The Humanity Of Inclusion

Ah yes, AI. Artificial intelligence. Neural networks. Thinking machines. We find ourselves in exciting and uncertain times, do we not? Uncertainty is to be embraced. It is, after all, a catalyst for positive change. But is this AI revolution truly a shift from the status quo?

Figma, last week, announced a handful of new AI-driven features. One feature in particular, Make Designs, has inspired reactions of discomfort and existential dread from the design community at large.

The premise is simple. Instead of drawing interface designs ourselves, Figma wants us to let AI do it. At face value, this sounds exciting. After all, who likes manually pushing pixels around a screen? Have we not suffered collective anxiety for decades over the misconception of that being our only value?

Anxiety! A powerful and debilitating emotion. The world's premier tool for designing digital products—used primarily by product designers—is beta testing a way to forgo (in the eyes of many capitalists) the need to hire those designers in the first place. Anxiety.

Certainly, Make Designs has real potential to cure the tedium of drawing mockups. Yet it also threatens to cure designers of their careers entirely. Not because the tool itself is meant to replace designers, but because of the preconcieved notion by employers that it can. An alarming prospect in a world that routinely commoditizes professionals as cost centers, to be reduced in order to post gains to shareholder value.

But this post won't dwell for any length on that inevitable impact to many people's livelihoods. No, my friend, that's not why we're here today. What follows instead are meditations on how this feature might impact product quality from the perspective of traditionally marginalized groups. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of my rationale for why AI isn't ready to replace designers, as viewed through the lens of accessibility.

Everyone's Responsibility Top

AI's output is, as of the time of this writing, a direct reflection of its training. It knows only what it is shown, and what it is shown is work that has already been created. It cannot empathize. It cannot rationalize. Like an infant, it simply regurgitates what it ingests. A gross over-simplification, but illustrative nonetheless.

An argument can be made that this is also how human designers create. We are each the byproduct of our own environments and experiences. There is nothing new under the sun, after all. We are, like AI, blissfully unaware of what we have not seen. Everything we create is informed by that which was created before us.

But, we can empathize and rationalize, and we often redefine that which informs our work, through our work. This empathy is how we improve experiences for more people over time; how we break the mold to include historically marginalized groups. As designers, we are each responsible for making things that work for everyone, not just the people that things have worked for in the past. In our field, edge cases may not be prioritized, but they should also never be ignored.

This is unfortunately something that current state AI is neither concerned with nor provisioned for. The output from a given prompt relies entirely on the AI model's training. What results is different enough on the surface, but the underlying principles are always the same. It's unlikely that this type of AI will ever intentionally reveal new ways of solving design problems for more people.

And so the would-be disruptor of the status quo is instead revealed as its systematic perpetuator. Philosophies that routinely leave populations behind, inherently baked into the technology. About 13% of people alive today have some form of disability. According to UserWay, only 3% of the web is currently accessible to them.

What result should we then expect from an AI model trained on the web as it currently exists?

AI improves only through training. Training occures when a bombardment of new inputs are fed into a model, catalogued, and learned from. If those inputs reinforce current design philosophies, for example, then the output will also reinforce those philosophies without intent. And intent, in design, is everything.

In this way, AI is more of a mimic. Less like a human child, and more like a parrot. Surely some form of intelligence exists, though only peripherally human-like. Any hope of mitigating that, of introducing any real change over time, requires human intervention; even as the corporate appetite for such interventions has already begun to wane.

Thus, the actual result of tools like Figma's Make Designs is likely to be a staggering loss of design quality—particularly for people who rely on inclusive and accessible design practices. These are, unsurprisingly, mostly members of marginalized communities.

Poorly Performing Prompt Products Top

Product Managers are primed for the role of "prompt engineer." Much of their day already centers requirements. Prompt engineering will be a logical next step, enabling them to leverage requirements as AI input and produce instantly compelling output. As they do, the process of designing products will become less and less expensive, and corporate shareholders will be rewarded. The resulting race to the bottom will have a fundamental and lasting impact on product experiences.

As designers disappear, so too will the desire to design inclusive and accessible products. Accessibility will become stagnant and out dated, or vanish altogether. Prompt engineers will pump algorithms full of all the requirements they can dream up. Without truly new concepts to train models on, though, output will rapidly homogenize. Like a virus, the same results will be replicated over and over.

For this reason, senior designers with experience will keep their jobs in the short term, in so far as one can today. Their bargaining power may even temporarily increase as their skillset becomes more valuable. But their numbers will dwindle as they vest, retire, and move on.

Junior designers and aspiring fresh graduates stand to pay the heaviest toll. Why invest in training a designer when your Product Manager can write a prompt in a fraction of the time and achieve a comparable short-term result? Or when you, the business owner, can do the same?

If junior designers never grow, never learn to think outside of boxes, and never question the status quo, the result will be a talent wasteland overrun by designers whose only skill is prompt engineering.

The web has matured, but it is still the most rapidly evolving design medium today. We would all suffer the consequences of a world full of prompt products, where accessibility is no longer just an afterthought, but no longer a consideration at all.

The Light At The End Top

I'll end on a positive note. There is a future within reach where AI improves design practices and outcomes, even for marginalized groups.

At the same time as they announced Make Designs, Figma also announced Make Prototype and Rename Layers. AI-driven innovations like these promise to help remove grueling minutai from the job, but without altogether removing the human creative element. This means more energy spent on solving unique problems, and less energy overall on the day to day grind. I believe this to be the right focus for the current technology, one much closer to realizing the true promise of technology upon which society so readily wants to jump the gun.

The future that we were promised by technology is one where we get to spend more time with our families, friends, hobbies, and passions. More time spent in exploration of life; watching our children grow up, supporting our aging parents.

The day job, the concept of a singular career purpose, should ultimately be rendered obsolete by technology—freeing us from the bondage of wage labor. Maybe AI can eventually become a powerful tool for that liberation, but the technology of today is far from capable of replacing designers, and our society is far from ready for that replacement. Without care, we risk undoing through technology the very objective it's created for; giving people a better and more autonomous life.

While many people will suffer the consequences of ill conceived AI tools that strive for short term creative automation, there still exists a slew of exciting opportunities for AI. As designers, we should embrace tools that empower us to solve bigger problems for more people, while tactfully advocating to retain those (still very necessary) inclusive human practices.