Lofty as it might sound, before we get into any specific discussion of how AI changes or supports design, we need to set out the territory this debate occupies: we have to map out the philosophical and moral landscape. I promise we’ll be quick.
Some light philosophy
It’s easiest to first set out the inarguable facts, the fixed points in our thinking. First, AI is here now and it’s not going away. Clichéd Pandora’s box metaphors aside, the technological progress that has allowed the current generation of tools to exist cannot be reversed, nor can it be ignored, and barring the end of the world, it will only advance. So we have to decide what to do about it. Second, it will affect every discipline, ours included. We should explore this idea mindful of how everything around design will change and become normalised, rather than in isolation.
Lastly, if AI is irrepressible and its effects inevitable, we each have to make a choice about how we respond to it. There will undoubtedly be regulation, but it is unlikely to be universal, so it will most likely be conceived and implemented at a national level. There may be some consensus and alignment internationally or supranationally, and some normalisation at an industry or organisation level (the SAG-AFTRA action in the US is a great example), and this will create variation. But it will be national governments that set the pace and tone of AI development and use, once legislation catches up with technology. It only takes one government to relax regulation for everyone else to have to do the same or risk being outcompeted.
Creative value
If you’ve come with me this far, where this leaves us, in the current absence of regulation, is with a set of choices to make: not just about what AI can be useful for, but about the role of a designer in the act of designing something, maybe even the role of people more generally. What do we want to keep in the hands of people, and will we even have the agency to decide in the long run?
One consistent theme of the conversations I’ve had over the last five years with my teams about their careers and their growth as designers is that more sophisticated tools commoditise the more repetitive and mechanical parts of what we do. This has been going on for a while. At the start of my career we worked in Photoshop, and we manually created redline guides for developers to implement our designs. Then some bright spark created a plugin that generated these guides automatically (as long as you had been diligent in organising and grouping your layers), and although they still had to be checked and exported as images, my workflow changed overnight. So did the amount of time I had to think about the actual work, rather than documenting it. Then along came Zeplin, and not only was this part of the work removed entirely, so was the value we had created in doing it.
In this case it was undoubtedly for the better, but I think it starts to illustrate how more sophisticated tools chip away at the nature of what we do and how we add value. Very soon AI will be sophisticated enough to move further up the value chain. It may well be that AI does the first pass at a user journey or a wireframe, perhaps from a human input, but perhaps from nothing more than a prompt, or the raw data about the problem we’re trying to solve. If we allow this thought experiment to reach its logical conclusion, almost every part of the design process, and more broadly the creative process, can be performed by AI.
Where this might leave us, and where I suspect we’re heading, is that the human role in design becomes one of curation and direction, rather than undertaking much of what we consider the act of design today. AI will produce design concepts, wireframes, strategies and images, and the designer’s role will be to course-correct, to steer, to apply taste, adjusting and adapting what an AI creates to meet human standards, and to bring human intuition and contextual understanding into the process. We will steer ideas along a path, nudging them into reality, at every stage choosing among the paths the work could take, or steering it on to new ones we might not have thought of otherwise. We will curate, shepherd and guide ideas from concept to reality. It will require less of us, and different skills, and over time we may find we lose the ability to do these steps ourselves. It might not even matter.
Backlash
This beautifully uncomplicated experiment, fun as it may be, doesn’t answer any of the immediate and more pressing questions we have. Namely: what should we embrace, what should we be wary of, and where should we focus our energy and attention as we all orient ourselves to this new reality?
In the face of the industrial revolution there were many counter-movements that fought progress they saw as destructive or as undermining human value. We may well see this again, but for now we have to make judgements daily. We can’t reject AI arbitrarily, out of fear or a sense of insult at the idea of human creativity being devalued. Nor can we accept every possible innovation with open arms without considering its implications.
Conclusion
We should embrace AI tools that take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise have gone. We should use them to broaden our perspective, to deepen our understanding and to come up with ideas we otherwise couldn’t. We should be wary of things that look like an answer to the commercial pressure to work harder and reach the end result faster, if they trade quality for a cheaper or quicker result. We should be wary of things that remove humans from an inherently human act, like creativity. If all we see in our public spaces, or interact with in our digital lives, are things AI has decided are important and right, we will be poorer for it.
We should focus our energy on removing the less valuable parts of our discipline, the ones that divert time and energy from the more valuable parts: like me, working late to draw redlines and pixel measurements on Photoshop files by hand. In doing so, though, we should keep one eye on how we describe our value, and on what we need to preserve to keep the inherently human value of art and design from being cheapened or degraded in the service of commercial aims.
We’re in the process of mapping this out in detail: identifying tools worthy of experimentation, where the use cases for AI are unambiguously helpful, and what the considerations are where it’s not so clear. I’d love to show it to you.