The Future of Design Services — Maybe

Aesthetics and ease of use.

That’s what designers are hired for nowadays.

It’s what people can easily observe, and they are hired to solve for that. They might say otherwise, but if you make it pretty and somewhat usable, they are happy, and you get paid. So everyone is happy, and we keep doing what works for everyone. There’s no reason to change it.

This has resulted in:

• A few visual styles to choose from.

• User experience patterns to copy.

• A generic tone of voice we all use.

This sea of sameness will soon be multiplied by a million.

And we will pay the price of playing it safe.

All the AI tools that are coming are trained on that pile of copycats that we collectively created. Guess what that will produce? A more homogenized and enhanced version of that lovely pile of copycats that I now picture in my head.

Some will say that’s great news; now we will only produce stuff that has proven to work.

Have you seen this experiment where they let a person wait in a room, and the only thing there is a button that can zap them with electricity? Guess what happened in minute 5? They are so bored they go press the button.

We can’t live without variety.

Soon, producing design artefacts like visuals and UX patterns will no longer be the bottleneck of the design process or the main thing in our proposals and invoices. Clients will be able to produce all that on their own with unlimited revisions. Then what would we sell?

With infinite choice, the next biggest challenge people have to overcome will be decision-making.

We will need to move from artefact producers to designers of decision-making frameworks. Discover and design a set of principles that will help our clients and their AI models make decisions that reflect their values and available resources.

As design service providers, we need to focus on facilitating AI-powered discovery and decision-making. Creating system principles for auto-generating UX patterns and interface designs. Design sustainable business models and stories that will spread ideas.

Or we will all start writing code that does all of the above. I hope it’s not that.

But whatever it is, we are definitely moving away from making things pretty and somewhat usable. That’s a given now.