Everyone Can Build Everything

What happens to UX design when the people who used to approve the designs can make their own?AI may be fundamentally changing what it means to be a product designer.Looking at job descriptions for senior designers, I keep seeing the familiar requirements: exceptional design craft, research expertise, strategic thinking, and the ability to influence stakeholders. Meanwhile, engineers and executives are using AI to build entire applications themselves, sometimes over a weekend.So I began wondering whether I was looking for the wrong kind of job.What if, instead of joining another design organization, I built an entire AI-powered design organization myself? One that could research problems, develop solutions, design interfaces, write code, test the results, and improve them. I could sell its services to companies, or install the capability so they could operate it themselves.It seemed like a terrific business idea. Until I started thinking about what companies actually pay designers to do.In this episode, I work through the uncomfortable questions that followed. How much of professional design is really about making good products, and how much is about persuading someone with authority to approve them? What happens when that executive can build a perfectly respectable-looking application without a designer, and becomes personally attached to everything they've created? And what becomes of UX research when we no longer need to spend weeks assembling evidence to win permission to try something?The investigation changed how I think about my own future.Perhaps the biggest opportunity isn't to use AI to sell design expertise more efficiently. Perhaps it's to stop selling design expertise altogether and use it to make the products I've wanted to build.AI isn't making everyone equally good at designing software. But it is giving far more people the ability to build something, put it in front of users, discover what's wrong, and try again.That includes the executives who may no longer need designers. But it also includes designers like me, who may no longer need the executives. Get full access to The Generative Gazette at generativegazette.substack.com/subscribe