Pentagram recently released their beautiful rebrand for Graphcore, a machine learning startup.
With it came an article from Fast Company, on how Graphic Design's next great challenge was branding AI.
AI is a tough one, historically it is borne of Sci-Fi interfaces of the time, 2001, Terminator and more recently, Iron Man have all exhibited futuristic interfaces of chrome, LEDs and neon.
The reality is that AI is no different to any branding, it's just never had a reason to be taken seriously until now.
Pentagram did a phenomenal job interpreting how machines see the world, I have tried to interpret how the concept of decision making can be visualised digitally.
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a nuclear medicine functional imaging technique that is used to observe metabolic processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by apositron-emitting radionuclide (tracer), which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule.
These scans are used to help diagnose and view the effects of Cancer, Brain Disease and Heart Disease.
Interestingly it also shows how the brain reacts during different tasks, like thinking, or listening... something I thought could be applied to Artificial Intelligence.
In a PET scan, red indicates high brain activity, moving through yellows and greens to dark blue for very low brain activity.
Taking a simplified approach to this system, I overlaid a 3x5 grid and labelled the majority colour for each square (some artistic license is taken, for example any red activity warrants majority)
Applying colour coded circles to the grid then gave me a graphical representation of the human brain thinking, and the seed of a design system that could be expanded out to artificial intelligence.
Applying the same thinking to different actions the human brain undertakes can be applied to a variety of AI interfaces, Google Home and Alexa both have listening states.
Finally the grid lends itself well to the creation of a logo to represent AI, with the letter A (artificial) in the low brain activity blue and the letter i (intelligence) in the high brain activity red.
This branding exercise is intended to be just that, an exercise - presented with the challenge of branding artificial intelligence, this is an example of how one might go about doing just that.
