Introducing Pienso’s New Look and Feel

Birago and I are thrilled to unveil Pienso’s new look and feel. We’ve been looking forward very much to this moment. Pienso’s new look and feel is a culmination of months of collaboration with the brilliant Jody Hudson-Powell and his equally talented team at Pentagram London. We wanted our newest design to both embody our philosophy but also honor our roots at MIT.

At Pienso, we place an enormous emphasis on interactive deep learning. Interactive deep learning grounded in principles that merge machine learning with design. We seek to foster user interaction that encourages tinkering, curiosity, and learning through practice by forging a middle path between agents and direct manipulation. The tussle between the competing approaches of agents versus direct manipulation is not new. Both Birago and I were mentored at the MIT Media Lab at a time which witnessed a great number of passionate debates across machine learning and design communities. It is rather uncanny that this debate is as relevant today in the age of large language models (LLMs) as it was in the decades prior. The MIT Media Lab is an institution deeply influenced by the Bauhaus design movement since its very founding and values and disposition espoused by the Bauhaus legacy has left indelible imprints in influencing how we collaborated as students when we first met. This legacy energizes us as we explore how these principles can be applied to developing interactive LLMs to empower everyday people.

Bauhaus: A Legacy of Innovation

The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. It was at the time a group of “eclectic” thinkers who were fundamentally dissatisfied with the pre-WWI society's hierarchical and disjointed approach to art, craft, and industrial production. They were unhappy with the elitist boundary between artists and craftspeople and that they did not work together. They lamented that as a result of this split, aesthetically pleasing and practically useful components of design and architecture became disjointed. Inspired by this gestalt, the Bauhaus movement revolutionized art, architecture, and design by integrating art, craft, and technology. Gropius himself envisioned a co-located collaborative space where artists and craftsmen could dissolve barriers between disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach revered functionality, simplicity, and modern materials and techniques.

The Bauhaus design movement was received enthusiastically by many avant-garde artists, scholars and even by some industrialists and manufacturers who saw the potential of the movement to bridge the gap between art and industry in a manner that put the end-user customer at the forefront of furniture, architecture and the design of everyday objects. Sadly the movement was also viewed with suspicion and hostility by many forces including the Nazis, who’s propaganda and mounting pressure culminated in the closure of the Bauhaus in Berlin in 1933 and forced many Bauhaus members to emigrate to other countries. Many fled particularly to the United States, where they continued to disseminate Bauhaus principles.

The Bauhaus influence therefore extended to the United States through émigrés who joined American institutions, including MIT and Harvard. Gropius himself joined Harvard’s Department of Design. György Kepes and Herbert Bayer both joined MIT, where they influenced many students and collaborators with the Bauhaus design ethic. The MIT Media Lab, founded in 1985, is a direct descendant of Bauhaus principles, notably through the work of Muriel Cooper and her mentor and fellow co-founder Nicholas Negroponte. Her Visible Language Workshop (VLW) at MIT focused on digital typography and interactive media, laying the groundwork for the Media Lab’s pioneering research integrating computation, media and design.

Here are some key principles from this movement:

Unity of Art and Technology: Art and technology should coexist harmoniously. They must use modernist materials and techniques to create functional, aesthetically pleasing designs.

Form Follows Function: Design should prioritize usability first. It should strip away unnecessary design bloat and ornamentation.

Total Work of Art: All disciplines and art forms should collaborate to create a cohesive whole.

Simplification and Minimalism: Clean lines and geometric shapes should be used in all design work. There must be an emphasis on essential elements.

You might be aware of mid-century modern design, which emerged in the mid-20th century with a large fan-following at MIT, and drew heavily from these Bauhaus principles. Characterized by simplicity, functionality, and modern materials, it influenced architecture, furniture, and graphic design worldwide. LLMs, like raw farm produce, become consumable through intuitive interfaces.

We wish to extend these Bauhaus principles in order to create LLM interfaces that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone:

User-Centered Design: Design and machine learning should coexist harmoniously . They must use new advances in design and computational techniques to create functional, aesthetically pleasing interfaces.

Intuitive Interactions: Design should follow a middle path between agents and direct manipulation. It should strip away unnecessary UX bloat and ornamentation.

Compositionality: Every visual component and backend computational routine should be in the service of allowing users to compose and customize LLMs on their own.

Accessibility: The design should be simple, free of jargon and have clear interfaces accessible to all users, including those without coding skills.

Pentagram’s Design: Thoughtful and Playful

Don Norman once told Birago that the main point of the Bauhaus movement was to evolve design methods and material in a manner that kept up with the times. According to him, modern design must incorporate concepts like interaction design, user experience, and cognitive design, which were absent in Bauhaus principles and that today’s design is not just about creating beautiful objects but solving core issues in various fields such as healthcare, education, etc that are influenced by AI. Our new look and feel crafted by Jody’s team at Pentagram London captures Pienso's philosophy and design gestalt in an inspiring way. Their design integrates Bauhaus principles and creates a coherent visual identity for today’s computational regime involving LLMs. At the core of this new visual identity is the concept of the "Optimistic Navigator," inspiring hope, confidence, and forward momentum, especially imagining the person with no coding skills as the optimistic navigator wrangling large language models. An Optimistic Navigator that wades through AI complexities and leverages their own nuanced subject-matter expertise, yet learning new skills that foster creativity and independence while also ensuring safety, privacy, and data integrity.

Our new website was implemented by a group of incredible engineers at Commerce UI. Usually the proverbial difference between what is designed and what gets implemented is substantial. But Commerce UI's work is quite brilliant and highly detail-oriented. They succeeded in not only bringing Pentagram's design to life, but did so quite flawlessly and on time.

Pentagram's design work emphasizes a participatory, purposeful, and connected vibe, aligning perfectly with our roots. Birago and I are grateful that our new visual identity is grounded in simplicity, clarity and balanced playfulness, echoing Bauhaus principles. Our new design system allows for playful expression through color and imagery, balancing robust simplicity with moments of delight.