Filling a Page or Wrangling into a Pen

The goal of writing, this myth suggests, is filling a page rather than the process of thought that a completed page represents.

“Challenging The Myths of Generative AI” (Tech Policy Press)

If design is about figuring out and describing what to make or what to fix, there is likely way too much room for automation in that for a designer. That is because design needs to show that something is happening and that means producing artefacts.

As we have seen with generative AI though, the production of digital images can be to a large extent quite quickly automated. How well these models and platforms that live on top of them do that is a different story. Either way, the production of the artefact of artistic choice is being automated and for design things are moving that way as well.

But there is no accounting for taste right? So there might be the role of some sort of artefact wrangler so that the person with the taste, like a DJ lets say, is picking and choosing and orchestrating what the machines are doing. “Design wrangler" if you will. The design is all over the place, the research, the insights, the design system components, and it’s then up to the design wrangler to use the magic AI lasso to get it all together into the pen where it’s magically packaged all together. This a designer already does, but in the future pounding on our front door, the designer will more than likely not even necessarily manage the wrangling of design even, but manage the the things that do the wrangling, meaning agents.

It’s all good though because the designer should in theory then be paid for their taste which would mean choosing how to put things together that put lots of other things together. And they still haven’t figure out how to automate taste.