Yet this loss doesn't mean design is gone. If anything, it requires us to find meaning in the turmoil and ask what design truly is, and what it still has the potential to become. Here's the difference - AI can generate outputs. It can mimic styles, assemble patterns, and even simulate decisions. But it can't create meaning. Meaning is rooted in memory, context, and emotion.
When my father died a few years ago, it changed me. We had a complicated relationship, but as adults, we did our best to mend the past and spend time forming a better relationship. After he passed, I held onto the good memories, but I also regretted the things we never got the chance to do while he was alive. That's how grief works - it strips life down. The noise fades, and what remains is a clearer sense of what actually matters.
The definition of flourishing we have used at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard is "the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives." Understood thus, flourishing is an ideal. It is not something we ever attain perfectly in this life. Flourishing is also multi-dimensional. We may be flourishing in certain ways, but not in others.
