I read posts on Threads, articles and blogs, and watch YouTube videos shouting from the rooftops that design is dead, AI can do that now. The same thing is happening across the creative industries, and even in my own profession, software development.
Yes, models are capable and getting better every day, but just because something can be generated quickly doesn't mean it's good.
Design is everywhere. If people stop learning it, we'll end up with a bland, copy and paste life.
I see it in web development already. I can spot an AI generated site instantly, they all look the same. The difference only comes when people put in more input, their own touch and their own experiences.
Buildings, signage, cars, bikes, bags, clothes, phones, the list is endless. You're interacting with design right now, with what you're wearing, how you got to work and how you're reading this. Years of work and graft, all culminating to this point.
People saying design is dead, art is dead, couldn't be more wrong. It has outlasted empires, wars, communities and every technological leap we've thrown at it. It's timeless, and often priceless.
If we stop learning about the history of design, the process and the friction, we'll end up with nothing new. No direction, no taste, and a bland old life.
Take the London Underground map.
Before 1931, the Tube's lines were drawn geographically, laid over the streets of a city map. Accurate, but a mess to read. Then Harry Beck, an engineering draughtsman who'd been laid off from the Underground's signalling department, started redrawing it in his spare time. He threw out geography entirely. Only horizontal, vertical and 45 degree lines, each line its own colour. The idea probably came from the electrical circuit diagrams he'd drawn in his old job.
London Underground turned it down. Too revolutionary. Beck kept at it, and after a small trial run it went out as a pocket map in 1933. Passengers loved it straight away.
Nearly a century later, every Tube map still carries a line crediting it as an evolution of Beck's original 1931 design. Metro maps all over the world have borrowed the same idea.
Here's the thing. Beck's map wasn't brilliant because it was quick to make. It was brilliant because of what he chose to leave out. He understood that someone stood on a platform doesn't care how far apart two stations are, they care how to get from one to the other. That's not something you prompt your way into. It came from his own experience, from years of drawing circuits, and from looking at a problem long enough to see it differently.
And it got rejected, that's where the friction comes in. He had to defend the idea, rework it and get it in front of people before anyone believed in it. Today you could generate a hundred transit maps in a minute. Most of them would look polished. Very few would know what to throw away.
That's what worries me about "design is dead". These tools are good at giving you the average of everything that already exists. Beck's map was the opposite of average. It broke the rules everyone else was following, and it only worked because he understood why those rules existed in the first place.
If figureheads and professionals in the design, technology or any other industry start telling people who are just getting into design, or want to learn it, that it’s dead and not viable, we’ll loose great minds and potentially innovations and products, when we don’t need to.
We also need to go through the process of ideation and the friction it brings. Without it, you can end up with inaccessible designs. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. Knowing what bad UX looks like, or why something was designed the way it was, comes from practice, learnt experience and testing.
We now live in a world where the jump from building a product to people using it or buying it is a small one. It's easier than ever, but that also means an influx of bad and inaccessible design.
So learn the history. Sit with the friction. Get it wrong a few times. And don't get me wrong, use the tools, they're useful. But next time you're stood on a platform, tracing a coloured line with your finger to find your stop, remember someone drew that in his spare time and was told no.
Liked this? Consider sharing it with a friend, colleague or on your socials, it would be much appreciated!