Design Without Designers

The club is loosing its walls

❝With a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.❞
— Akira Kurosawa¹

A notification lands on my phone from a group chat with friends. It’s the kind of image that has become instantly familiar in the past year: cheerful, slightly unnatural, and unmistakably AI-generated. Balloons and confetti float around a pile of presents and pastel sweets, and in the centre, in a typeface that looks like it was chosen by a polite machine trying not to offend anyone, are the words “Best wishes, Nasso!”

Yiannis, a friend of mine who doesn’t work in design, follows up almost immediately. “I made this myself!” he writes, with the satisfaction of someone who has discovered a new shortcut and wants credit for taking it.

I respond the way designers often do when they’re making a joke that isn’t entirely a joke. “You guys are going to take our jobs.”

He sends another image a minute later. Same illustration style, same framing, but now the mood has flipped, as if the scene has been revised by a director who decided the comedy needed a twist. Sad rainy clouds and flowers, the balloons seem to have left, and the message reads: “Sorry, Nasso.” It’s fast, it’s funny, and it’s uncomfortably competent, because it demonstrates something we used to treat as a boundary: the gap between having an idea and producing the thing.

It would be easy to dismiss this as irrelevant to design, because it’s “just” a meme in a chat. But I keep seeing designers complain about people using technology to do “design work”, or “pretending” they’re designers, as if the real offence is that outsiders touched the tools. AI is only the latest accelerant to a habit that is much older. We’ve spent years speaking inward, perfecting tools and processes, and calling it professionalism, while doing a weaker job of explaining to the world what design is actually for.

And now the doors are starting to open.

For me, the reaction isn’t clean or consistent, and I’m a little suspicious of anyone who says theirs is. Part of me feels a genuine delight at how quickly an idea can become a thing, because speed has a way of making creativity feel possible again. But I also feel a small sting when my friend said “I made it,” not because he’s done anything wrong, but because it exposes how much of my own identity has been tied to being the person who translates intention into output. What worries me most is not that people will generate more things, but that when things become cheap, the thinking that should guide them becomes easier to skip, and responsibility becomes easier to avoid.

The club we built

A few years ago, Khoi Vinh² wrote about design’s tendency toward insular shoptalk, and the way we can sound like a private club talking to itself³. When I read it then, it felt familiar in the way an honest friend feels familiar, because they’re saying something you already know but haven’t quite wanted to admit. Design culture loves to talk about design culture. We love our tools, our methods, our debates, our micro-optimisations, our rituals, our moral hierarchies, and our internal status markers, and we’ve gotten very good at recognising each other through them.

This is not unique to design, of course. Every profession develops a language and a set of norms, partly to be precise, partly to protect itself, and partly to signal belonging. But in design, the line between useful precision and performative identity is thin, and we often cross it. You can see it in how quickly conversations drift to software features, frameworks, and increasingly intricate process diagrams, even when the real problem is human, organisational, or political. You can see it in how often “good design” becomes shorthand for “design that looks like what designers like,” which is a convenient definition if you happen to be a designer, and a confusing one if you’re not.

The cost of this inward focus is not only that we occasionally sound annoying. The deeper cost is that we leave a space where public understanding should be, and that space never stays empty. Someone is always there to fill it, sometimes with the idea that design is decoration, sometimes with the idea that it’s taste, sometimes with the idea that it’s a final layer of polish. Occasionally, with the idea that it’s that “cool thing” or “magic,” which is flattering but also a way of avoiding clarity. If we’re honest, we have enabled all of these interpretations by not insisting, consistently and plainly, on what we’re actually responsible for.

For a long time, this wasn’t fatal, because the profession could hide behind scarcity, the tools were expensive or hard to learn, the craft took time, the output looked specialised, and the boundary was not only cultural, but also practical.

Recently, AI arrived and made the practical boundary feel a lot less real.

The club is losing its walls

There’s a particular kind of “authority” that comes from being the person who knows how to operate the machinery (especially when you’re good and fast). In design, we’ve built a lot of authority on that kind of access, and sadly, a big part of it comes from design education. We might not like to admit it, but many design conversations still assume that the person closest to the tool is closest to the truth.

There’s a kind of insider model at work in design, where fluency in certain tools, terms, and rituals quietly becomes a proxy for authority. It’s not malicious, and it’s not unique to our field, but it does create a boundary between “people who can” and “people who can’t”, even when the real value of the work sits elsewhere.

If you have ever watched a room change tone the moment a designer starts explaining “the process”, if you’ve ever been in a conversation where the complexity of the workflow stands in for the importance of the work, or if you’ve ever felt the subtle pride of being the person who knows what to do in Figma, you’ve probably seen it in yourself too.

AI doesn’t destroy design, it destabilises the idea that authority can rest on controlling execution.

Because now execution is not scarce.

In the creative arts, we’ve already watched the phrase “I made this myself” change meaning. It used to imply learning a tool, developing a skill, putting in time, and producing a thing through labour. Now it can also mean describing an intention well enough for a system to produce multiple versions in seconds. That is not the same kind of making, but it is a kind of making, and people will treat it as such because it is useful, because it’s accessible, and because it satisfies a very human desire to turn ideas into artefacts.

The important point is not whether this is “real” design. The important point is that the world doesn’t need our permission to call it design, and it never did. We are not the committee that decides what counts.

So when designers react with offended disbelief, as if the public is cheating in a game that designers invented, it’s worth asking what that reaction is protecting. Is it protecting quality, responsibility, and people from bad outcomes, or is it protecting status, identity, and designers from feeling less replaceable? The uncomfortable answer is that it’s often closer to the second.

Output was never the point, but we treated it like it was

The republished introduction to Khoi’s piece⁴ includes a line that stays with me: “AI could liberate the work product of designers from designers themselves, opening the means of the craft to anyone able to type what basically amounts to a search query.” It doesn’t only describe job displacement. It describes a cultural shift in who gets to produce designed artefacts, how quickly they can do it, and how little ceremony is needed.

This is not a brand-new dynamic. We’ve lived through versions of it before. Desktop publishing, stock photography, templates, drag-and-drop site builders, Canva, no-code tools, UI kits, design systems, component libraries, auto-layout, and the simple fact that the internet is full of examples that can be copied have all moved production outward. Each time, a section of the profession reacts as if the sky is falling, but the sky rarely falls. The profession shifts slowly and unevenly, and many people quietly update their definition of what they do while continuing to describe it with the same words.

AI isn’t just speeding things up, but removing steps, so the jump from an idea to a finished-looking output can feel almost instant, and from the outside, it can look like thinking and making are the same thing. That makes outputs feel lighter and easier to throw away. The bigger change isn’t technical; it’s about value: when output becomes cheap and abundant, output alone can’t justify a profession.

Designers like to say “design is more than visuals,” and they’re right, but we’ve mostly said it to each other, while many organisations still treat design as the final “make it nice” step. So when AI helps automate the “nice” part, we shouldn’t be shocked that people assume design itself has been automated.

It’s not surprising. It’s a consequence.

What we failed to explain

If the public thinks design is output, it’s partly because we have spent an enormous amount of energy talking about output. We teach tools, celebrate craft, share screens, argue over pixels, typography, and component patterns, and we do it with genuine care because craft matters. But we often fail to connect craft to the part that matters to everyone else: consequences.

Design, when it is done seriously, is a discipline of choices under constraints. It is deciding what matters and what can be sacrificed, setting priorities that shape what people can do (what they can understand, what they feel safe doing, what they are nudged toward, and what they are blocked from), and building defaults (and defaults are politics in disguise). It is also the ongoing work of making systems legible, and therefore contestable, which is a quiet form of power.

None of that disappears because AI can produce ten variations of a screen in twenty seconds, but it does mean we can’t lean on the old signals of value. We can’t lean on “I can do this in Figma,” on process theatre, or on the romantic story of craft as the justification for the role.

We have to speak in terms that stand up outside the club, and this requires a shift from authority to responsibility, and from “design as a skill” to “design as accountability.”

A line in the sand

If design is to remain a profession rather than a function of some software, it needs to be clearer about what it will not outsource.

AI can already generate layouts, images, flows, and variations faster and cheaper than any human, which makes execution no longer scarce. Treating output as the core of design only delays a necessary reckoning. What does not transfer so easily is judgment. Design still involves framing problems, deciding what not to build, and making trade-offs that affect people beyond the interface. These decisions carry consequences that optimisation alone cannot resolve.

Design also carries responsibility for those consequences.⁵ Someone has to decide when efficiency becomes harm, when simplification excludes, and when a smooth experience hides a questionable outcome. AI can execute intent, but it cannot be accountable for it.

As design becomes increasingly liberated from designers, designers have to anchor their value elsewhere, not as guardians of craft, but as stewards of judgment. That shift is not a loss. It is a clearer, more honest definition of the role.

NK

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1. Akira Kurosawa: Japanese filmmaker who directed 30 feature films in a career spanning six decades. With a bold, dynamic style strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.

2. Khoi Vinh: Designer, blogger of the famous Subtraction blog, and former Design Director for The New York Times and later Adobe.

3. Welcome to the Designers’ Club—Keep Out, AIGA Eye on Design

4. What It Means to Be a Designer Today, co-edited with Liz Stinson and published by Princeton Architectural Press, features both collected and newly commissioned essays on the state of graphic design today from AIGA’s Eye on Design.

5. Book suggestion: Ruined by Design: The Shitty Pulp Edition, by Mike Monteiro