Sep 11, 2026 · 16 min · 8 segments
Saeema & Melisa in conversations with the Design council, and Prof Delfina Van Ditmar and creative technologist Jude Pullen. We talked about the skill we need to design for the planet, and how can…
Saeema Ahmed-KristensenHost
Melisa LeneroHostWe've done some work in digit lab where we, you know, so look at a lot of our workers on data and AI, and we did work with lots of manufacturing companies across many sectors.
So you could say about design, you could say about manufacture, you could say about other commercially sensitive domains.
Often you have to train your own localized language, large language models on your own data to make that relevant.
And there's the trust and privacy and commercial sensitivity issues which prevent sending data up to the cloud.
And others will say it's 10 times depending on where you sit on the fence.
That debate, it's quite hard to go past it because there's the subtleties of how AI is being used.
And where I personally sit, I embrace AI to solve global solutions while being wise about the ethics, whether it's privacy or the sustainability impact.
And we also see directions like you've just talked about edge processing and also circular economy of data centers.
That's the other direction of research that's happening to reduce consumption and think about the research.
How do you meet reactions when people talk about AI in terms of sustainability? Do you see it that people are quite polarized around it?
Yeah, I think...
I think what's difficult is that, you know, exactly that point of if an AI search is 10 times, let's just be on the generous side of those two statistics.
I think my pushback, and I think I've always held this stance, that it's very easy to point a finger and just say, oh, you know, that big tech company is evil.
If at the same time, we're not doing anything about it as consumers.
So where I'm going with that is if it is widely understood and widely publicized in the public, which let's hope these statistics become more like, what is it, Mike Berners-Lee's How Bad Are Bananas, that people have a quick reference of like, I've just done a GPT or a Le Chat or a Claude Code, then they should have a sense of what the cost is.
My challenge would be, is your query 10 times more useful than a Google search? In which case I kind of feel the scales maybe balance themselves out.
If you said to me, Did I use, you know, one of these Gen AI things to just do a sort of, you know, cat on a vacuum cleaner mashup video, then sure, maybe as a teenager, that's just part of me finding out what's funny.
We've done some work in digit lab where we, you know, so look at a lot of our workers on data and AI, and we did work with lots of manufacturing companies across many sectors.
So you could say about design, you could say about manufacture, you could say about other commercially sensitive domains.
Often you have to train your own localized language, large language models on your own data to make that relevant.
And there's the trust and privacy and commercial sensitivity issues which prevent sending data up to the cloud.
And others will say it's 10 times depending on where you sit on the fence.
That debate, it's quite hard to go past it because there's the subtleties of how AI is being used.
And where I personally sit, I embrace AI to solve global solutions while being wise about the ethics, whether it's privacy or the sustainability impact.
And we also see directions like you've just talked about edge processing and also circular economy of data centers.
That's the other direction of research that's happening to reduce consumption and think about the research.
How do you meet reactions when people talk about AI in terms of sustainability? Do you see it that people are quite polarized around it?
Yeah, I think...
I think what's difficult is that, you know, exactly that point of if an AI search is 10 times, let's just be on the generous side of those two statistics.
I think my pushback, and I think I've always held this stance, that it's very easy to point a finger and just say, oh, you know, that big tech company is evil.
If at the same time, we're not doing anything about it as consumers.
So where I'm going with that is if it is widely understood and widely publicized in the public, which let's hope these statistics become more like, what is it, Mike Berners-Lee's How Bad Are Bananas, that people have a quick reference of like, I've just done a GPT or a Le Chat or a Claude Code, then they should have a sense of what the cost is.
My challenge would be, is your query 10 times more useful than a Google search? In which case I kind of feel the scales maybe balance themselves out.
If you said to me, Did I use, you know, one of these Gen AI things to just do a sort of, you know, cat on a vacuum cleaner mashup video, then sure, maybe as a teenager, that's just part of me finding out what's funny.
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