What Happens to Design After AI?
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How is AI reshaping the design landscape?
Designers when using Claude, as opposed to engineers using Claude, would consistently get better results. And it's because of the language that they use.
We have to remember that design in the European sense came from royalty and the desire to be distinctive because they were working with scarce materials. What's interesting about this era is that this idea of taste doesn't fit when all the materials are available to everyone.
Right now, everybody's trying to solve whether LLMs have taste. These models have millions of definitions of taste. LLMs have been trained on the output of humanity, not on the input. So what led to a design decision is not something that the LLMs know.
Maybe advice for our design engineers in the room. How have you in the past effectively communicated the value of an instinct versus a deadline or even another instinct which may be less important?
Yeah, that's a tough one because AI is making it easier than ever to create software. But what happens to design when anyone can generate an interface, a website, or an application with a prompt? Some argue that AI will commoditize design. Others believe it will make great design even more valuable by automating routine work and freeing people to focus on higher-order creative decisions. In this conversation, A16z General Partner Anish Acharya sits down with Microsoft VP of Design John Maeda and Impeccable founder and CEO Paul Backus to discuss design, software, creativity, and what happens when AI becomes part of the creative process.
What role does taste play in AI-generated design?
I want to actually talk a little bit about perhaps to begin with the relationship between design and technology. I think there's some people who may view design as sort of more spiritually close to art and others who see it perhaps in a more utilitarian fashion, you know, the design of everyday things. So perhaps, John, I can sort of ask you to kick us off and talk to us about how you see the interplay between the two.
Well, first of all, glad to be here. I used to think about this a lot when I was at Kleiner Perkins and thinking like, why is it that design is important in 2014, 15? Like, why was it important? It was because this weird company called Airbnb was unusually successful. And if you connect to why design became important, it was because of mobile. Before mobile, desktop experiences could be crappy and it was okay because you didn't use them very often. But mobile had high usage and therefore it was bad all the time. It would be painful. So that's when it sort of started to happen. In terms of the relationship now, however, I'm so excited to be on this with Paul because I've been a fan of this moment when we'd be able to auto-design.
And that's since the 90s when I was at MIT. We thought it was going to be possible one day, and now it's very possible.
How does automation affect the value of design?
And Paul, I think, is someone who's really at the cutting edge of all that.
Incredible. So elaborate a bit for us. What do you mean by auto design? And is the way that it works today, does that match the sort of idea that you had back in MIT?
Well, I mean, if you go back to the 1980s, there was a woman named Muriel Cooper who was unusual because she was a trained print graphic designer. She designed those book fans on MIT Press. There's a beautiful logo at MIT Press. She designed that among other pretty major things at MIT's history publication. She was the one who imagined a world where people wouldn't want to use the terminal and might want to use this thing called Helvetica. to look at things on the screen. So she predicted the whole desktop publishing revolution, electronic publishing revolution. And at the time, she also had a bunch of people from MIT's AI lab. And MIT AI lab was asking, how do we create things by machines that humans are good at?
And so her lab focused on how to automatically design things with quote-unquote AI at the time.
What is the relationship between design and technology?
Incredible. Paul, give us your view on the relationship and interplay between design and technology. Has it turned out the way you expected?
I think we're still working that out, to be honest.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How is AI reshaping the design landscape?
0:00–1:33
2
What role does taste play in AI-generated design?
1:33–2:47
3
How does automation affect the value of design?
2:47–3:50
4
What is the relationship between design and technology?
3:50–4:37
5
How can designers and engineers collaborate in an AI-driven world?
4:37–5:48
6
What are the implications of agentic workflows in design?
5:48–6:52
7
How does Impeccable enhance the design process?
6:52–7:49
8
What future trends can we expect in design due to AI advancements?
7:49–48:35
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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