My design toolbox has never looked this good. How about yours?
This is a reflection of my 2023 as a designer, and how I feel going into 2024.
Watch out, the age of designers with superpower is here. With the recent advancements and coming of age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software, our (already) amazing abilities to make beautiful, enjoyable, usable things are about to get heroic at a grand scale.
Many of us designers will remember the precious hours of our lives wasted in creating concepts, storyboards and prototypes just to have them shelved up until recently. Emerging ideas got killed because we were not yet able to protect them without spending even more time and effort (and sleep) in developing them so that they’re strong enough to standout and cut through. We become jaded because the ideas we envisioned seldom saw the light of day in an ever increasingly noisy and agile landscape. Then AI came to our aid.
As an interaction designer, my AI-enabled toolbox has never looked this good. And it keeps getting better. Yes, it will feel somewhat uncomfortable working with AI tools to start with, but I believe many of us would rather focus on realising our creative vision than reproducing me-toos, components and doing repetitive stuff with the time we have to design.
I believe, it is time for super-lean design thinking and doing. For a shift back to craft. It is not how big your design team is, but how skilled they are with tools — as artisans before us have done so many generations before. For example, if your team is not using Figma, you are already losing out on many features that can make your team, an A team. Same with Maze.co for research and many similar ones like it. Platforms like Webflow and Framer further the no-code movement, letting us publish our design vision without having to write huge chunks of code. And let’s not even get into the possibilities of the generative AI platforms like Midjourney, Chatgpt, etc … 💭 💡 ☕️ 🧑🎨 🖥 🚀 🤯
I can generate story boards of user journeys and concepts in Midjourney or Firefly in under a day and have them tested the next day. I can set up a user test with a few clicks and run it with my panel of select target users and get results in under a week. The cost of this? Under $1000 or so (excluding my time). This would have costed about 10 times more and longer before. Our cost of iterating is getting leaner, and that is very good news!
Coupled with design systems (which is now prolific) we can produce interactive prototypes and close to production-ready code faster then ever. Very soon, we’ll be wondering of we’re able to squeeze a complete research, design and delivery cycle into a two week sprint (inc. user testing). Our quality are higher and the speed of delivery even faster.
Creating designs is going to be so fast, it will be like single-use plastics all over again — easily created and disposed without much consideration. Let’s hope that the rubbish this generate will not cause us the same level of harm single-use plastics had. Our carbon footprint will most likely increase with these tools as they suck up ever more energy and raw materials to make the chips and components, and the (renewables 🤞) electricity to power them. Compared to the sketching on the back of a napkin, the difference is going to be significant. A chat I had with Chatgpt suggests that itself is also sitting on the fence on the matter. Discussions are emerging on this topic but it is definitely a space to watch. Here is another example if you’re keen to explore.
Another problem I see will be the impact to the number of design jobs we can offer to the next generation of designers who will continue our grand lineage of crafting things. Less time will be needed to get to a quality a senior can produce but the number of roles may be much fewer. We will move from pixel to prompts. And the joy of making or crafting will shift. But in this, I still believe in the creative power of humanity to surmount technology as it has time and time again. As design leaders today, it is our responsibility to help create viable job opportunities for designers today and tomorrow.
The toolbox looks great but we must be mindful of the costs and implications that comes with it.
So, with such great powers, comes great responsibilities. Are you a design hero for good? Or a villain exploiting dark patterns, driving mindless consumption? The question is not whether we will still have a job. Rather, with these new and improved tools, where and how are we going to apply ourselves?
I currently work in the world of electrification and mobility, aka electric vehicle(EV) charging. It is sort of a chicken and egg design challenge where we need to change a lot of the fundamental design of electricity supply, storage and distribution along side the production of Electric Vehicles which is not very sustainable currently. And so the carbon emission dilemma becomes even more acute when using AI. While we believe that by shifting vehicles from fuel to electric we can lower emissions, the technologies we have for making electric vehicles are still very resource intensive. I believe with the new tools we now have, I can do much good given the cost associated.
As designers, we inspire users and colleagues in envisioning and seeing what the future can be and how it can work for them. We are at a cusp of changing mobility and we have a chance to ask a lot of what-ifs before we continue with the status quo. Here are some areas of opportunities that I am exploring:
- How to provide someone with a plug point when they need to charge?
- Do we even need a plug?
- Should we have fixed batteries or can they be swopped?
- How to harvest or distribute energy in the most efficient manner?
- How to lower the barrier to adopting EVs so that economy of scale can improve the technology, especially in battery science and materials?
As we go into 2024, what I wish for next in my toolbox is for these tools to tell me what is the carbon cost when using them. That way I can include them in the overall carbon equation and know that I am not adding more to the problem. If you know of any such tools — please share in the comments!
Thank you for reading and I hope I’ve inspired you to reflect on the superpowers you now have as a designer, and what great things you can accomplish next no matter what stage of your career you’re in. And if you’re still debating on whether you should try it or not, go for a small dose and see what happens. Any thoughts or comments are welcomed, please share them below. Happy 2024!
