Don’t Bring Me Solutions, Bring Me Problems — Or, why AI is not going to take away your design job
I’ve been reading a lot of Luddite FUD about how AI is coming for our Design jobs. It’s not. Not in the short term. And, not in the long term.
Yes, AI is going to change how [d]esign with a small “d” is done. A lot. But, no, the need for [D]esign with a big “D” and the need for Designers to do Design is not going to go away.
Automation makes design easier so Designers can spend more time on Design.
Once upon a time, Designers built comps and specs in Photoshop. It took hours of monkey-work pushing pixels around on a page to get something to put in front of a PM or exec for discussion. And, then, hours to manually add little notes for the engineers about fonts and colors and how wide the gutters were.
Over time, demand for Design and efficient Designers grew, and tools like Sketch, XD, Figma, Framer, etc. came along to help make the busy work go away.
The [d]esign job changed — a designer who was super fast with Photoshop shortcuts was no longer competitive with the designer who was slower in Photoshop, but better at understanding the actual requirements.
The [D]esign job was still the same — develop an understanding of the problem, iterate on solutions, gain consensus on a path forward, and deliver specs to someone who can build the solution. But, now, the designer could put more time into understanding the problem and successfully selling their ideas because they were spending less time in tools.
AI-enabled design is coming, and it’s just another tool
New AI-powered design tools are no doubt going to be fantastic at helping generate design solutions. I’m currently working with startups developing AI-enabled design tools to:
- Create pixel-perfect comps that follow the corporate design system in just a few clicks.
- Analyze specs or live apps for accessibility issues and automatically create and prioritize Jira tickets.
- Translate text-based requirements into a testable web and mobile prototypes.
- Run usability tests against an AI-powered persona and report on results with recommendations on what to change.
Think of AI-enabled design as you would a helpful summer intern — someone to do the stuff you don’t want to do.
While a huge advancement in problem solving, AI today, and especially AI that’s coming, is not qualitatively different than any other new design tool in the Designer’s toolbox. Automating parts of the Design function doesn’t eliminate the function, it just lets Designers focus on higher value-add tasks.
Good AI-enabled designers will still have jobs — Good designers will embrace AI design tools and and become more effective at solving harder problems, better and faster. But the problems to be solved are not going away. And if you want to be a good designer, you can stop reading here. You’ll be fine. Just stay competitive and learn the new tools and techniques as they come out.
But,
Great Designers will thrive — Great Designers will expand their influence in the new world of design AI. Because great Designers will embrace a core shift in mindset from iterating on great Solutions to iterating on great Problems.
“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination.” — Albert Einstein, 1938
Don’t bring me Solutions, bring me Problems
The adage, often attributed to Bill Gates, of “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” epitomizes the old organizational mind set and stands in sharp contrast to the coming Design-led mind shift.
It’s time for Designers to stop wishing for a seat at the table and take their rightful spot at the head of the table.
In the old world, any idiot could see what was wrong and it took smart hardworking people to find the solutions.
In the new world of AI-powered design, this is 180 degrees wrong.
In the new world, AI-tools will reduce the effort and skill involved in designing Solutions — freeing up Design resources to work on the Problems.
In the context of the designer’s beloved Double Diamond, the emphasis and budgets of the organization will shift from the Solution diamond “Design the thing right” to the Problem diamond “Design the right thing” — which is what Designers have been arguing for all along.
The next-generation great Designer will excel at three jobs-to-be-done:
- Identifying Problems worth solving.
- Framing the Problem in a way that can be solved.
- Working with people and tools to develop and deliver the Solution.
And these are the things that today’s great Designers are already great at doing.
And, with AI-enabled design tools at hand to take care of Solutions, great Designers will have the time and mandate they need to solve great Problems.
Great designers will eat the world for lunch
If you look at the three jobs-to-be-done above, you will realize that they are the tasks of a product leader and they are the tasks of an organizational leader.
The advent of AI-enabled design is the opening Designers have been looking for over the last 20 years. It’s time to stop wishing for a seat at the table and take your rightful spot at the head of the table.
