This article in the Harvard Design Magazine is not narrowly about geospatial topics, but more broadly about AI and its potential roles in design, including cartographic design: In “AI as a design medium”, Eric Rodenbeck, lecturer in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and founder of Stamen Design1 proposes positioning AI as a medium for design inquiry rather than a mere tool for producing answers most efficiently:
AI as a material to be tested, misused, and interrogated. Here, prompts become sketches, outputs become sites of critique, and design becomes a practice of engaging with complexity rather than resolving it.
In the article, Eric mentions some interesting examples of using AI in this way in the broad domain of design, in a course he teaches at the Harvard GSD. The piece concludes with a call back to his experience at Stamen Design in 2005 when Google entered the mapping space:
When Google Maps launched in 2005, I had just been in business at Stamen designing maps for a few years. My first, terrified thought was: “That’s it. We’re done; no humans will be involved in the design of maps moving forward.” The opposite turned out to be true; a golden age of web mapping was, from my point of view, partially enabled by Google, making maps so easy to deploy that everyone wanted their own. I think we are seeing something similar with the rise of AI in the design space.
What I worry about most right now is not that AI will replace designers. It is that we will approach AI with too little ambition. If we treat it only as a faster way to do what we already know how to do, we get more of the same—faster maps, faster interfaces, faster summaries.
I won’t quote the conclusion of the article here, but I recommend reading it in full, especially if you are more broadly interested in AI.
Footnotes
Stamen Design is a San Francisco-based design and technology studio that specializes in data visualization, cartography, and interactive experiences. You likely have seen some of their map-centric work and may know some of their web map styles, for example “Toner” and “Watercolor.↩︎