My Four Favorite Design Quotes In The Age Of LLM AI

There are four quotes that have stayed with me for the last 30+ years, that I’m pulling out of the past for the upcoming 2023 #DesignInTech Report on Design and Artificial Intelligence.

One is by the late Nobel laureate and CMU AI pioneer Dr. Herbert Simon (1916–2001) who had an impact on economics and design, in addition to computer science. And the second is by MIT computational design and AI pioneer Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the One Laptop Per Child project; the third is by MIT design visionary Muriel Cooper (1924–1994). Lastly, the fourth is by Harvard and MIT computational design OG-est OG William J. Mitchell (1944–2010).

Enjoy! And please check out the 2023 Design in Tech Report at designintech.report when it comes out on March 12, 2023!

Favorite Quote #1: Simon’s Scissors

“Human rational behavior is shaped by a scissors whose blades are the structure of task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor.” — Herbert Simon, “Invariants of Human Behavior” in Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 1990, p.1–19

I’ve kept AI pioneer’s “scissors” metaphor for how the brain works in past Design in Tech Reports. I recall Dr. Simon’s using it at a time when I was really struggling to…