Design by AI: Why we need to hack the algorithm

Hello, and welcome to The Developer Podcast, where we talk about how to make cities worth living in, which often has to do with the spaces between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. My name is Christine Murray, editor in chief of The Developer and director of The Festival of Place. As we increasingly use AI to summarize and generate our work, are we oversimplifying, conforming, and edging out the diversity and complexity that make cities worth living in? Today, I'm speaking to Professor Jyotja Trevarenas, the director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre and professor in the faculty of design at OCAD University in Toronto. Jutta established the Inclusive Design Research Centre in 1993 and proactively works to ensure that society is designed inclusively. She's been looking at AI and has noted how it often offers answers and solutions that are typical, popular, normative, predictable, and statistically average. The more data we give it, the more it determines what an average human does and how they behave. But that's not where innovation and great ideas come from, and arguably that's not where great places come from either. At its worst, in the built environment, that could mean places that harm people who are not considered average. Yutta believes it could be possible to retrain these AI models and transform the way they work so that they create places that are inclusive to everyone. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let's listen in. Hi, and welcome to the developer podcast. Tell me about what it is that you do at the Inclusive Design Research Centre in Toronto. So I'm the director and founder of the Inclusive Design Research Centre or the IDRC. I founded it back in 1993, which was, almost pre Webb and, specifically to look at how can we use the, new affordances of digital systems to create, environments, systems, products that are more inclusive of human diversity. So moving from a one size fits all version of universal design to the possibility of recognizing that everybody is different and we need different things and that our lives are changing all the time. So how can we create systems, including, cities, buildings, but especially digital products so that they work for that full range of human needs. So you spoke recently at the Festival of Place about AI, and this is something that's being increasingly used to make our work easier, our lives easier in the built environment. I mean, we've got designers who listen to this podcast, people in planning. They're all looking at how they can use this, to kind of streamline or speed up some of their processes. Your talk was about what happens when AI gets it wrong. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, AI, which was, you know, probably less on your radar when you started the design center, you know, more, critical now, and how, you know, this, mindset that AI is built from is, intersects with …