Adobe Emerging Design
Overview
As part of Adobe's elite emerging design team, I helped shape the future of their creative apps and services.
Our role was to envision possibilities, open minds to new ideas, and push boundaries. We advised on motion tools, content creator tools, educational offerings, video editing, using AI ethically, and much more.
Working cross-functionally, we founded new product visions and built prototypes to validate concepts. We partnered with research, machine learning, and strategy teams to align innovations with Adobe's mission.
In summary, I was part of the team that envisioned and shaped the future of Adobe's creative products.
My contribution
Product strategy User research Product design Visual Design
The team
6 × product designers
Year
2020 - 2022
Approach
Here are four of the projects Silka led or contributed to.
1/4. Smart Brands
Content creators today face increasing demands to produce more content, faster, for multiple platforms and formats. To meet these challenges, we explored how generative AI could enhance creative expression and productivity.
Challenge: How could generative AI improve creative expression and productivity for content creators?
Innovation through empathy
We started by understanding the needs of our key persona Zach, a social media manager who creates visual content daily. Zach struggled with repetitive tasks like resizing images and tweaking typography across platforms. He also lacked inspiration for fresh visual themes and snappy copy.
Concepts
Our innovation focused on relieving Zach's pain points with AI-powered creative tools. We conceived an intelligent multi-format content composer that instantly resizes and styles content for different platforms. A generative visual ideation tool suggests creative themes and layouts to spark Zach's imagination. And a copy generator crafts initial drafts of engaging, brand-aligned captions for Zach to refine.
Outcome
Together, these AI capabilities could significantly increase Zach's efficiency and creative range. By innovating with empathy for his perspective, we aimed to help Zach produce vibrant, distinctive content at scale. Our concepts demonstrate how generative AI can become an intuitive, empowering partner for content creators seeking to master today's demands.
2/4. Playground
Adobe Education approached our Emerging Design Group seeking to expand their capabilities and better serve students. We realized they needed tighter integration with Adobe's broader ecosystem to provide easier content access in schools and homes.
Students needed engaging creative tools not just for initial discovery, but throughout their lifelong journeys. So based on research, we proposed strategies to generate content more easily.
Some examples of our innovative work included using AI to teach visual storytelling with images, automatically generating art, DJ tutorials with finger-scratching to manipulate audio/video, and more.
As a team we envisioned features like:
- AI-powered lessons on story telling, photography, comics, graphic design
- Collaborative forums for student creativity and feedback
- Accessible learning paths customized to individual progress
- Immersive AR/VR creation tools
- Safe social spaces to share and discuss projects
- Portfolios to showcase student journeys over time
3/4. Gravity
Engineering challenged us - design a platform for rapid AI experiments.
If done right, Adobe could lead the revolution.
We conceived Gravity - a bold no code space for generative creativity. Connecting Adobe's AI building blocks, it would demolish silos.
Gravity afforded designers limitless potential to imagine future AI solutions. It let teams discover capabilities and ideate unified.
We envisioned Gravity as Adobe's own AI playground - models, data, and algorithms to freely build with.
Engineering's visionary challenge drove us. Gravity would propel Adobe to lead the coming generative explosion.
Project Gravity may have influenced Adobe's development of Adobe Firefly, a generative AI model that boosts creativity and efficiency in Adobe apps. The ML team could have taken inspiration from Adobe Enterprise Cloud to build AI marketing tools. Other outcomes include new generative AI in Adobe's creative suite to aid artists, and AI productivity features in Adobe Analytics for data insights. Overall, the project likely spurred Adobe's AI innovation across products.
4/4. Blink
Blink utilizes Adobe's cutting-edge AI technology to analyze live streams. The Blink team tasked me with transforming their complex prototype into an intuitive commercial product.
I condensed their interface into a single page with clear, conversational labels and refined search and editing features to cater to real-time streaming needs.
By meticulously focusing on the audience's needs, I created an experience that streamers could immediately understand. Through my user-centric design, I distilled sophisticated AI into an effortless tool.
The prototype lacked commercial appeal, but by simplifying complexity and aligning with audience goals, I successfully transformed the app into an enjoyable, easy-to-use product.