Designing how designers master AI

Designers are told to use AI tools, but few are taught what mastery means. A common onboarding approach tries to solve tool use, confidence, and job impact with one training plan, which fails. Designers often feel both excited and anxious because AI tools behave differently from familiar software, and conventional training outcomes leave people feeling behind. A different approach reframes mastery and stops treating it as a one-time declaration. A session begins with the statement “I’m not an expert,” emphasizing that expertise in this context is not about having answers. The focus shifts to building a personal practice for using AI effectively.

"Mastering an AI tool isn't learning its correct use. It's learning to bend it to how you already think - and that kind of mastery is personal, divergent, and never finished. Every designer is being told to use AI tools. Few of them are being told what it actually means to master one. And underneath both is a question almost no one is naming out loud in the tool onboarding: if the tools get good enough, what happens to the job?"

"Most organizations are trying to solve all three with a single training plan. It isn't working. The designers I work with are excited and anxious in roughly equal measure, often inside the same moment. They've been handed a category of tool that doesn't behave like the software they're used to, and the conventional response - write a deck, run a workshop, declare mastery - keeps producing the same result: a room full of people who feel behind even when they're trying so hard to get ahead."

"This essay is about what happened when my team stopped trying to solve it that way. And about the word mastery itself - which I don't want to abandon. I want to redefine it. October 1st, 2025. Eighteen people on a video call, a few minutes before nine in the morning PST. I want to start here because what Fatimah Richmond opened that session with did something I'd been waiting for someone to do for almost a year."

"She said: "I'm not an expert." She is, of course. Just not in the way that matters here. Nobody is. That's the whole point. Fatimah - UX researcher, published poet, twenty years in the valley, DeepMind on her resume - had joined the Salesforce Service UX team at the start of the year, coming out of a world where Gemini was the default tool for almost everything. She brings a researcher's instinct for knowledge management and a storyteller's territorial relationship with participant voice."

Read at Medium