (Jepsen), with the most common perception of mermaids being that of beautiful, yet deadly, half fish-half women, whom sailors fear. Majority of the medieval myths and fantasies described them as being women of disarming beauty, with fish tails, who sat upon rocks combing their hair and baited sailors into death traps before devouring them[2].This is arguably the most common perception of mermaids. The concept of merpeople prevails now as it has prevailed for thousands of years, in cultures and civilizations all over the world. It is deep rooted in folklore and modern popular culture alike. This mythical beast has captured people’s imagination for millennia and continues to do so. This paper attempts to explain, explore and describe Mermaids and Merpeople as mythical sea dwellers and gauge their cultural impact, through a few lenses.

The first appearance of mermaids in our culture is said to have occurred in Assyria c.1000 BC[3]. The fertility goddess Atargatis turned herself into a fish from the waist down, casting herself into a lake. It appears that right from this first instance, mermaids seem to be associated with the idea of disarming beauty, power and foreboding. It is a well known fact that the sailors, pirates and seafarers of old believed that mermaids herald bad luck and death for ships. They were said to distract the sailors with their beauty before killing them (Higgins, 1996). Seafarers have often been depicted as superstitious and weak hearted men (see quotation below), and the concept of mermaids is, seemingly, one of many explanations adopted by them to calm and explain phenomena to their fearful minds. The convenient fact that these are essentially very beautiful women makes it debatably easier to solidify the belief and give them, as well as the general public, something to grasp on to. This deep rooted superstitious belief seems to me to be one of the facts most responsible for the theory of mermaids gaining traction in mainstream culture. It represented adventure, danger and mystery, and had beautiful women too. However, the earliest known depiction of the half human-half fish form was not the seductive mermaid, but that of the Babylonian Fish God Oannes, c.2000 BC, as mentioned by C.J.S. Thompson in his book The Mystery and Lore of Monsters[4]. Although it is the mermaids who are usually spotlight, it appears that the mermen were actually depicted earlier. The belief in certain lore, such as Greek, is that mermen and mermaids generally coexist, (in what could perhaps be called “mercommunities”?) and that mermen are understood to be uglier than their female counterparts[5].

A large chunk of what we know and understand about merpeople comes from Greek mythology. An offering of the Greek on this subject is that of the Sirens. Although they were originally believed to have been women with the bottom half and wings of a bird, some folklore suggests that they lost their feathers and entered the sea, growing tails like fish (Jepsen). The Sirens of Roman mythology, however, are women with a fish tail, descended from the River God Achelous[6]. It can be inferred that Sirens are cousins of the Merpeople. Sirens are essentially beautiful and seductive half-women with exceptional singing abilities, who would sing from rocky cliffs and lure ships and their sailors towards the rocks and hence to their death[7]. A notable mention of Sirens in Greek mythology is that in Homer’s Odysseus, where Odysseus orders his ship’s crew to plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast, so that he can listen to the song of the Sirens (Homer, Odysseus). Another instance of folklore regarding merpeople from Ancient Greece is the legend of Thessalonike, the half-sister of Alexander the Great. It is said that when Alexander died, she threw herself into the sea in grief, but her immortality caused her to grow a tail and become a mermaid. She lived in the Aegean Sea, terrorising any sailors that passed her who said that King Alexander was dead[8]. Greco-Roman folklore tells us much of what we know about merfolk and also, I feel, provides us with an insight into the rationale behind their respective depictions: why they are represented the way that they are.

The mermaid was regarded as an image of the seductive pleasures of the world and, as Ann Payne noted in her book on Medieval Beasts, the ‘sweet music of the sirens represented … the honeyed words of worldly temptation; the compliance of their victims typified the weakmindedness of men who allow themselves to be distracted from their proper course. (Higgins 1996, 9)

The beliefs and superstitions about merpeople invoke connotations that can be linked with general human nature and behaviour. The sailor’s-eye-view of mermaids can be interpreted as having implications of sexual desire and a fantasy of courting danger. Although contestable, today, we would perhaps find the older depiction of mermaids as being unnecessarily sexualised, yet, it reflected the time it was born into. This is not to imply that modern day depictions do not stray into sexualised territory, but the incidence of portraying a less feminine and more grotesque merperson is far more common today than it would have been even just fifty years ago. The merpeople depicted in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, are a fitting example of a more asexual and beastly representation. However, the medieval depiction of the mythical creature seems fitting for the searching, wandering and often, lonely sailors, to whom a mermaid can be seen to symbolise the longing that they may feel. This can be seen in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, where the bait-pirates nearly fall into the mermaids’ trap. It is not only the socio cultural aspect that plays a part in mermaid portrayals, but also people’s desire for a guiding figure. A pattern I have observed is that merpeople, through the ages of depictions, have often seemed to reflect peoples’ longing for some sort of divinity or superior being, who is beyond a simple Human: a figure that they can idolise. This can be seen in the cases of the Javanese Mermaid Queen, Nyi Roro Kidul, the goddess Atargatis, as mentioned above, the goddess Aycayia of the Caribbean region, and in Thai folklore, Ravana’s daughter Suvannamaccha, who tried to prevent Hanuman and the Vanaras from building a bridge to Lanka. It would appear that all these regional figures of lore, along with the Babylonia Fish God Oannes mentioned above, are merfolk in a divine stature. It appears then, that the patterns that arise in the depictions of merfolk through the ages can indeed be attributed to certain deep seated aspects of human nature: to be entranced by a mythical and mystical creature like a mermaid, which can be glorified into an idol.

With this, I move to conclude my exploratory investigation on the beings of mermaids and merpeople, and their cultural impact. The myth and lore of merpeople has a grasp on us that is fitting to the theatricality of the lore. They are dramatic creatures who have been given dramatic portrayals, whether on paper, canvas or film, that have captured the hearts and minds of generations of people. It can be expected that the perception, understanding and depiction will develop further over the time to come, as folklore and mythology is studied, interpreted and reproduced further. The exciting fact about folklore and mythology is that it can yield vast quantities of interpretations and creates a huge scope. There is unlikely to come a time when a line will be drawn on the extent of lore regarding merfolk.

Endnotes

1. Carl Pettit, “10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Mermaids,” TheFW, September 26, 2012, , accessed April 08, 2017, http://thefw.com/mermaid-facts/.
2. Jim Higgins, “A Mysterious Mermaid,” Archaeology Ireland 10, no. 3 (Autumn, 1996): 9, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20562279.
3. Philip Jepsen, “On the Origin of Mermaids,” Mermaids of Earth, accessed April 4, 2017, http://mermaidsofearth.com/on-the-origin-of-mermaids/.
4. Benamin Radford, “Mermaids and Mermen: Facts and Legends,” LiveScience, accessed April 4, 2017, http://www.livescience.com/39882-mermaid.html.
5. Linda S. Watts, Encyclopedia of American Folklore (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), 266.
6. Jepsen, “On the Origin of Mermaids”.
7. Mike Dixon-Kennedy, Encyclopedia of Greco-Roman Mythology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1998), 281.
8. Philip Lee, “Thessalonike of Macedon- The Mermaid Princess,” Quintessential Ruminations (blog), May 27, 2014, accessed April 5, 2017, https://quintessentialruminations.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/thessalonike-of- macedon-the-mermaid-princess/.