Sleights of hand

Config '24, AI, and Design as a craft

I attended Config ‘24, the gathering where thousands of excitable designers were told a software tool now has a button called “Make designs.” 

The event was great. It was filled with so many people around the world who share my point of view: they don’t just want to extract value from the world, they want to bloom new life into it through creativity centered around usability. Figma announced AI tools that make their workflow so efficient that it’s beginning to disappear entirely. They’re growing out of its adolescent phase and entering a more paternal one, asking their users to embrace “the future” and toggle a little checkbox to let Figma use your designs to train the models that design for the rest of their users.

I walked away thinking the product is helping others enter the field while leaving those who’ve been in it for a while wondering if they’re overstaying their welcome. Its a good strategy for the company, I think. Figma has more users as a result and what other measure of success could be more appropriate?

The conference came in the heels of one of the most energizing weeks I’ve had in a long time. You see, a couple days ago I downloaded Cursor and decided to give it a try to build an iOS app. I don’t have any knowledge of what it takes to build an app. In spite of designing many apps in the past, I couldn’t tell you what to do after opening Xcode — I’ve left that part of the process to the engineers.

I’ve been thinking about an idea for a while, and over the years, have tried to get different friends who do know how to build apps to bring it to life with me. Of course, everyone has actual important things to focus on so we’ve only gotten to varying stages past the starting line but never close to the finish line. And so the idea was left there, in purgatory, unable to exist but not forgotten. But last week, I took the idea and pasted it into Cursor:

I want to create a Swift app for iOS that shows me an ‘upcoming’ list of important events in my life. The list only needs to be a date and a title. I want to be able to add new entries to this list. If an entry has past the current date it can be removed from the list.

Cursor walked me through every step of setting up the app, and translated my human words into the machine‘s words. It gave me code that I could paste into the app and explained it to me. Little by little, my app came together and in a matter of days, I had it on my phone. In fact, you can even have it on your own phone by clicking here!

Right before Figma’s keynote announcing the “make designs” button, I “made code” with another app. On one hand, people can now use Figma to replace designers, while on the other hand, I’m using Cursor to replace engineers. I’m stuck in the middle feeling simultaneously disempowered as a designer and completely empowered to make new software.

Ultimately, the feeling is powerful: I wanted something, I made it, and now I have it! The different roles it takes to achieve that feeling (designer, engineer, PM, etc) appear to be becoming irrelevant and we’re left simply as Software Creators, perhaps not too dissimilar as how we have Content Creators.

This AI wave feels like a tsunami. Some people are surfing it while others are roleplaying as Moses.

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There’s a natural rage that comes when you take something away. I see it all the time in the children’s playground. Kids don’t like it when you take away their toys. It’s wired into us somehow. Action figures tend to lose their appeal after a while and our toys become more ideological. They turn into concepts like “jobs” and “purpose” that we tend to hold on to until it’s ripped apart from us by forces we can’t understand. 

I’m not a man of faith —as far from it as it gets— but one thing I’ve come to appreciate is its ability to remove the delusion that you’re the protagonist of this story. It seems like most religious practices are centered around something or someone else. A creator, a central consciousness, a set of ideals that aren’t your own but you tap into. I like this a lot, especially in a world where we can essentially get anything when we want whenever we want it. Or at least that’s the expectation. 

That’s one of the reasons I really like going to the movies. The ritual is comforting to me and it reminds me that I’m not the center of the universe. If I want to see a movie in theaters, it happens in a moment in time that I can’t control and in a place that I can’t control. Once I get there, I enter a room with hundreds of strangers who I don’t know and have no influence over and we’re all in total darkness, without any distractions, giving our entire attention for two hours to a creative work . When else in life do we get to experience something like that?

I like the idea that life is not about me. I just get to witness it and play a role in it but it isn’t mine to claim. Without faith, one of the ways I’ve tried to access that idea is by practicing a craft. Something that has been done before me and will be done after me. Typically, a craft comes with a set of ideals and values that inform your world view. 

Over the last 20 years, Design has been that craft for me. It’s given me a rich history to learn from, a set of beliefs, and a community to embody them. There seems to be a fundamental shift happening that removes key steps in the practice of that craft and helps us pretend that design too can come to us whenever and however we want. It seems like that too is being taken away from us and replaced with something else. A sleight of hand not too dissimilar than me pointing out a tree to my son after I take away a kid’s toy that belongs to someone else.

I think I like trees, too.

Yeah, I like trees.