Will AI really eliminate design jobs?

My take on the whole AI thing for designers

One question I get about this book is: if AI make design easy and our jobs go away will anyone need your book? This outcome would make me sad, but it’s also funny - design gets easy because no one does it anymore - Problem solved!

While we don’t talk about AI much in the book, there is a good reason why. It’s something I have a clear opinion about and wanted to share with you here.

The demise of design, as well as product management and other engineering adjacent tech jobs, comes up in every downturn. Creative people are prone to self doubt and are naturally sensitive to news that seems to validate it. The spike in design layoffs last year was real, but growth sectors like technology always have boom and bust cycles. It’s par for the course. And design, unlike engineering, isn’t always essential to business success, for reasons we explore in this book. If you want a career that is recession proof, creativity has never been the best way to go.

However there is good news and it comes from the implications of this famous quote:

Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. - Pablo Picasso

What’s often missing from the AI discussion is the divide between design as production and design as planning. Design as production is making screens and making prototypes, executing on plans someone else has made. Computers have always been great at production, repeating tasks perfectly over and over again, often better than people can. Back when newspapers were popular, craftspeople, called typesetters, laid out type by hand: it was a well paid, full time job. The terms uppercase and lowercase comes from this, as the typesetter literally grabbed different letters from the upper case, or box, or the lower one.

Of course almost no one is a professional typesetter anymore: computers do this work far better and cheaper than people can. But what’s counter-intuitive is that as computers get better at certain tasks, the things they still can’t do often become more obvious and important. The endless number of CGI effect laden action movies on streaming services now make well done practical effects far more noticeable and valuable. Not to mention that writing a good script, and making a good movie out of it with any technology or budget, seems more elusive now than ever. This is part of what Picasso was trying to tell us about computers: answers to bad questions aren’t useful. $100 million movies that are unwatchable, or software that is hard to use and unprofitable, are answers to bad questions. Asking the right question is the important part.

We also erroneously believe that new technology eliminates the old, but often that’s not true. When TV was born in the 1950s, everyone thought radio would die, but instead it forced radio to recognize it’s unique value: you can listen to people talking while doing other things, like driving or running, which was basically the birth of podcasting. New technology clarifies things but often in surprising ways that are hard to predict.

Picasso’s famous quote above is telling us designers the way forward is to get better at asking questions. To see design more as a planning role than a making role. To figure out what computers still can’t do, or can never do, and fill that gap. If AI makes building trivial, the challenge shifts for the industry to be who is the best at deciding what to make. That problem may become harder, because the need for it is clearer than ever. The teams of those people might need to grow, while teams for making need to shrink.

This means anyone who excels at leading or influencing creative projects, leading people through discovery, planning, decision making, making tradeoffs, and getting deals made, will always have a job. It’s a function that can never go away. As long as there are organizations with people (not just robots) in them, there will be differing opinions, turf wars, conflicting goals, all things only a creative minded person with good facilitation skills (such as designers) can solve.

In Why Design is Hard, I offer this declaration:

Success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent. The powerful people you need as allies, or your clients, will likely know little about design, and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your design ideas and convince people to use them is equally as valuable as your creativity. 

Design purists will wring their hands and complain, but this isn’t design! I disagree. It’s design as planning, but not production. It’s true that design as planning is often done by executives or project leaders, people without the word design in their job title, but I don’t care. Whoever is deciding what to build is a kind of designer, even if they don’t have the training or experience to do it well.

If your love of craft is hard to let go of, there will always be people willing to pay more for higher quality handcraft. There are people who still make a living hand making suits, dresses and shoes (and websites too). There aren’t as many of them as there used to be, but they will always be here. However you’ll have to find the right businesses or clients who have these values. Otherwise, letting go of design as production is the way to dodge whatever disruption AI has for this profession.

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What’s your take on AI and design? I admit I’m always a tech skeptic, so maybe there is more to be worried about that I see right now. Let me know what you think.