Agents and managing design by proxy

At this point, if you have anything to do with using a computer on a regular basis, you don’t have to use those two letters even. AI is conceptually becoming the Internet, a thing-place which was once a thing you go to, and now is just sort of everywhere.

The latest buzzword (anyone remember “guru?”) you read every three seconds, which encapsulates a massive concept, “agents,” are all over the place conceptually and in that muddle of a public mind-sphere we all are drowning in. Agents can be thought of as robots. You tell them to go do a thing with AI and they go on and do it semi-autonomously. They are already everywhere.

Non-humans are going to be doing more and more of what designers have done. Design often includes this notion of “craft,” which in terms of digital product design, has traditionally meant making things look a certain way. This has meant doing lots and lots of examples of what things should look like. Now robots can push the pixels for us. Just as humans once typed all code, which went away overnight, the same will happen for the interfaces we design. An MCP will soon be able to do that and in some companies already is. We will soon be orchestrating the creation of the systems on which we’re designing systems. This isn’t necessarily bad at all, but does require rethinking what we designers are going to be doing with ourselves.

The first thing this means for designers is we will all need to be managing agents doing stuff we used to do. However, designers are notorious for their allergy to management. Chalk up too much art school (guilty as charged, twice mind you) and potentially misguided nostalgia for counter-culture upbringing. Looks like we’re going to collectively need to be taking some sort of design antihistamine and get over it. We’re going to need to be orchestrating agents building parts of design systems, components, asking us for feedback on possible variations, etc. So basically doing what creative and design directors do. They have the taste and overall ideas and command others to make it a thing.

The second thing this means for designers is we’re actually going to have be more human in things. We’re going to need be good at talking to the people who are making money out of the thing we’re designing so we can translate that to agents. It also means that we’re going to have to, and will in theory have a lot more time to, talk to people using the things we’re designing. And by designing, I mean at this point, more by proxy.

What we can expect from design is having a good eye, taste and a knack for explaining how to translate that into stuff people can look at and use. Designers will just have to be a lot better with humans because we’re the ones who are going to have to be able to translate how to address the human condition and what we’re trying to solve for. So in the end of the day, pushing less pixels over and over again, and more figuring out where the people and processes fit well together. Like we are supposed to be doing already.