A road to where?

The human story is littered with unknown, imperfect, and improbable events.

For thousands of years though, an infinite amount of insignificant events were taking place simultaneously within the circles of our ancestors which coincidentally set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Those insignificant events were stories we told one another – and over time, we got better and better at telling them.

Some of the earliest evidence of such stories took shape around 39,000 BCE when our distant ancestors illustrated pictures of animals and landscapes that made up the world around them on cave walls. We call these pictographs. Over time, these pictographs evolved like the humans who wrote them into something we now call cuneiform, the first written language.

More recently, we may think of storytelling in the form of that new terrible Marvel movie, or quintessential ghost story around a campfire. Maybe it’s a great novel that you just can’t put down. Maybe it’s the song that you play way too loud in your car. No matter the medium, the feeling we get from the inimitable human activity of creating, telling, and digesting stories is an evolutionary oddity that has been invaluable to the survival and success of our species.

Before I continue, I want to point out that in writing this, I’m reminded of a blog I wrote a blog in 2019 titled “Curb your cynicism” that one could point out as being a directly contradictory to the points I’m about to make. Here is that blog:

Curb your cynicism (2019)

I worry that designers may become too cynical. As I doom-scroll through news headlines it would be negligent to deny the constant state chaos we ingest on a daily basis. Regardless of how we react to this perceived state of the world, I believe designers take it particularly hard. We are inherent problem solvers. We tend to gravitate towards things that we want to expose and visually create solutions for. After all, staying current on trends, and reading the news is an important part of what we do.

Climate change, the bleak polarization of our politics, potential nuclear warfare with countries led by nefarious characters all seem to dominate these headlines. Naturally, these are things we should at least want to try to resolve not just as designers (who have limited capacity to affect such things) but as people.

With that being said, amid the chaos there is a lot of good in the world. It’s happening in little pockets all around us. All we have to do is look beyond our screens, and we will find it. As you read this I want you to ask yourself, what was the last thought you had about your future? Was it an optimistic thought? Was it skeptical? Scary? It could be all of those, and every one in between. Make note of that, and understand that it is okay to feel however it is you feel.

Regardless of what lies ahead in our future, through the mundane day-to-day, and the pressure of the anxieties we feel, we must not become overwhelmed with melancholy. We must keep our creative wheels turning. As much as it is our nature to solve problems, it is also our duty to make the world a better place, and inspire the current world we live in. That will keep us going in the right direction, whatever direction that may be.

I wrote then that designers are inherently problem solvers, and that we “…gravitate towards things that we want to expose and visually create solutions for.” For the most part, I still believe that. So looking around at my industry today, I have to ask – what the hell are we doing? What problems are we solving by creating digital tools that replace the human nature of storytelling with algorithms? What problems are we solving by giving the keys of self expression through songwriting, painting, writing, photography and otherwise to a machine? I’m of course talking about the use of artificial intelligence in the creative industry.

Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution led us to this goldilocks period of sorts. This age is abundant with technology, the right amount of arrogance, ignorance, and greed for us to give away the very thing that made us who we are.

Where will this yellow brick road lead us, I wonder?