UX design
fromMedium
20 hours agoDesigning with AI without losing your mind
Outsourcing critical thinking to AI tools in design can undermine the quality of solutions and diminish essential skills.
In 1962, the architect Buckminster Fuller envisioned a floating city that would free humanity from its dependence on the Earth. The speculative project consisted of enormous geodesic spheres that would naturally levitate in air warmed by the sun and be anchored to mountaintops.
Today we are at the cusp of revolutions in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, renewable energy, and biotechnology. Each brings extraordinary promise, but each introduces more complexity, more interdependence, and more latent pathways to failure. This elevates prudence to be critical. Good design recognizes what cannot be foreseen. It acknowledges the limits of prediction and control. It builds not merely for performance, but for recovery.
The normative form for interacting with what we think of as "AI" is something like this: there's a chat you type a question you wait for a few seconds you start seeing an answer. you start reading it you read or scan some more tens of seconds longer, while the rest of the response appears you maybe study the response in more detail you respond the loop continues
When Sonos released its redesigned app in May 2024, the backlash was immediate and brutal. Users couldn't access basic features like volume control and alarms. Systems became unusable. The company's stock plummeted 25%. Eventually, the CEO was replaced, and lawsuits claimed over $5 million in damages from customers who'd lost functionality they'd paid for.
Something's been slowly shifting in the design zeitgeist. I've been watching my feed on X and the vibe has changed. More and more, I see designers sharing finished experiments or prototypes they coded themselves, rather than static Figma files. Moving from working on a canvas to talking to an LLM. The conversation isn't "here's a design I made" anymore... it's "here's something I shipped this afternoon."