In an age of shrinking corporate headcounts and budgets, how can designers keep their jobs and their business? That question is taking on greater relevance in the AI age, as generative AI threatens to work faster and at a greater scale than what human designers can do.
Dan Makoski, the former chief design officer for UnitedHealth Group, has a suggestion: Designers need to learn business-speak.
“A lot of CEOs don’t really understand design. They think of [designers] as black-turtleneck-wearing creative people that make stuff pretty,” he said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference held at the MGM Cotai in Macau on Thursday. He warned executives are poised to start questioning if they even need designers, as they start to explore whether AI can do these design tasks automatically.
To stay relevant in the age of AI, Makoski suggested that creatives need to learn the language of business; in turn, this “continued executive education” will help business leaders appreciate what designers do.
Designers care about the “human sides of the equation” for a product, such as accessibility and possible social implications. If a designer can explain these things in business-speak, then executives will realize that creatives have a role to play in a company’s strategy—including, importantly, its use of AI.
Products need to reflect the company brand in the “most human way possible,” argued Greg Petroff, former chief design officer at Cisco Security. “To do that well, design needs to be in the middle of the conversation.”
Arin Bhowmick, chief design officer at SAP, said that creatives also need to understand how to use data in the age of AI. “Typically designers don’t look into data, they look at designing experiences,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s ‘garbage in, garbage out’ for AI, so it’s important designers expand their notion to understand data lineage,” he continued, referring to the process of understanding how data flows from sources to users.
Victoria Spaulding-Burford, vice president of product design at Salesforce, agreed. “The power of the [AI era] is the data. That isn’t always the most comfortable place for designers or design leaders,” she said.
Designers are starting to embrace generative AI tools as a way to speed up the design process. But the new technology remains controversial, as design leaders fear its overuse might ultimately undermine human creativity, or put human design jobs at risk.
But panelists on Thursday suggested designers still need to take AI seriously. “My take is to get involved,” Spaulding-Burford said.
“If AI is helping to automate what’s ordinary, then it frees up [designers] to think about what humans can do that’s extraordinary,” Makoski said.
And there’s no way to escape the fact that the end users of any design are real people. “At the end of the day, you’re designing for humans. AI is just the technology,” Bhowmick said.
