The Humanity Of Inclusion

The age of artificial intelligence is upon us, heralding in an era of excitement and uncertainty. Uncertainty is to be embraced. It is, after all, the catalyst of positive change. But is this AI revolution truly a shift away from the status quo?

Figma, last week, announced a plethora of new AI-driven features intended to improve the lives of designers. One feature in particular, Make Designs, has inspired reactions of overt discomfort and existential dread amongst the design community.

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 misconceptions about that being a designer's entire role not been a leading cause of anxiety within our community for decades?

That very anxiety broaches the root of misgivings about Figma's feature. 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.

While potentially enabling product designers to focus more on solving user problems by removing the tedium of drawing mockups, Figma's Make Designs feature also threatens to remove the actual designers from the equation 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 spend a lot of time discussing that inevitable impact on many people's livelihoods. There are plenty of those articles already. What follows instead are meditations on how this feature might impact product quality from the perspective of traditionally marginalized communities.

Everyone's Responsible Top

AI's output is, in its current form, a reflection of its training. It knows only what it is shown, and what it is shown is the work that we have already created. It cannot empathize. It cannot rationalize. Like an infant, it regurgitates what it ingests. A gross over-simplification, but illustrative nonetheless.

The argument can be made that this is also how human designers create. We are each the byproducts 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.

However, we can empathize and rationalize, and we often redefine that which informs our work, through our work. This is how we improve experiences over time. This is how we include new groups of people.

The same cannot necessarily be said for current state AI. The output from a given prompt relies on the model's inputs. 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.

And so the would-be disruptor of the status quo instead becomes its systematic perpetuator. The very philosophy that routinely leaves entire 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 expect from a model that is trained on the web as it currently exists? AI can only hope to improve through training. In that way, there will always be a need for human intervention; even as the corporate appetite for such interventions already begins 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.

With innovations such as Make Designs, it's likely that Product Managers will take on the role of "prompt engineer", providing just enough input to 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.

Talent Wasteland Top

There may come a time when, after suffering through decades of poorly designed and poorly performing prompt products, companies will seek human intervention. By then, those capable of intervening may have all but retired.

Senior designers will keep their jobs in the short term, in so far as one can today. Their bargaining power may even increase as their skillset becomes more invaluable over time. 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, yourself, can do the same?

Juniors may never grow, never learn to think outside of boxes, and never question the status quo. The talent pool may become overencumbered with designers whose only skill is prompt engineering.

We may all suffer the consequences of a world full of prompt products, rendering our 3% accessible web into a fraction of a percent accessible over time.

The Light At The End Top

There is a future where AI improves design processes and outcomes, and moves the accessibility needle upwards from 3%. At the same time as they announced Make Designs, Figma also announced Make Prototype and Rename Layers. These AI-driven innovations promise to help reduce much of the minutia currently involved in the design process, and without reducing the human element or quality of design outcomes. This is surely just the beginning.

Our future is, realistically, some combination of the utopian and dystopian. While many people will suffer the consequences of ill conceived AI tools that strive to automate creativity, the community rit large will also grow to embrace innovations that trivialize non-creative tasks, helping humans to solve bigger problems more efficiently, and for more people.