Designing with AI Agents (part 1)

2 min read

Agents, agents, agents. You can’t open the internet without reading about how AI agents are already changing everything from how we shop to how we understand and appreciate sliced bread. They’re everywhere, devious little operatives lurking in the shadows doing things out of sight, resolved on destabilising how we do stuff.

I’m a product and service designer. I figure out how people use things, mainly digital things, and creatively solve for that. Agents are lauded as malleable and instant minions who we can send forth and do our digital bidding, from doing your taxes to curing cancer. But what do these things mean for design?

There is a lot of appropriate and very vocal concern that what was once the creative class is being replaced by AI. This is partially our fault. A very small partially mind you. We should be building agents before they build our replacements is one way of thinking about it. If we focus our design agentic efforts on things we don’t want to do or things we’re not good like we’re supposed to, then maybe we can get to this AI-assisted design nirvana that we keep on reading about.

A decent first stab at this would be setting things up. This is what designers have to do a lot. We set things up. Usually the same things over and over again. Right now Figma can generate a UI for you. It just creeps out of the dark and bulldozes a thing, albeit a pretty convincing and usable thing, right into your lap. There you have it. You can type some more and it tweaks it. Boom. But somehow, as far as I’ve seen, you can’t truly build with it. Why can’t agents start scurrying away and putting together a design system for me? Why can’t agents come up with systems that I can tweak and see the whole thing change parametrically? As designers, iif we’re replacing people with machines, we should do it well. That means thinking systematically about not duplicating page after page after page and tweaking when we could be doing something better like figuring out what those pages should do.