Paddy Harrington
Founding Director, Frontier
Paddy Harrington is the founder of Frontier, a Design Office. Frontier designs brave, imaginative, and guiding stories in the form of client collaborations, media, and products that help businesses, people, and the planet thrive. With almost 20 years of experience in design, he has degrees in literature and architecture and has worked in research, architecture, advertising, and design.
He's also an award-winning writer and filmmaker and has spoken at several design conferences as well as at Brown, Harvard, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Paddy is formerly SVP, Design Innovation and Digital Creative Director at Indigo Books and worked as Executive Creative Director at Bruce Mau Design.
In the past few months, Chat GPT has become something of an obsession. And, if you happen to work in a creative field, there is the question of what it really means for practitioners. It raises some pretty existential questions for sure.
On the subject of collaboration, Chat GPT, affectionately known as “Charlie,” can be considered a tool in that process. Fundamentally, what it is trying to do is finish a sentence. Looking at a word and sizing up the probabilities of what should follow it, choosing it and continuing on with the process. Charlie finishes its own sentences based on probabilities based on what billions of web pages and digitized books have already said on the subject in question.
In other words, Chat GPT is a form of fundamental collaboration at the level of all humanity, pulling the best of everything together and creating one result.
In the present context, the question is, “is creativity best done in isolation or as a shared experience collaborating with others?” Our intuitive answer is yes, it’s both, the combination of getting certain things done in isolation, and other things done in collaboration with others.
Answering the same question, Charlie came back with, “Both isolation and collaboration can be effective for fostering creativity, as isolation allows for deep focus and uninterrupted exploration while collaboration brings together different perspectives. … .” A measured and balanced response that Paddy feels is a good and comprehensive answer.
In effect, Chat GPT – or “Charlie” – is a very clear and comprehensive choice for getting solid, well-researched and thoughtful answers to questions. In this process, Charlie can be an incredibly powerful research tool to help you with your inquiries.