When AI replaces design, not if

A little over a decade ago, I remember a brilliant grad school professor I had saying something like “In the course of your careers, AI will replace you. You need to figure out what you’re going to do when it happens.”

Similarly prescient, back in the 1990s the writer William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” All of which to say: the time to figure out what we’re going to do I think is more or less now.

Now, a lot of designers I know are chafing against the role of design as it exists today. In many professional contexts, designer has become synonymous with craftsperson. Design is the craft of pixels, the craft of artifacts, and while the work might be highly strategic—in giving usable form to strategy, in transforming strategy into useful experiences—designers themselves are ultimately makers.

Making, as we’ve learned, can be potentially easy to replace with generative tools. So very understandably, a lot of designers I know are also trying to move so-called “upstream”, toward things like “problem framing” that are more “strategic”. I’m doing air quotes here, you just can’t see them.

Here’s the thing: I think that that AI can potentially do “problem framing” better than just about any human could. Imagine describing to an AI tool all the things that are going wrong, the symptoms that lead you to believe there’s a problem, and then providing some context, like what are the unique requirements, people, or systems involved. And then, imagine just asking the AI for some options for what the problem might be. The medical field is already experimenting with this so I think it’s just a matter of time before it extends to other fields.

What is left for designers to do? Stay with me while I take a hard turn here. One of the many things I love reading about is the use of design thinking and design practice in the military. The “Military Design Movement”, as it’s called, is a fascinating example of a massive organism, the US military, hitting the limits of what is possible with a hierarchical approach that is based on strictly defined roles and moving forward through design instead.

The military saw the writing on the wall, and I think those of us who work in tech maybe should as well. Yes the stakes are very different, we have livelihoods on the line instead of lives, but as market conditions, user expectations, and the technology we work with all become more complex—I think it’s increasingly necessary that leaders and teams across every function become able to think and act adaptively.

That’s not problem framing and it’s also not craft, but it is design; to operate adaptively requires creativity, collaboration, and iteration—some of the things that designers are trained to do. And while AI can absolutely outpace us on iteration, in my opinion it’s got nothing on creativity or collaboration.

So I think what’s left for us to do is to push past the defined roles that we’re trying so hard to save and instead we need move into the uncertain space of the future where we adapt and collaborate differently, and we need to accept that we won’t know what that looks like until we do it. Thanks for listening.