Does design still matter? And if so, should humans still be doing it?

In a world where AI claims to soon be able to solve every problem, I explore whether design will become obsolete, and I start by asking what it was to begin with.

I’ve been interested in design since a young age and despite my attempts not to limit myself with labels, I have long considered myself to be a designer, among other things. I have been investing a lot of time in the last couple of years in rekindling some of the creativity that I lost in the run up to and fallout from my burnout a few years ago, by designing things not for money but for the love of it. Despite being told by some people that it’s pointless because AI will be able to do it all soon, I have found it incredibly rewarding.

Then a few weeks ago I read this post from Michael Anderson that really got me thinking about the importance of design. In his post he said:

I know it’s not politically correct to say anything positive about Tesla these days, but it continues to amaze me how the design of the original Tesla Supercharger was so good, that well over a decade later, most other chargers still fall short. It’s as if nobody else really cared to stop and think about what they were really for, why it mattered, and invest the time, energy and ingenuity to create a really great solution.

Michael’s comment reminded me of when I once visited a factory where they manufacture ticket machines for the railways at British train stations and I asked their head of engineering, “Who designs them?”

“We do,” he replied with a proud look on his face. I was a little surprised because I wasn’t aware that they had a design team.

“So what is your design process?” I asked in response.

The answer I got explains a lot about our world, from ticket machines, to electric car chargers, to supermarket self-checkout machines. He looked at me blankly for a few seconds, and then said:

“Well, the railway company gives us a list of all the things it needs to include, like a coin slot, credit card reader, a screen, and a ticket printer, and we get all those components rigged up so that they can talk to each other and then we design a box that will fit them all in.”

That was it. British design at it’s finest.

If that is all we are doing as designers, then maybe we should just let Artificial Intelligence do it. It might well do a better job. But I can’t help but feel that design is a lot more than that, and that us humans still matter.

Credit where it is due, the original Supercharger design is in my experience, so much more than a metal box with some components bolted into it. Some humans really thought about it.

To explore this, I took a trip this weekend to The Design Museum in London, pondering the role of design in a world that looks set to be increasingly dominated by AI generated solutions (not to mention AI generated problems). If we listen to the hype from the big tech companies, we could easily be led to believe that design as a practice will soon be obsolete and that any design we need will be done effortlessly for us by the machines.

Graphic design, web design, fashion design, interior design, car design, architecture, industrial design, service design, and any other type of design that you can think of, could theoretically one day (if not now) be done by a computer.

In some ways this could be seen as a good thing, if it makes better solutions more widely available, particularly in areas of our global society that need better design solutions but can’t afford them. Of course, if you earn your living from designing things, that idea isn’t very reassuring, but I think there are also reasons to consider that design, specifically good design, needs humans.

These days I’ve given up on binary thinking. I’ve given it up for lent, realising that the truth is rarely to be found by putting things in rigid boxes of “good” and “bad” and I think that AI in general is one of those complex and messy things where so many potential upsides are muddled in with so many risks, many of which are still unknown unknowns. This is true as much when it comes to AI and design as it is in regard to AI and anything else. So today I want to look more closely at what design really is, why it matters, and whether there is still a role for humans in it in the near (and far) future.

The lift doors at The Design Museum make a powerful yet ambiguous statement. Then again, design is subjective!

Can you define design?

I enjoy watching the show Interior Design Masters on BBC but one thing that frustrates me is how they band around the word “design” with such assertive authority without ever defining what they mean by it. It seems to be an ambiguous badge of honour that gets handed out by the judges when they like something and can’t express why they like it.

“Oh I walk into this room and I see so much Design!”

What does that even mean?

The word design is a pretty standard part of our culture these days and it gets used all over the place to mean many different things to many different people. To some people it means making things beautiful, to others it means making things useful, while to many it simply means sticking some other persons name on your clothes.

I thought I’d put this to rest once and for all at The Design Museum, where I would surely find the answer. But then I got there and realised that they don’t know either. There are many interesting displays with boards that at first glance feel like they are going to clearly define design, and they all somehow fizzle out into ambiguous waffle that dodges this very central question.

So let’s look at the etymology of the word. Apparently, design as an English word originates from the latin word designare, meaning “to mark out.” At first that might not seem very helpful, suggesting that design is just the marking out of things, like fence posts around a garden or some spray paint on the road marking out pot holes. Look a bit closer at the usage of the word though and what this really means is to make a mental plan based on an intention, and then mark out or shape something to bring this plan into the world. Design is therefore the bridge between intention and action to realise that intention.

This is why design is so often associated with problem solving, because problems need solving, and human minds set their intentions on devising solutions and bringing them into the world. Likewise, design is often closely associated with the arts because people have an intention to express or communicate something, have a vision for it within themselves and set about trying to bring that into the world for others to experience.

On this basis we might define design as something like:

The intentional act of forming an idea and marking it out so that it can be brought into the world.

There are a few key details here that are important to the essence of design, as follows:

1. Design is an intentional act

This is easy to overlook but it is central to what makes design important and special. Every act of design begins with a conscious intention in the mind of a human, and it is an intention to create. Therefore design is inherently proactive, requiring a human to pause and contemplate something that matters to them, formulating an idea as to how they manifest it into our shared world.

Most of us spend most of our time on autopilot, going through the motions of life, and might even do things that to other people look like design, especially professional designers who are uninspired and just trying to get from 9-5. But that’s not design. That’s just robotic creation driven by external stimuli. It is pseudo-design.

And so it is that robots, just like humans who behave like robots, can do things that look like design. But for it to actually be design, it needs to have begun as a conscious intention in the mind. If like me you believe that machines don’t have conscious intentions, then design must require a human being.

2. Design is a bridge

Having started in the mind, what is needed is a bridge between the mental and the material worlds. It requires an internal act of seeing the idea clearly enough to then externalise it, or mark it out, so that it is then possible to bring it into the world. This marking out must also be done by a human, since only they know the shape of their intention.

In some ways, an AI prompt can be a way for a human to mark out this intention in the material world, and a designer could even use the AI as a tool to help them mark out the design better than they can themselves. It can therefore be a valid tool in the design process, but it is not the designer. We can tell this because the same mind (or minds) that formed the intention are the only ones who can judge whether the marked out design meets the original intention.

3. Design is more than an idea

The final part of the definition I offered above states that we mark out an idea “so that it can be brought into the world.” This is important because, as the saying goes, ideas are cheap. We can have ideas all day long, but they don’t impact the world unless we can create the bridge from our minds into the material world, and collaborate with whoever or whatever may be necessary to make it a reality. A great designer therefore doesn’t just have great ideas, but has the ability to communicate them clearly and collaborate with others to make them happen.

In some cases, as with Designer Makers, the designer might also be the maker, but design and production are not inherently the same thing, and as different people have different skills, the final act is most often a collaboration. It is entirely possible that AI tools can be a part of this mix.

But when all is said and done, the conscious bridge created by the designer must be used to travel back again, from the material world into the mind, to validate that the finished article, whatever it is, sufficiently matches the original intention. Just as in days gone by, the designer would be the only person who could truly judge the work of the craftsperson who produced their idea, or how today a web designer is the only person who can accurately judge whether the web developer has accurately produced their vision, so too the work produced by an AI must be assessed by the person whose conscious intention it stemmed from.

Furthermore, in most cases the designer will have had the intention to affect other people with their idea, hopefully in a positive way, and so the success of the design in the real world is contingent on the subjective experience of the people for whom it is intended. No machine can ever know whether a design is successful, for while they might gather raw data to feed into their algorithms, they cannot experience the finished design.

As a slight aside, this is why User Experience Design is such a strange term, because not only does it unnecessarily designate fellow humans as “users,” but otherwise states the obvious, that most design is design for Experiencers. It is also why there is increasing concern that we seem to be designing more and more for machines who cannot actually experience anything, because when it comes down to it, it is the experience of life that makes design meaningful.

One of my recent “just for fun” design is this mock album cover for the fictional band The Open Minders, inspired by a dream I had and contains a lot of hidden (and unhidden) meaning.

The role of humans

With this clearer definition of design, we can see that while AI could be used in some aspects of design, you really can’t have design without humans. Granted, some people might say that maybe we don’t need humans at the core of design, instead using humans simply to articulate their intentions and validate the solutions developed by AI. This might well be where a lot of design ends up, but it would be foolish to write off the broader role of human creativity, intuition, skill and facilitation in the design process.

Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this would be to look at some types of design that we don’t normally refer to as design. For example, in writing a book, the author intentionally forms an idea, marking out a structure or concept for the book so it can be brought into the world, and then sets about crafting it, often in collaboration with other people such as editors, proofreaders, typesetters, illustrators and printers. It is a design project, and it is highly personal. The author could theoretically have told an AI what it’s idea for the book was and then let the AI write the book before checking that it had met the brief. This is no doubt already happening, but what we get is something devoid of the rich, nuanced, unpredictable uniqueness of the human author.

As another example, in composing a piece of music, a musician is designing a soundscape that expresses something from deep within themselves and will touch other humans in deeply meaningful ways. In many cases, it is an act of divine inspiration that comes from within, with many musicians saying that they don’t know where their music truly comes from. We can on the other hand use AI to generate music, and some of it is surprisingly good, but it is not a true expression of something that comes from deep within the heart and soul of another human being.

And finally, if we apply design to our own lives, which I recommend that we all do, we are shaping our lives with conscious intention as an expression of who we are, what we want, and what we believe in. It’s a never ending process in which we are constantly learning from the interaction between our own inner intentions and ideas, and the feedback we get from trying to bring our inner world into the outer world. We could tell an AI what our intentions for our lives are and then get it to tell us what to do everyday, simply giving it regular feedback on how things are going, but what sort of life would that be? We would quickly become automata, living by the command of the machine and not consciously living our lives to their full potential.

The same patterns are there in all of the typical activities that we refer to as design, from poster design to urban design, but they are often obscured behind layers of commercial objectives that distract us from why our designs really matter. To remove humans from the design process might in some cases make it more efficient, but to make the mistake of thinking that we don’t need humans to design things would be a great loss for humanity.

Not only would it strip our world bare of the rich vibrancy of human creativity but it would rob us all of the joy of creation, of self-expression, and of the challenge of bridging our inner and outer worlds. It would rob us of the opportunity to design better lives and better worlds, and that is surely what life is all about.

Ripping off band-aids

If you’ve followed me to this point, design still matters and humans must always be at the center of it, not because the mega-corporations need us to be, but because we need us to be.

The problem that is on the minds of many designers of every variety now though is that the AI systems will copy our work, that they will rip us off, and create thousands of variations of it without ever offering anything so much as a thank you. What are we supposed to do about it?

My answer, somewhat radically, is nothing. Not because it is morally right for big tech companies to copy our work, but because our human spirit is too valuable to waste fighting a battle that we will rarely win. I know that might be easy to say, and if you’re worried about your livelihood as a designer might not be easy to accept, but I have as much skin in this game as anyone and just as much to lose. Yet I feel that the real solution is not to fight being copied, but to invest in our own creativity.

Band-Aids were invented by Johnson & Johnson employee Earle Dickson in 1920 and they have been copied uncountable times since.

The problem of being copied is not new. People have always copied each other. Being copied means that you did good work. It used to really bother me when I saw my work copied, whether at school or professionally, but these days I see it simply as an unintended complement. Now with AI copying everyone’s homework on an unprecedented scale so that big tech companies can boost their share prices, the complement is magnified. But so is our impact. Even if they butcher our work in ways that make us cringe, the very fact that these systems are copying our work means that we are influencing their outputs and they are amplifying our visions. And this makes the value of our efforts to design a better world greater, not lesser, even if we don’t get paid for it.

AI will no doubt make life harder for many people who have relied on design as their profession, and we’ll have to find a creative way to solve that, but it might also remind us that design is still worth doing even if it isn’t always commercially viable, because we are not just cogs in the industrial machine of capitalism, but living, breathing, richly complicated human beings who are here to experience life.

Artificial Intelligence is our wake up call to embrace what makes us special and engage more fully in the unfolding of the human experience. Every single one of us has something to contribute, and we mustn’t let anyone, least not the big tech companies, tell us otherwise. Go out there, and design a better world.

Thanks for reading Oxymoron. I write these posts as a labour of love and don’t ask anything in return, but if you enjoy them or at least find them thought provoking, I’d be really grateful if you can recommend it to someone who you think might like it, or share it somewhere online, or simply click like. It only takes a minute but can help these ideas reach more people and for that I am grateful. 🙏

Also, I read and reply to all comments so do feel free to share your thoughts below. I’d love to hear them.

— Tom

---

Lastly, on a related note, while I was at The Design Museum having lunch in the cafe, I took the time to catch up on some of Andrew Boardman’s excellent Substack, Dear Designer. This recent post called Do Not Panic echoes some of my sentiments here, or more actually I guess am echoing his. Either way, it’s great, so I recommend giving it a read.

Do Not Panic