Design in the age of AI

We are experiencing a major shift.
Today, artificial intelligence is no longer a simple tool: it produces, automates, analyzes, suggests, adapt… And it does so at a speed and scale we’ve never seen before.

Faced with this revolution, many designers are concerned: will AI take our place?

This fear, though understandable, hides a more exciting reality. AI does not directly threaten the designer; it transforms their role. It pushes designers to rediscover our essence, to return to what gives us value and strength: thinking, questioning, connecting.
It’s no longer about designing prototypes, mock-ups, or user journeys. It’s about making the connections between uses, technologies, systems, cultures, and values.

To understand this transformation, we need to return to what (from my perspective) makes design unique, and how artificial intelligence reveals the role of the designer.

Design as a systemic approach

Design is, by nature, systemic.
A designer must think in terms of systems, because a product never exists in isolation, it lives within an ecosystem. Moreover, to build it, the designer operates within a network of complex systems: technical ecosystems, social contexts, organisational cultures, multiple timelines… And this for the following reasons:

Designer works with living systems.
Organisations change, users evolve, technologies transform.
It operates in an environment of constant change and must continually adapt.

Designer reveals interdependencies.
Features change behaviors, which in return transform usage, which ultimately impacts an organisation. The designer sees and tries to anticipate these knock-on effects, where others see only separate elements.

Designer embraces complexity.
Technical constraints, business challenges, human realities, multiple timescales… Designer cannot simplify this complexity without losing relevance. As designers, we are especially good at working within chaos (in the Cynefin sense of the term).

Design thinks in interactions.
An interface element doesn’t exist in isolation; it fits into a journey that connects with other journeys within a arger ecosystem. It always considers the relationships between elements.

This systemic nature makes design a practice of connection.
It links what seems separate such as: human and technology, desire and constraint. It reveals what is invisible and anticipates what is not yet there.

Design as a holistic vision

It is entirely possible to act within a complex system… without ever adopting a holistic vision.
Where the systemic approach observes interconnections, the holistic approach embraces the whole.

Being holistic isn’t about “seeing more broadly” for the sake of intellectual elegance. It’s about taking the entire system into account, not just the visible or measurable parts. This vision encourages to deliberately broaden our perspective in order to:

Rejecting oversimplification
Instead of artificially reducing complexity, which leads to greater technical and design debt in the medium and long term, simply to move faster, the designer accepts it and works with it.

Designing with awareness
Acknowledging that every design choice has effects, whether immediately visible or not. This awareness makes the designer more responsible and pushes them to examine decisions from multiple angles.

Collaborating across disciplines
Tech, product, content, data, legal, HR… each field holds part of the system and offers essential insights.

Integrating the invisible dimensions
Culture, time, emotion, environment… all the things you won’t find in a backlog but which profoundly shape the final experience.

Considering impact beyond the deliverable
On usage, on behaviour, on organisational or societal dynamics.

The designer adopts a holistic approach deliberately: not to cover everything, but to design with clarity in an interconnected world, where every decision matters, goes beyond the product, and carries a measure of responsibility.

Design, disrupted by AI

Artificial intelligence is radically transforming our design practices, but not necessarily in the way we imagine. It doesn’t undermine the core of our work, our systemic and holistic approaches. On the contrary, it makes them more urgent than ever.

By transforming our tools and processes, AI doesn’t just change how we design. It changes what the designer needs to consider, what they must anticipate, and how AI is changing how we think. It accelerates, amplifies, simplifies… but it doesn’t articulate, it only produces.

In practical terms, it disrupts our practices on several levels:

  • Automation of production tasks (UI, content, components, variants…);
  • Analysis of massive data to uncover uses, trends, behaviours;
  • Dynamic adaptation of journeys, content or interfaces to user context;
  • Evolving design with continuous learning and iterations based on real feedback.

But this technical power also introduces new blind spots:

  • Experiences that become standardised, lacking clear intent and distinctive vision;
  • Systems optimised locally without a global view or strategic compass;
  • Interfaces generated at scale… but without narrative, without meaning, without awareness of consequences.

AI is good at doing, but doesn’t know why it does it.
It generates solutions without questioning their relevance, produces variations without understanding their impact, and optimises metrics without interrogating their meaning. It doesn’t connect things, doesn’t check results, doesn’t measure. And this is precisely this limitation that reveals the irreplaceable value of design: to bring intention, meaning, and direction to technological power.

AI, the designer’s new ally

As AI becomes integrated into tools and production workflows, a question emerges: what is left for the designer when a machine can generate screens, write text, structure user journeys, analyse tests, and so on? Because yes, when the machine begins to do all the production work that many designers do today, how can we not feel afraid of AI? How can we not question our role?

From my perspective, the answer doesn’t lie in technology, but in the stance, the role the designer must take (or take back):

  • From execution to structuring.
  • From doing to meaning.
  • From deliverable to ecosystem.

By returning their original role, the designer once again becomes:

  • A framer: defining the intentions, rules, and limits of what AI generates.
  • A mediator: connecting business goals, technical constraints, and human realities.
  • A translator: turning signals from data into meaningful design choices.
  • An architect: designing the conditions for an experience to emerge, not just its final form.
  • And much more.

Our responsibility is not to model our ways of designing on those of AI. Just because it can produce rapidly and at scale doesn’t mean the designer should do the same. Just because it generates a solution doesn’t mean that solution is right, contextualised, or desirable. The designer must use AI as the tool it should be: an accelerator, a multiplier of capabilities, a tool.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence doesn’t signal the end of design. It marks a turning point. It is another shift that redefines our role and our impact. This technology forces us to clarify our intent and to better understand humans and systems in which we operate.

It pushes us to move beyond execution, freeing us from production so we can return to what matters most: imagining, questioning, connecting, framing. This evolution restores design’s strategic dimension. More than a creator of forms, the designer becomes an architect of complex experiences, a translator between technical and human worlds, a guardian of coherence and product quality in an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem.

In today’s digital ecosystem, design may be the only discipline capable of simultaneously carrying a global, systemic, and holistic perspective. This unique ability to hold both a big-picture vision and attention to detail, to bridge technology and humanity, to anticipate impacts while staying grounded in the present, makes design an essential pillar for building tomorrow’s solutions.

The practice evolves, just as it has evolved before and will continue to evolve.
AI won’t do design for us. It will help us do it better. Artificial intelligence is an accelerator, a multiplier of capabilities, a tool… provided we know in which direction to steer it.

Where AI answers, the designer asks.
Where AI produces, the designer structures.
Where AI optimises, the designer makes choices.
Where AI predicts, the designer interprets.
Where AI adapts, the designer guides.
AI is not mandatory, design is.

Don’t forget, design is about building things for people, no matter how or what tools you use. What matters is creating things that are useful and meaningful, to make people’s lives easier.

Appendices and resources

Published: 07/01/2025

Using human-centered design to transform complex systems into clear, effective and engaging tools. My goal? Create value by merging both design and technology.

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