Grief revealed priorities by stripping away noise and sharpening what matters, inspiring a design perspective focused on meaning over surface. AI has similarly disrupted the design industry, eroding familiar practices but not eliminating design itself. AI can generate outputs, mimic styles, and simulate decisions, but it cannot create meaning because meaning requires memory, context, and emotion—qualities machines lack. Designers must therefore take machine-produced material and shape it into resonant human experiences, injecting life where AI supplies form. The future of design centers on purpose, emotional context, and translating synthetic output into meaningful, human-centered work.
Yet this loss doesn't mean design is gone. If anything, it requires us to find meaning in the turmoil and ask what design truly is, and what it still has the potential to become. Here's the difference - AI can generate outputs. It can mimic styles, assemble patterns, and even simulate decisions. But it can't create meaning. Meaning is rooted in memory, context, and emotion.
That's how grief works - it strips life down, the noise falls away, and what's left is a sharper sense of what truly matters-a new way of seeing the people around you that you never had before. Lately, I've been looking at design through that same lens. And while much of what I write may sound jaded and cynical - even doom-and-gloom - beneath it all, I'm an optimist, always searching for meaning in the chaos.
But it can't create meaning. Meaning is rooted in memory, context, and emotion. Machines don't live, so they can't feel the depths of being. That's why our role as designers is more important than ever. The future of design isn't about competing with AI - it's about doing the one thing AI cannot. Our work will be to take the flood of machine-made material and shape it into something that resonates with human experience. To inject life where the machine only provides form.
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