The Generative Designer (with Patrik Hübner)

“Where there’s data, there’s design.”

Those are the first words on Patrik’s site—a too-blunt synthesis of his position as a designer, method, and work.

I had been following Patrik for over a year before I decided to reach out to him. As I found out, he’s personable, kind and incredibly generous with his ideas. And an amazing designer.

Patrik self-describes as a creative director and creative technologist, but there’s so much more to his story. Indeed, his practice applies a deep knowledge of code, systems, and branding, although a deeper read reveals a very personal focus on the relationship between technology and humans and the role of design in society.

And then, there’s his work. Beautiful and hard to define: tech-forward and human-centered, branded and spontaneous, visionary and comfortable today. I believe there are two sides to great work, a vision and the ability to sell it. Patrik, obviously, has both.

You can find out more about Patrik Hübner here.

My prompt:

He woke up and, like every morning, opened the TimesAlgo app. The endless feed began with the familiar message (“Good morning, Cosmo. It’s February 2nd, 2028”.) It included the weather, the latest news, and suggestions for the weekend. He was scrolling fast when he saw a headline that made him stop.

“New Cosmo x Algo—The world around you.”

The summary explained that the app update matches the news with their life events, changing how they relate to the world. The company had been testing it internally, and the results had been so positive that it was being rolled out to all users.

Cosmo thought about it for a moment and then tapped to install.

The update was installed and restarted, and he immediately realized it was entirely new. Instead of the typical scroll, a dashboard organized stories around Cosmo’s present, upcoming, and recent events (he could also stretch it farther into his past and future.) A reminder about his dinner with Inez that night was paired with a recent interview with the chef and a reminder to order the sweetbreads he had so enjoyed a few years earlier. A story he’d been following about a breakthrough in wearables was presented along with a detailed program showing how it could improve his fitness program. A list of articles about the IoT, related to a presentation he’d been preparing for months, ran right below. He tried the app for a few minutes and felt he had to stop. “This is not normal,” he thought; “it’s like it knows everything about me.”

He put his phone away and went to work.

He opened the app at the office a few times during the day. The dashboard spontaneously reorganized each time to bring him what he needed at that precise moment. All through the day, Cosmo could anticipate, understand, and react to anything faster than ever before. He started liking it more.

By day’s end, Cosmo realized his outlook had changed. The app no longer felt creepy. It was like having someone predict his every need, but only because they cared about him.

On the way to dinner, he prepared for the next day.

The chat:

Diego Kolsky: While your work fits well in the branding world, you strike me as a designer with a different background and interests. How did you get started in generative design?

Patrik Hübner: I started coding at a young age, at around 11 or 12. I had begged my father for a computer for quite some time, and after a while, he relented. He said I could have it if I were willing to pay for it with 5 years of birthday and Christmas presents. It was an 80x286, with 60 Megs of hard drive and probably 2 Megs of RAM. It was incredibly cool—I just loved it.

With my youthful enthusiasms, it made me feel that if I were just smart enough and invested enough time, I could create anything with it. I felt the same fascination as when I looked at a guitar. It’s like every song you could ever think of is right there on the guitar’s fretboard. You just have to discover it.

Looking back, I think those thoughts relate strongly to where I am now as a creative technologist and designer. To be able to program you need to have a clear understanding of the world around you, describe it as precisely as possible, and then try to of turn it into an objective set of instructions. That’s what programming is—to make something accessible through very clear rules, knowing the steps it takes to make things happen.

Much later, a friend showed me a book on generative design. He was a musician, making live, minimal electronic music, but with analog equipment. He invited me to explore how I could use the book to make real-time live visuals so that we could start a creative collaboration in a multisensory space. For about year, I coded every night until 4 am after my day-job working as a creative at a branding agency—always coding visuals and thinking about new ways to use music as a driving-force for them. At some point, I started realizing that music wasn’t the only set of data I could work with to generate design, so my work quickly expanded, and I started combining that approach with what I had been doing in branding and communication design.

Diego: One thing I find stunning in your work is how much more concrete and relatable it is than typical generative art. People can relate to it; we get into it and understand what it is.

Your project for Lexus contains a rich story about the game, the team, and the competition. There is a narrative that adds depth to the outcome. And I think that’s a good starting point to explore your work because it relates to where generative design is going.

Patrik: I think you’re right. But before I continue, I want to emphasize that there are probably as many perspectives on what generative design is as there are players in the field.

For me, the core of generative design is always about reflecting on the creative potential of our environment and how it can open up new perspectives. That’s what I did for the first couple of years by engaging with what is called Creative Coding: An open-minded, iterative approach to the creative potential of code as an artistic medium. Just basically start running, reflect, iterate and repeat, right? Creative Coding is an open-ended journey of exploration. You’re not working on something very specific but rather on understanding and seeing what it can yield. I understand it to be the ideation process, the initial spark of generative design because it’s very free. Generative design on the other hand is very focussed, it is about combining practical design methods and strategies and utilizing them to achieve a specific goal.

Obviously, communication is always at the core of my work— how do I get people emotionally invested in an idea, a product, a brand? I achieve this by using a fusion of data, programming, storytelling, interaction, and the design to frame narratives from a new perspective.

There are only a finite number of stories that we can tell each other as humans. So it’s more about finding new perspectives of how we can frame an idea in a way that hasn’t been accessible to people before. At the core of that is my use of data.

But data is such an abstract word… To me, data is an expression of everything you can find in our natural world, of what we do as humans. Everything in our environment can be expressed as data nowadays… most of it anyway. I try to connect people with the world through data-driven stories and expression. To help them gain a new perspective on a subject and have them re-discover something they seemingly have seen a million times – when I achieve this, this turns into a meaningful and relatable experience. Then, it tells a story; it’s not just a technical execution.

I read this wonderful book. You probably know this book… [he picks up a copy of How to Speak Machine by John Maeda] There’s a line in it that really resonated with me: a technologist thinks, ‘I do because I can,’ while a humanist thinks, ‘I do because I care.’ I’ve been coding and programming since I was a kid, primarily because I was interested in humans, people, and our world. That’s my anchor. That’s my frame of reference. Yes, I use technology in what I do, but technology is not necessarily my primary focus. Technology is the enabler. I don’t build stuff because I can build stuff. When I want to connect a topic, a brand, or an idea with humans, I need to understand and dive deeper.

At the start, I always ask my clients: “What is it that you actually do?” And the surface-level answers don’t do it—it’s really about understanding what remains when you strip all the surface stuff away.

Their answer gives me an entry point to framing that story.

For Lexus, for example, it was obviously the interplay of the players and their positions on the map. That was actually the key. That is what decides everything. Where they are they, and where. How could they turn that into an advantage?

At the time, I hadn’t yet played League of Legends. I needed to be able to talk to coaches and people who understand the game. Otherwise, I knew I would just layer something on top of it that would not be relatable. And this game is a personal experience for a lot of the audience, and I couldn’t screw that up.

So, no matter the topic, to get to more relatable, more real, more interesting solutions, I try to surface the nature of the topic I’m working with, find what is representative of that idea in the real world, and make that part of the living brand, of that dynamic identity.

Diego: I looked at your site again and found a section on your methodology. So, yes, you start with the idea. But you refer to Plato’s definition of the idea: the essence of the object, which can take infinite forms. That, to me, is a great working definition of an idea as the seed for generative design.

Patrik: A lot of what I talk about now is the result of teaching generative design at design universities. And I use these concepts to get people in the mindset of generative design and its real potential. People still cannot grasp what it is, they only see the end results. Most of the talk currently is about automation and machine learning. But for me, technology, for technology’s sake, doesn’t hold meaning. So it is really about this connection of the environment with storytelling through generative design, and having an empathetic approach. And also another question which I’m very interested in that is directly related to all of this is the topic of co-creation. It cannot be just humans leading the way because that limits yourself and the potential of what you can do. But it can also not be the promise that, you know, that machines are gonna do everything because then it becomes meaningless anyway.

So it’s like the co-creation between man and machine and using the individual strength, and what comes from that. I’m intrigued by the question of how a machine can become a creative partner. What it takes do enable that. But also how you can think of new spaces and forms of expression that are different from the tools, interfaces, and narratives that we have today. Right? That’s what I’m really interested in.

It’s also why I got into branding: It’s is a field that forces you to be very precise and concise, to remove everything that isn’t needed, and to always just boil it down to one story, one concept. One thing that people can remember. And I think that's a great challenge for somebody like me.

Diego: I’m intrigued by AI because with that computing power comes decision-making on the fly, and spontaneity comes in. A lot of other concepts are brought in, too.

Patrik: You could argue that, both in traditional generative design or the broader aspect of generative design and machine learning, you always have three components. There are data, forms, and rules. These are the three things that make-up systems. For machine learning, you input both form and data and output rules. It basically uses large data sets in combination with unsupervised learning to extract rules. And for traditional generative design, you input rules and data, and output form, right? Depending on the project’s challenges and goals, I prioritize and use the components differently. I use machine learning to extract rules and then feed those rules, as part of a rule set, into a hand-crafted system which, in combination with those rules, other rules, and incoming data streams, generates form. It’s an approach in layers and less about only using AI going forward – that would be too limiting and, quite frankly, boring to me.

For me, the real value of machine learning lies in the fact that it allows me to tap into aspects that were not available to data-driven generative design before, specifically anything related to qualitative data. So basically, anything that requires an interpretation. Is it funny, or is it beautiful? Good or bad? They’re not a 0 or a 1. You can’t measure that, you need to interpret it. And that’s what machine learning excels at. And that’s why I feel it is very powerful.

But, at the same time, it’s not an easy, or a simple, or sexy way to sell that. That’s why, I guess, most of the companies are delivering applications based on prompts that get you an image and you’re done. But that’s not how it’s going to work. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But again, I’m incredibly excited about machine learning, just a bit bored with the way people are selling it and talking about it in the present.

Diego: Following on what’s on your method page on your site, the next concept you bring up is a program or a mediation scheme. And, I don’t know if I read on the same page, or elsewhere, that you take on the position of an orchestra director, which you find that freeing. It’s you and the machine, generating together, if I got it right?

Patrik: Yes, absolutely. That’s what I'm most excited about, this space of opportunity or possibilities that I build. The difference between traditional or static design and generative design is that instead of turning an idea into a specific form immediately, it is really that the program is a mediator between the idea, the creative person, and the end result, which leads to new opportunities. It requires the creative person, the actual human, to specifically express what they see in nature, to turn that into rules. It requires systemic and also programmatic approaches. Uncouple yourself from the actual process of creation, but you create that space for it.

It’s being sold as something new, but it’s not. You can go way back. I’m very inspired by John Cage, who in the 1950s created compositions that included the audience, the physical context, and properties of the location, which were part of the outcome; or Fluxus in the 1960s, and the idea of breaking down the division between stage and audience by having scripts for things that can happen, and seeing how it evolves. They work with that same core idea: composing a set of rules, and see how that plays out given different environmental circumstances.

There were so many projects in which I tapped into datasets, starting with expectations of what the outcome would be. And in reality, they turned out quite differently. That is also one part of this work that is so interesting and exciting: It’s not just a top-down approach anymore, in which a couple of people sit in a room, think of something, and then create it.

I had a project on my website [The Pulse], one of the more complicated ones from a storytelling perspective. We tapped into Twitter conversations to create a key visual for a conference on women and politics. We listened to those conversations and used them as data. We were expecting negative conversations because it was such a hard topic. But looking at the real data, It was like 95% positive, and only very few were negative.

So it’s the same idea, that creating a space is beneficial for you as a creative person and at the time it’s beneficial for those receiving your work. In a hyper atomized, tailored-to-you world the job of a generative designer is also about mediating between different groups. I think that’s how I see designers working in the future because, as technology frees up what you do with your hands, you get more time to think about other important things—that’s going to be incredibly important.

Why are we even designing things? What is the actual most important role of designers? Isn’t it to make untapped spaces into something you can understand and associate concepts with emotion rather than creating media fragments? And what does that then mean going forward?

Diego: In my work and teaching, I always come back to relationships. And I think of relationships as the evolution, if you will, of the communications designer. You create programs where the output can be influenced by the user individually, which to me can take many forms. One is, of course, to move levers and add inputs (an image, a message.) But another could be adding my own data. Have you played with that at all?

Patrik: Yes, absolutely—a lot of my projects incorporate that in some form or capacity. Agencies always want to know how I work, and I always say form and end result are only the final things I think about in the creative process. I always think about the idea first. What is the essence of a product or brand? How can I extract a story from that? How can I find directions towards interesting expressions in the environment? And what does that mean in terms of data? If I want to focus on something very personal, it would be relationships with people and the things surrounding me. And if I want to tell a more global story it would be something like the weather, or the population of your city, or whatever. It is very unique to each project and each route, because you can find different routes and stories for every project.

To me, the projects I am most fascinated always use data from the environment. And again, just to express that once more, the environment can be the world itself, or us people in it. This leads to the fact that each design, each form has a very specific reason for why it looks that way in this very moment and why it looks different when maybe somebody else looks at it, or if something else occurs in our world. This is where I feel the process becomes meaningful. Then, it tells a story, and it has more than one layer to it. And this is also, for me, the most important aspect of generative design. It invites you into a space that shows you a different perspective. That’s why I hardly ever work with designs and data based on randomness. Randomness, to me, doesn’t provide an expression of something real or relatable.

Diego: I think that randomness, in a way, is also one of the shortcomings in how AI is presented. It’s the fact that you give it a prompt, and the model will generate a series for you to choose from. So, authorship and the participation of the designer are very limited. If I don’t have control over the tool, like you do, then I only get to pick. But, as you said, randomness is futile. If I get infinite choices, then there’s nothing to choose. It’s a contradiction in itself…

Patrik: There’s a huge range of how you can interpret generative design. I am very interested in doing open explorations and being surprised by them. But then there are projects that need a lot of control. They need to be specifically on brand. They must never do this or that, which is just as possible. I mean, that’s the beauty of it. Right? We are generating spaces of opportunity. And we can control how limited or how open they are. And obviously, also for just specific usage. That’s very practical because you could argue that you don’t even need a corporate design manual anymore if you use it in the field of branding.

There’s a huge argument to be made about what creativity is. You could always say that, while there is a huge amount of potential in generative design, it is always just creativity of the second order, that it’s not a real leap or real spark because everything that has been put in there has, in one way or another, is predictable. It’s the only way these systems can learn and operate, and unless some very different paradigms are being discovered, which people are researching but which have not been put into action, it’s always just going to feed you back something that was already there.

Again, that’s not what telling stories and connecting with people is about, right? It’s about creating those opportunities. I am specifically in a position where I did exit my old agency, which was using a tried and true formula, and put myself into a position where each project is completely bespoke, totally different, a new journey. We sometimes have no idea what’s going to happen, and I love those projects the most because I can trust the toolkit and ways of how I work and at the same time be on a journey towards an expression that may never have been implemented before. That is still fascinating to me.

But this might make people less familiar with the approach also be, you know, a little bit afraid of it, right?

Diego: Yeah, that’s what I was pointing to: There’s a certain degree of chance; you’re the editor of whatever possibilities come back. If you get 60 iterations a second, you just choose from what you get. And I think that’s fine, as long as you can set the rules. But that is not what AI models allow for yet.

Patrik: I think you can always argue that it isn’t the end result that matters, but the story. There’s this anecdote of someone buying an old painting at the pawnshop for a couple of bucks, and it turns out it’s an old Michelangelo worth millions. It’s the same painting it was before that discovery, right? Nothing physical about it has changed. It’s the story that creates the value. And that’s the same thing with all these AI-generated images. If you can create, like, a million, a billion of those, then it becomes completely meaningless. It is just the story that adds the meaning and value back.

It comes back to that quote of John Maeda. Purely technology-focused people might be limited in their understanding of these aspects of value through story, because they tend to connect more with the technology than the needs and realities of actual people. I think that is why the designer’s position and voice are so important. Knowing how to code helps, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I think what you need to be able to do is understand the core potential of generative design as a new mindset. As long as you can discover ideas and share them in a way with somebody who understands it and who can turn that into action, you’ve won. Yes, code is cool, but it’s not necessary at the core of generative design. And I think that’s part of my mission: to enable as many people as possible to think and act that way and then team up with whoever can make that vision a reality.

Diego: I have a couple of questions that are more practical. One has to do with clients; you said they may ask about the result instead of the story. Is that a difficult thing to navigate? Are people more open to it now? How do you reframe those expectations?

Patrik: It’s probably one of the biggest challenges in this space because generative design’s biggest advantage is also somewhat of its weakness—that it is all still quite new and undiscovered. And if you try to show what it can enable practically, there are comparably few cases to reference. So it’s really about the skill to be able to explain the benefit of working generatively, that it means a dynamic and open living identity or brand design that enables us to frame these stories differently, that it opens up a space where dynamic situations can evolve over time, that we can have people interact – all these things. And it’s always about kind of making it tangible for the clients from that perspective. I can show them Brute, I can show them Lexus, I can show them other projects, but they would also need to understand the input/output, the formula, and everything else we’ve been talking about…

I think it is important to help them understand the space by somewhat painting a picture in their minds about what could be possible. This certainly does need a special kind of client. Somebody who trusts you and who believes in you. And that’s really difficult. I had to build a reputation over many years and learn to be able to talk about it. If you’re new in that space, going to someone and saying we’re gonna build it generatively, but I cannot show you how, or what it’s gonna look like, and there’s hardly any cases… that’s a really tough sell.

That also comes back to why I believe the promise of everything that’s possible hasn’t been fulfilled yet.

Diego: One more question: You’ve been doing this for as long as I haven’t. What do you see coming up? What are you excited about? What are you dreaming of next?

Patrik: We’re in the early stages. If you want to predict the future, look at the past…

We come from a time when, in the 50s and 60s, people were trying to revolutionize society, and creativity was being torn down and reimagined. It was maybe one of the most creative times for quite a while. And then, in the 90s, the Net Art movement, and this question of how modern technologies and the Internet can be used to question society, information, and what it means to be yourself in a new digital realm. These were all deep questions that were discussed on an incredibly creative level.

And then, at some point, it all became very professional. It all became very one-size-fits-all. I think many aspects of these conversations got lost or pushed entirely toward the art sector, which is different in intention and perception. I’m not an artist, so I’m not really qualified to say anything about that space. Generative design, if you think about it this way, makes people question and think again; it gives you that beginner’s mindset again. It’s not just about finding the most usable and immediately practical solution, but it’s about reaching people in an incredibly saturated and loud market, where everybody is so good everybody can create the most awesome posters, the most awesome apps, everything. And, with machine learning, it will get better or worse, depending on who you are. So our only chance is to come up with new and innovative ideas. It’s less about finding new technologies but finding a new mindset. And so I feel that’s where it come full circle.

On a societal level, it is incredibly important not to forget that we, as humans, have connections, emotions and structures. And I think that’s maybe where a lot can happen, if not only people with a technical background are more able to use these methods, but when people from the arts, design, and culture get into the conversation. And that’s also why I am trying to share as much as I do. Because I feel like it’s so important to not always just think about products. Yes, you could argue this dude is doing branding and marketing, and yes, I am, but I am also thinking more about how to apply these things on a societal level to make you understand or connect differently to broader topics like climate change or our history as humans—this is something you can apply to everything.

I also think it is going to become more normal. I recently had a conversation with a student of mine about dynamic identities. To her, it feels almost normal for a brand to have a dynamic identity because she’s from a generation that realizes there isn’t a single truth, a single point of view. And she’s actually very suspicious of anybody and anything claiming to possess a single truth. This combination of being personalized but also having a story that is relatable and connects you to others. I think this is where the field will be headed.

And from a technological point of view, I am very interested in augmented reality as a technology that is bridging the gap between the digital and the physical worlds. I’m not personally interested in virtual reality because I feel it’s a very isolated experience. AR, once it becomes part of our lives, will enable so many new opportunities. And again, I’m looking forward to seeing what a new generation of people using technology as a fundamental part of their lives does. You can only imagine what this next generation will do.

And maybe the last thing I’m thinking about is, questioning the status quo, right? I mean, I grew up in the nineties, and I told that story at the beginning because back then, there weren’t so many conventions on how things have to look, work or behave. What a website is, how you purchase online, the perfect call to action integration, whatever… And I think that thinking is also necessary to take things to the next level… So, yeah, it’s a more opaque area, I guess, but I think it’s more about a shift in mindset than actual production techniques.

Diego: Yeah, that’s a great answer. That’s where the richest new stuff will come from: people who understand the new reality that we live in with technology and then make something out of it.

Patrik: Now you get an iPhone 15, and it’s perfect, it’s beautiful, it’s all good. I mean, would you actually question if it even has to be that way or if it should be different? And there’s been billions of billions poured into basically not making us think. And I think that’s also why we are becoming less literate.

A couple of years ago, I gave a talk about the metaverse, comparing Net Art and the whole crypto space. One had promising discussions of where humanity can take technology. Very critical and very creative—very anti-establishment, to a degree. And the other space was just about, how do I make money? Obviously, there are great people in the crypto space, but the mainstream wasn’t about that anymore. Part of that is because peeking behind the curtain and demystifying these new things, making them more approachable, is not what most companies are interested in.

That’s why I always plead with my students not to be afraid. Pull it all back. Take it apart. Let’s look at it. Let’s really ask ourselves the fundamental questions and then rebuild from that. And do that every time. That’s how I approach every project if I can.

Diego: That’s a great place to end. Did I not ask you something you would have asked yourself, or did I leave something important out?

Patrik: One of the best comments I have ever heard came from an art director who had been working there for 15 years. After I did a talk and workshop, he said, “I feel like I’m at university again, where I felt I could still do everything right.’ Generative design, the way I understand it and see it, is infinite, and it’s about you to discover it. It’s never too late. You just need to be curious, and the rest will come. I hope to see you on the other side.