ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WON’T REPLACE DESIGNERS; IT WILL SUPERCHARGE THEM

Bengaluru: My 14-year-old niece wants to study design. By the time she graduates, AI will reshape the job market-and design looks especially exposed. What should she study? Which skills will still matter? Should she fear automation? We put these questions to leading design experts at the 9th edition of the DesignUp conference held in Bengaluru on Tuesday.

Their consensus: this may be the best moment to be a designer in any field-at any age-because AI is amplifying, not replacing, human judgement and curiosity. “Design is evolving,” said Alex Skougarevskaya, head of design (content & discovery) at Canva. “It becomes much more about curation, taste, and the ability to meet user needs, AI will make you faster, but it isn’t going to decide what problem to solve or what idea to evolve.” “At Canva, we treat AI as a tool-you should be using it every day,” she added. “Instead of doing two or three concepts, you can explore 50 and still be the one in charge of what you actually design.”

Archana Thiagarajan, who leads design for Adobe’s Experience Cloud, said roles are evolving and titles will keep proliferating as the craft widens. “The beauty of user experience (a prominent design-related profession) is we’ve always had a surplus of titles-human factors engineering, then user interface (UI), then interaction, then visual, then user experience (UX); now it’s full-stack design and product design. There’s no shortage of tools, so you have to contextualise the problem and domain you’re in,” she said. “And if you’re an independent designer, don’t box yourself too soon. Ask: what’s my superpower, where can I have the most impact-and lean into that.”

For Fonz Morris-entrepreneur, investor, educator and a former Netflix lead product designer who helped scale Netflix and Coursera-AI’s big effect is lowering barriers while raising expectations of value. “AI is just a tool. It helps designers be more efficient, but it doesn’t do what I do at the level I do it,” he said. “What changes is the designer’s wheelhouse-you’re no longer only one craft. You can write, research, dabble in code, and talk go-to-market and revenue. Designers are strategic partners.” He urged students to anchor on impact. “You can’t monetise something that doesn’t have value. Know the problem you’re solving and the bottom-line impact. That’s how you don’t get laid off-and how you get promoted.”

On skills for the next decade, the experts converged on first principle over tools.

“AI won’t automate design out of existence-if anything, this wave creates all kinds of opportunity. Now is your chance to design the systems that will shape the tools AI will make. Designers should be in the driver’s seat to shape this moment-which is why this is the best time to enter the field.”

Archana Thiagarajan | VP, Experience Design, Adobe

“This is a super exciting time to be a designer. AI makes you faster and lets you explore 50 ideas instead of two, but it won’t decide which problem to solve or what to evolve. The job you’ll end up having may not exist yet, but people will always need designers to make great interfaces.”