In Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship Dan Cohen finishes with a summary that hits exactly where I am landing on using AI in design. Emphasis mine:
This is the professorial equivalent of the cognitive decline that we worry about with our students who have been using AI for years — and what atrophies in the seminar room will surely atrophy on the page as well. The solution seems clear: if you would like, use AI for the parts of scholarly work where it excels and check all automated output, while retaining human seniority in orchestrating and expressing the meaning of your research.
For me, as I explore how to use these new tools in my work, this is where I am landing. I do all the design thinking, the layouts, and interactions but the AI does the building. What would take me maybe a week or more to build a prototype to test a design, takes Claude an hour or two, and as a result my work is richer.
Design for me has never stopped in the design software. When I worked for myself as both designer and developer, design would continue as I built. I would move back and forth between Sketch and code, my problem was that sometimes I was aware a better solution was out there, I just couldn’t build it. When I moved to an in-house design team that symbiosis of design and dev was lost. The design software we used to prototype would influence my design thinking, I didn’t always know how to do something, or it would take too long to build so I couldn’t explore it.
In contrast, the workflow now emerging for me is much closer to what it used to be when I was self-employed, the difference now is that I am less constrained by my own technical ability. I am able to push designs further and see how they work in the browser, my work has become both quicker and deeper.
