Mike Coughlin

“designing much faster than the others” — this so daft and makes it clear they don’t understand design at all. “Designing fast” (or slow) is just not a thing. If you conflate “producing ui by piecing together stuff” and “design” then the former (which is a form of assembly-line practice) can surely be fast or slow. What makes the practice of design challenging is not how to put a ui or poster together, it’s what the pieces are, what the message is, what is being communicated, how it all works together. So many of today’s “design” AI tools focus almost exclusively on the production part, on putting stuff together. I’d love to see an AI design tool that forms a deep understanding of a problem over the course of days or months and works like a creative partner. Call me on my bullshit, thinks about the whole, isn’t concerned really about the final arrangement of elements as much as it would understand the story and the message.

This is really neat but it’s not a design tool as much as it’s a design _production_ tool. The practice of design is mostly about what comes before production. There’s no doubt in my mind that all parts of software production will become automated very soon. Writing code, making web pages, putting pieces of a design system together etc. And that’s fine. I think few people actually enjoy this kind of production work. Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our precious time in life on what is more meaningful?! At the core, the practice of design is methodical; like architecture, not like art. In a nutshell: We find constraints, form comprehension of the whole and propose solutions that honor those constraints. First after that do we enter some form of production phase, usually prototypes first, learn about some constraints that were hidden before, loop back, prototype and then build the production-grade “final” artifact. These last few tasks are quickly losing value because AI tools can do it much faster (not yet better though) than humans. It’s simply just what has the best RoI for a business. Some companies and individuals will continue to spend human time on certain parts of the “production line” as a market differentiator, but it will cost them a relatively high price compared to competitors. Anyhow, I still haven’t seen a tool better than Figma that supports the actually-interesting part of the design process. I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma focused their products on that, maybe separating “products for production” of “products for ideation & exploration.” The latter would obviously still leverage AI, but not to do the work for me but rather to support my efforts the way a therapist helps me live a better life (not living my life for me.)