Design in the AI Era
- Published
Some thoughts on how designers should work in the AI era.
Identify the work AI should not do
To use AI well, we need to identify the kinds of work we should not ask it to do and find ways to make that work more efficient. Otherwise…
- We ask AI to do something it should not do, causing problems. (Quality suffers.)
- We continue doing work AI should not do in the old way, creating a bottleneck. (Productivity suffers.)
For example, LLMs are susceptible to hallucination, so telling one to “use color combinations that meet accessibility requirements” is quite likely not to work.
To delegate work to AI with confidence, we need ways to enforce the principles the designer has set.
Color
In programming, static checkers and unit tests serve this role. The more such mechanisms we have, the more confidently we can delegate. It would be useful to think about mechanisms that can play the same role in design.
Color seems a relatively easy place to start. Research into human color perception is already well developed from an engineering perspective, so there are plenty of theories and tools we can use.
- Automatically check for accessibility violations.
- Automatically generate dark modes, high-contrast modes, and so on while ensuring accessibility.
- Automatically generate color palettes that accommodate users with red–green color blindness, total color blindness, and other differences.
See Computational color system.
Layout and typography
If these efforts prove reasonably successful, we could gradually extend them to other visual elements, such as layout and typography.
Design inherently requires multidimensional separation of concerns, so we need ways to address aspect weaving—for example, how typographic characteristics affect the margins of a grid. I find it difficult even to locate discussions of these issues.
Vision
I would like humans and AI to be able to pursue more creative and experimental work freely, trusting programs to take care of the low-level functional details. Much as advances in structural mechanics have enabled modern architects to be extraordinarily creative.
Some say software in the AI era will become a manufactured product rather than an artisan’s craft. I would like us to imagine the stage beyond that.