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, a 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? Haven't misconceptions of that being our sole value been a leading cause of anxiety for decades?

That very anxiety broaches the root of misgivings about Figma's new 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 removing the tedium of drawing mockups from our workflows, Figma's Make Designs feature also threatens to remove the actual designers from the workflow 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. What follows instead are meditations on how this feature might impact product quality from the perspective of traditionally marginalized communities. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of my rationale for why AI isn't ready to replace designers.

Everyone's Responsibility Top

AI's output is, as of the time of this writing, 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 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 include historically marginalized groups. As designers, we are all 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 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 for more people.

And so the would-be disruptor of the status quo instead becomes its systematic perpetuator. The very philosophy that routinely leaves 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 can only hope to improve through training. If only in that way, there will always be a need for human intervention with this current technology; 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 effort already centers around requirements. Prompt engineering is a logical next step, enabling them to provide just enough input to produce instantly compelling output on their own. 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, their collective wisdom about how to design inclusive and accessible products will also vanish, or become stagnant and out dated. Prompt engineers will pump algorithms full of all the language they can dream up. But without truly new concepts to train their models on, outputs will rapidly homogenize. Like a virus, the same results will be replicated over and over, until it becomes nearly impossible to generate anything unique even on the surface.

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, rendering our 3% accessible web into a fraction of that over a short time.

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. These AI-driven innovations promise to help reduce much of the grueling minutia currently involved in the job of designing products, but without altogether removing the necessary human creative element. This will help designers spend more energy on solving unique problems, while spending less energy on the day to day grind. I believe this to be the right focus for the current technology.

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.

Dr. Ayesha Khan once wrote that the very concept of work/life balance "... tells you that at work, you're not treated as a living being but more like a lifeless object or obedient machine." As corporate culture already seeks to commoditize human lives, one cannot help but wonder how long before AI and people are viewed synonymously; as disposable and replaceable productivity machines.

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 thing 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 to automate creativity in the short term, 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 practices.