Designing with AI: AI Playbook for Design Teams

Quotes and takeaways

As designers, we are always responsible for how we use our tools, and that is the same with AI.

This was a year ago, and she talked about the way engineers are seeing efficiencies with CoPilot. But now we now it is a mixed bag and there are complaints that people are not learning or retaining when AI is doing the work.

“GenAI is the worst it’s ever going to be” so plan now for a future where it is much better.

In 2023, 74% of designers that responded to her survey have already used Gen AI. About half have used AI for research or content synthesis, which is somewhat troubling if we do not maintain a “human in the loop” for high quality and low bias.

Augmented tasks are here now and happening. “Hybrid” meaning it might require more than one tool because the AI is not yet inegrated into the tools we use everyday.

New skills needed: AI literacy and AI art direction. Translation between my language and my skills and what the AI expects.

What continues to need a human: Strategy, directions, inspirations, ideation, communications, collaboration. Focus more on vision, storytelling, actions from insights. Creativity defines us, not our tools.

The risk is, if we do not adapt, inaction will devalue design and we might lose a seat at the table. People who use AI will replace people who do not.

Build an AI Creative Council: group of folks who are not just designers, but have interest in design and using tools to achieve it. Acknowledge the risks, develop a language to prompt for diversity (the words to generate content with racial diversity), integrate bias assessment in critiques, advocate for training, document successful workflows.

Learn to art direct your ”AI intern”: Directing humans is similar, as AI needs succinct but very clear instructions, just like an intern might. Create a shared dictionary of promote “tokens” that translate into successful art direction for lighting, composition, depth of field, and subject matter. Some words do not work well, like “playful.” Too open ended. This needs experimentation to get better at it.

Translate the principles — Medium, composition, lighting, color, scene descriptions, human attributes, object properties, etc.

Start small, with story boards, mood boards, internal content, icons, illustration, and other things with a low risk. Create a safe place to start to experiment.

Many articles recommend using camera types and lens size and such, but this language is not consistently understood by GenAI (other than MidJourney). So experiment on your own and take recommendations with a grain of salt.