Consider these prelimenary notes on the topic. It is hardly even a draft

Adapting to AI as a Designer

Jakob Nielsen and an "Urgency around AI"

Jacob Nielsen wrote a blog post that said that designers needs to have urgency about AI. When I first read this article I was in the process of being let go from my job, and many of my design friends, were at least being threatened of loosing their jobs. Nielsen writes that designers need to learn AI but he doesn’t say anything about what that would mean. It left me with a vague anxiety and stress and it’s first now that I feel like I have the energy to address it.

How do you use AI as a designer?

When you search “Design and AI”, you will come across a lot of articles that describe how AI have helped designers build new apps

In this article, they lay out how they created both the product design roadmap, and the most important features of the product. They used ChatGPT to generate the site map and break down each screen and what needed. They even use AI to generate code

In this article, they talk about how they use AI image generators like Midjourney, Dall-e, and stable diffusion to mockup web design ideas. They also talk about how LLM can be useful for research, both preparing questions, analysing data and querying data afterwards. They also used it for copywriting and to make initial personas for their app.

In this article, they use AI for pretty much everything that they need. They can use AI for to create personas, for competitive analysis, for transcript, transcribing, user interviews and surveys as well as AI image generators for moodboards.

When I read through these articles and others like them the theme that I see is that AI is used for the first steps of explorations.

If they generate a moodboard or a picture for the hero section they still needed to move the Photoshop to actually finish it. When they make a persona they needed to fill-in real data. It seems like right now that the use case for AI is to speed out up the initial sketching phase and to make something quick to get going, the final touches still needs to be done by skillfull hand.

What does it mean to learn AI

So if this is how AI is being used, what kind of skills do you need to do this? Grumpy designer who wonders In this article the Grumpy Designer talks about the skill of prompt engineering, and that designers might be especially suited at it because it requires a lot of communication skills that designers are supposedly great. One point, and I agree with this, is that right now Prompt engineering is very important. You need to learn each model behaves and the magic works to get it to do what you want.

But as the field matures this is one of the pain points that the model owners will try to fix as quickly as possible. So in the near future being good at prompt engineering is probably really good but I don’t see it as a sustainable skill. It’s also not a very transferable skill. Although you can learn some basic guideliens that applies for all you will need to learn specific prompt structures for each model or service.

Prompt engineering will not lead to job security.

They also bring up that API building API on these models will be the best way and this I think is very interesting. I do see a lot of potential in billing new services if you understand a AI model and the API but it’s usually not what you would consider the core skill of a designer , it either wears into a developer roll. If you want to do the code that connects this API, or it wears into a more product role for designer, they will need to shift their skill set and abandon their traditionally traditional key areas to take advantage of this like typography color Composition

The last advice I gave is that the sign should just start using all these and we saw in the earlier segment here on the other post how you might do that so here I think that you will need to learn how to incorporate them, but as the field progresses, like this is not also not sustainable knowledge, knowing a model right now will not be the same in a year from now so if you start using another model for some other task for two months and come back your you’re gonna need to re-up your skill it’s a very short expiry date on this knowledge

So what is the designer to do?

If you listen to some people, especially people on X/Twitter, it sounds like AI will replace everything. The complete job. But if you read about how designers are using AI it is more like AI is taking over tasks, or even phases of tasks. I think it is useful to remember that a job requires a lot of different skills to be able to do a lot of different tasks

The article from the grumpy designer and this Forbes article says that you might want to cultivate is the skills of interpersonal connection and communication. In my experience as you move from a junior position to more senior position, you move from concrete hard skills into fussy soft skills as a manager or lead design of some sort. As a senior you will probably do a lot more meetings and more talking rather than pen to paper. Are we essentially telling all designers to move into a leadership role?

A more practical issue is that, in my experience, we're not great at hiring for soft skills. There’s no leetcodes for soft skills.

To sum up

Becoming good at a certain AI service, or prompt engineering, will not help with long term job security. Learning how to build applications, becoming a developer, seems more long term but then you are abandoning your core competencies as a designer.

Either AI will have minimal effect on the designer profession since you will need someone who has taste and can do the final touch ups. Maybe the only change will be that there are fewer jobs available since people will feel like the AI output is good enough.

If there are fewer jobs available, a contraction, then it would make sense to pivot to something where you feel like you have a head start and can switch easily. The alternative is to double down and become the one who can take a mediocre ai output and make it great.