Demise of Design: The Erosion of a Profession

The profound impact of AI algorithms is not on language, as many apprehend, but rather on the method and profession of design. Its decline seems imminent.

Following the establishment of the EU and the subsequent need for universalised protocols to standardise societal and state functions, the inception of ERP (entrepreneurial resource planning) and the first AI protocol signalled the impending demise of the design profession. As the design field diminished human activities and cognitive engagements into deductible patterns, displacing essential soft skills such as observation, representation, experience, and imagination with standardised tools and lemmatisation processes, it inadvertently paved the way for its own demise.

Human nature tends to believe in deducing standard principles, formulas, and tools from our experiences to predict and perfect human lives. Throughout history, various knowledge systems, including mathematics, science, philosophy, astrology, history, language, and grammar, attempted to standardise interactions through identifiable patterns, tools, techniques, and methods. In this historical progression, more equipped knowledge systems, armed with tools and processes, displaced lesser-equipped ones into redundancy, especially those attempting to replace the soft skills of human observation, representation, imagination, and the crucial ability to make mistakes, dissent, protest, empathise, sympathise, and fail.

Regrettably, the design and technology fields are structured around the pursuit of perfecting resilient structures rather than embracing the potential for mistakes or failures. As mentioned earlier, the inclination has been to replace human soft skills with mechanical tools and models. Today, AI is diligently perfecting this trait and model, particularly in areas where design, as a profession and method, applies tools, techniques, and strategies to resolve problems, address flaws, or enhance resilience.

The crucial juncture for design has arrived. With a relatively short history of just over a century, it must either redefine or reinvent itself to withstand the advancing AI models or face extinction in the near future. Design's survival hinges on adopting the methods of art, which, despite evolutionary changes in human lives, have endured by keeping soft skills at the core and not succumbing to becoming mere operatives of tools, techniques, and methods for predicting and perfecting structures.

For design to endure, it must redefine its approach, displacing tools, techniques, and methods with soft skills such as love, compassion, failure, dissent, and protest. Shifting its focus from a problem-solving method to, similar to art, creating a space for "breathing life" is imperative.

Should design fail to undertake this redefinition and reorientation, the demise of this profession at the hands of AI will occur sooner than anticipated.

(Painting - KK Hebbar's work) both images are drawn from internet