One year ago this week I started my journey at IBM.

My first impression was I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life but I made a promise to Steph and myself to give it a year. Moving to a new job hurts — I needed time to sort things out and give myself time to adjust.

I left Ogilvy with a number of goals in mind for what I wanted to do next with my career; get much deeper into real technology, explore the balance of brand with experience, and really make stuff, not just marketing and artifacts.

Across the board I didn't feel I was hitting the mark. I felt I was letting myself down and I needed an opportunity to really dive into something that was outside of my comfort level. Whenever I am stressed out, confused, frustrated — my reaction is to put pen to paper. Maybe that is my Dad coming through, but I find that hard work usually pays dividends, maybe not directly in a way you see, but it does.

My next project was a fire-drill to "clean up an experience" for an IBM Watson prototype.

"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century." —J.G. Ballard

I spent the holidays this year overwhelming my family with what Watson is, but if you aren't familiar — Watson is "creating a new partnership between people and computers that enhances, scales and accelerates human expertise." It's not all winning Jeopardy or chatting with Bob Dylan.

Watson is cognitive computing.

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Cognitive computing is machine learning.

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Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence.

My inner 8-year-old nerd just freaked out. I've been obsessed with science fiction from an early age — maybe it was my unique timing in the world. Close Encounters of the Third Kind left an indelible impression on my childhood mind — my mom tells me I would watch on loop. E.T. was every kid's best friend, Star Wars, and NASA — I remember watching Challenger on TV, as does every kid my age. But the astronaut/science bit never panned out for me — advanced math thing threw a wrench in my plans. But now, here I am at 34 getting the opportunity to use colors and pixels — essentially crayons and pencils — to help shape A.I.

The team I got to work with impressed me; everyone has their unique skill set and respected one another, they bust their collective asses, and in turn we produced something that proved a proof of concept and developed Watson skills in a new way. It was unveiled at a TED x Watson event and even featured in a Fast Company article. In layman's terms, we made a computer watch a couple thousand videos of the best minds in our current world and use them to give perspectives on complex questions like "What is the impact of war on creativity?"

Got me — hook, line, and sinker.

The thing about these projects is they're scary, intimidating, and fun — it's uncharted territory. These are the infantile stages of consumers interacting with A.I., at scale. The patterns and visualizations we develop will become the shorthand and building blocks for what we evolve to as users.

There is an inherent pessimism to Watson and similar A.I. integrations — but they are really a crystalline reflection of ourselves. Watson is us. Tay is us. The platforms are only as good as what they get — the cloud version of "you are what you eat." It starts to get very complex — and really interesting — when you start to think about the implications of morality and societal beliefs. Tay didn't technically fail — it perfectly reflected the depths of Twitter and our digital mores — our Freudian subconscious in 140 characters. It ingested the nonsense it interacted with and used that as knowledge baseline to begin interacting with humans — but instead of questioning why as humans our initial response is to teach it hatred — we pass it off as a failure. I'm not keen to reflect on why that happened, that is well beyond the scope of one blog post — but it reinforces the idea of providing context.

There is a visual state of proving that we must show users; how and why Watson got somewhere. Watson can complete tasks in milliseconds but right now there is a sense of anxiety about how a user got to a point — we have to show them that we got to X because of Y.

That can be solved a number of ways but they are only temporary. Users are adopting patterns so quickly that we quickly trash that and move to something more intuitive. Users will graduate to appreciating that what they are seeing is personalized and there for an inherent reason — overtime the pessimism will turn into appreciation of convenience.

The other challenge I've been thinking on has been designing Watson interactions for non-linear experiences. This hasn't been an exact project that has come up but more conversations and discussion and maybe a direct reflection of playing way too much Division on Xbox — sorry Steph. I had a rich conversation on Slack the other day with one of my colleagues about where we go when we move beyond screens — as designers and experience architects. I was being a bit flippant when I suggested that the notion of UI design beyond screens is B.S. but, in reality, it turns into something more akin to classic product design and game design. A balance of classic physical product design and studies in non-linear storytelling than anything remotely close to my current definition of UI design. We will be designing initially for the proving steps again — ingestion, reaction, ambient clues, and notional guides will be our building blocks until users begin the quick adoption of these patterns.

And where we go from there will be just as challenging and exciting as the past year has turned out to be. I'm eager to see where Watson leads us to. I know we are only getting started and it will only improve as teams integrate the ability to align data and experiences in powerful ways. Thanks Watson for making the past year turn into one of the best — shit — there are robots at the office…ROBOTS!

Thanks Steph for being a sounding board and being slightly interested in things that are outside your purview. Thanks to all my incredibly talented coworkers & friends; the iX team, you guys and gals are drastically better at this than I am. WatsonACTS, your brains intimidate the hell out of me, but my go-kart skills are constantly improving. Finally, IBM for letting an art school goon like me in the door, never thought I'd be punching with the giants.

Cheers to another year.

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This private publication is not affiliated with my employers or professional associations. Personal blog, personal opinions. Not speaking for anyone but myself. ✌️