AI Dispatches from Figma Design Conference
Craft, taste, metaphors, and what we need to be prioritizing with AI
Recently, I attended Config2025, one of the most vibrant gatherings for the digital design community. I had the opportunity to listen to various talks and panels, including ones featuring Garry Tan from Y Combinator and a creative producer from the popular show Severance. I want to share a few insights about AI and design that I believe will be interesting even for my non-designer readers.
1. We are currently in thte “messy middle” of AI wave, and no one knows what shape it will take or how it will influence our work-life. Many people have perspectives and intuitions about it, but there isn’t a strong grasp of it yet. This became clearer when I listened to Garry Tan responding to Figma CEO Dylan Field’s question on navigating the pouring down of AI tools. He's on top of the AI chain, as the president of Y-Combinator, hanging out with the richest and brightest. He went tangential to the question by discussing his vibe coding project. He was implicitly suggesting to experiment with these tools as much as you can. He then gave the example of staying above the prompt line--referring to a 2015 article that makes the case for a hypothetical API line that's differentiated Uber drivers from Uber employees (if you are the one creating the APIs, you will be managing the robots, not the way around) He was hinting that it will be the same in this wave.
2. Speaking of perspective, there is a sense of cautious optimism about the possibility of keeping AI in check, ensuring it does not entirely take over design jobs. In a panel with four design leaders called Enabling Design Teams with AI, Adam Presson sketched out a useful framework to grasp the evolution of AI in the tech industry. It reminded me of the levels of autonomous cars. He sees AI in three stages, including L1: AI as a design tool; L2, AI as a collaborator; and L3, AI as an organizational force. (his namings might be a little different, this is how I interpreted them.) We are relatively safe as AI's capabilities mature and move from L1 to L2. AI is augmenting our designerly capabilities and allowing designers to own the front-end of their designs. In the L3 scenario, AI acts at the organizational level, and things could get pessimistic regarding jobs and the role of design within the industry. He didn’t articulate much on L3, but his designer empowerment ideas still portrayed a positive outlook if we stay more intentional and proactive about AI.
3. To guide AI towards better outcomes, there was a significant emphasis on sticking to the qualities essential to design, such as craft, taste, empathy, and trust. Karri Saarinen, for instance, talked about craft as a competitive advantage in this AI-driven world. I was also delighted when he spoke of Christopher Alexander and his notion “quality without a name”—something that feels alive and right.
Another thought wave about craft came to me while listening to Sal Khan’s new book, Brave New Words. Sal talks about how we might enter an era of craftsmanship blended with entrepreneurship in the book. This reminded me of the famous Arts and Crafts movement, which started in England as a response to industrialization in the late 19th century. I first learned about it while studying industrial design in Turkey. Artisans were losing jobs to machines, similar to what we face now. The movement emphasized the importance of artisans and artistic work while introducing the idea of looking for beauty and ethics in everyday objects. The movement, though short-lived, gave rise to modern design fields. Perhaps, this moment in time will give rise to another movement that might open new ways of designing and creating. We shall see.
4. There was an interesting discussion around AI-associated rituals during the Rituals and Skills of AI panel. Shishir Mehrotra articulated that AI will accelerate the transition of individual contributors into managerial roles. This shift will involve managing AI agents and require the development of new rituals and norms. This was another good signal for our work on human-AI teaming. I'm excited to explore this space more in the upcoming months. Meanwhile, here’s a post I wrote last year that touches on this.
5. Earlier this year, I wrote about metaphors related to AI, and it was great to hear a supporting perspective from Joel Lewenstein at Anthropic, articulating the importance of metaphors. He argued that the metaphors we choose will shape the products we design, and advocated for viewing AI as a creative partner. He kicked off his talk with metaphors of the past (cars as faster horse carriers) and then moved on to today’s AI wave. Having touched on the AI as a tool, agent, and co-pilot, he rooted for a creative partner metaphor, and gave examples of AI as a creative collaborator from Midjourney to Figma products.
With its strong signals from a diverse set of talks, this vibrant gathering validated my hunches about advocating more for a people-centric lens in designing for and with AI.
What I am listening to, reading, and watching
Sal Khan’s New Brave Words was a great book, and I highly recommend it. He narrates the book himself, and I felt like one of his students listening to one of the Khan Academy YouTube videos. He’s so good at explaining complex concepts. What I like about the book is his cautious optimism about where AI can take us. He sketched scenarios of how AI could democratize education and transform students' engagement with all types of content.
I am slowly savoring Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life by Shigehiro Oishi. The book's central idea is that life can be evaluated not only by happiness and meaning but also by living a psychologically rich life. He defines a psychologically rich life as being open to and trying new experiences. One research study he conducted on the concept was hilarious. He and his team analyzed hundreds of obituaries from the NY Times and codified the words describing happiness, meaningfulness, and psychologically rich life. They discovered that people who live a psychologically rich life are in the minority, and there are very few people whose life story hits all three boxes—meaning, happiness and a psychologically rich life. This is a great book to justify your next international trip or indulgent new experience:)
I created a playlist for all the talks on AI at the Config Conference, check it out. My focus in this post was AI, but here’s one of my favorite talks of the conference, on storytelling from Ebi Atawodi.
And this is a wrap for this issue. Until next time, take good care of yourself and your loved ones.