AI and Designer-as-god
I have recognized a troublesome pattern in the design/research discourse about how LLMs will change our role. I am still thinking through this, but I wanted to share my raw thought stream with you.
We have a few popular metaphors for talking about LLMs. Some of the most common ones I hear are:
- Sparring partner
- Intern
- My dear assistant
- Stochastic parrot (my favorite)
With the increasing popularity of MCPs and the word "agentic", people started acknowledging that different LLMs are good at different things. This realization gave the AI fanboys/girls the permission to accept that their favorite chat window is not a sentient, intelligent, know-it-all, magical servant that does their bidding. Not only that, they have (locally) accepted the fact that LLM outputs are quite hard to use without additional overhead. Oh relief.
This acknowledgment shifted the fandom talk from "being a 100x in something" to "being the coordinator of things." In this new phase of AI hype cycle, humans are these cute, creative, know-it-all, omniscient beings that are best suited for coordinating the work of several output generators, even if they have no idea about how those generators work.
Unfortunately, this idea of coordination really resonated with the designers who were brought up with, or self-subscribe to, the notion of being designer gods. The designer gods think that the world is waiting for their decisions, and that only those decisions would create the perfect user experience. The designer god thinks that the team who is responsible for creating and running the experience cannot do a good job without their blessing. The person with decades of experience in the domain that the designer god is working on? No no, they are just business people who really don't get design...
I think our industry successfully recognized that designer-as-god was not a useful mode of working for digital products in a modern society, about a decade ago. I felt that we had about a decade of work left to do to completely eradicate this toxic perspective. Unfortunately, I think this new notion of "oh he who designs screens and flows is a loser" set us back about a decade.