machina was a design proposal presented for consideration of the KiteGG team for their annual artificial intelligence conference, in this instance for May 2023."
Designers: Breanna Dulay, Andrea Leon
Research: before we started our ideation process, we had to inform ourselves
This included a deep dive into AI, as we had to understand what topics might be included in the conference. We took notes on different fields of AI, industries that utilize or could utilize its capabilities, different use cases, and related topics.
Out of all three ideas, we found AI in Daily Life to be the strongest since neural networks and the evolution of AI were often represented using common and sometimes overused visual cliches.
With our information mapped out, we came up with three primary ideas to base our design around and created moodboards for the two we felt had the strongest potential.
Ideation
We continued our brainstorm on paper to let our ideas flow more freely.
Our final decision on our ideas was to go through with the AI in daily life concept.
We started visualizing our concept by creating mockups. Although we didn't go through with these designs, it helped us to see what themes we had envisioned in our head and how these ideas were received by people upon review.
At this point, our team had lost some traction in figuring out which direction to go. We wanted to have our visuals be unique in the sense that it wouldn't get lost in the first results that a google search about AI would bring up, but also not too far off that it would be hard for people to connect the dots.
Our next point of action was to recenter and consider our idea at its basic stage: artificial intelligence in our daily lives. This brought us to look at smart devices, and their different silhouettes.
Execution
Inspired by the simple shape and form of our everyday devices, we took pictures of different types of devices: a smartphone, laptop, camera, and smart home device.
After multiple testing processes running our photographs through Illustrator, we decided on focusing on the smartphone, which allowed us to play around with the simple shape.
We also had to consider the conference, its audience, and what the needs were in terms of merchandise, information hubs, and media.
Promotional teaser for social media