- I Know Kung Fu - Show Me
Design Process
AI in Design
Some of us remember the time of being just "designers" and moving fast: a sketch, a couple of rounds, a product owner's gut call on what shipped. Then UX became its own discipline, and speed gave way to discovery phases, personas, mood boards, and a rationale deck for every button. The work got more convincing. It also got slow, sometimes to a crawl with projects rescheduled around the time it took to build a persona pretty enough to survive a stakeholder review.
Say whatever you want about AI's influence on creativity, but it's been very helpful in handing some of that time back. Feed a client's site content into an AI model and have a working content architecture back in minutes. Connect to a design inspiration library, it can round up competitors and flag issues in fifteen minutes. A basic design system can exist before the coffee's finished. What used to take days of research and documentation now takes a fraction of it.
What hasn't gotten faster is the thinking. A prototype rushed out in an afternoon is flawed, and you already know it, which means it teaches you nothing you didn't already suspect. That thinking step took time because it was the actual work, and compressing everything around it should not compress it.
The moral of this trip down memory lane is that extra hours AI hands back are only useful if they go toward more thinking, not just faster shipping.