Don’t make the mistake of thinking generative AI’s impact on design is about image services. Images have always been just the visible tip of the design iceberg.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking generative AI’s impact on design is about image services (like DALL–E 2, Firefly, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion). Sure, those are fascinating and relevant but they’re not the main event. Images have always been just the visible tip of the design iceberg.
Generative AI will change design in major ways over time — it will:
Help conceive experiences ranging from entire products to microinteractions. Design tools store interaction flows in formal languages along with descriptions in natural languages, so there’s a massive supply of designs suitable to train models.
Transform how user researchers conduct design research. Generative AI can help manufacture synthetic data for use in both quantitative and qualitative studies. That can help protect the privacy of users whose data it’s derived from — either to comply with regulations or to abide by ethical commitments or both.
Make new design assets and produce critiques or variants of existing ones. Like interaction flows, these assets are all encoded digitally, and organizations will use generative AI to combine them with their own design systems for brand alignment and consistency with their foundational design principles.
