Cooked is not a climate

Designers are cooked. Or so I’ve been told many times over the past 2ish years. So much cooking.

But, let’s leave aside for a moment whether it’s true.^[1] Let’s start with the word “designer.”

What is a designer, exactly? Brand, graphic, UX, industrial, interior, motion, service, spatial, bag. The term is so broad. It covers so much. It used to confuse and piss me off that searching for designer online would typically point to Product Design, more often than not, software. But some pure shower thoughts led me to this analogy: Design is basically a continent, made up of multiple countries and territories. And right now, the design continent is dealing with some seismic goings on. The tide of AI laps at the shores of some countries, while others sit comfortably inland, oblivious or ignorant to the rising sea level.

When people say “designers are cooked,” they don’t really know what they mean. They’re gesturing at a full landmass and calling the weather.

AI has gone well past eroding a few coastlines and into full-scale terraforming. Underwater volcanoes are going off and new landmasses are forming, and fault lines are cracking open in places nobody expected. Some of it is genuinely exciting. Some of it is, frankly, shit and a bit terrifying, and a lot of the time it’s both at once.

What’s been interesting to watch is what AI has exposed. A lot of people’s understanding of what designers actually do (and why it matters) turns out to have been pretty thin. Now they can prompt their way to something that looks vaguely designed, and they’re finding out there’s no setting for taste and craft. Without them you just make a lot of confident mediocrity, very quickly. AI design or creative generation is still a whole lot of dice rolling.

Meanwhile the map most of us have been navigating by is slowly turning into fiction. The version of the job that apparently needs replacing is itself mid-transformation, and some of us are refugees, searching for territory that might not have a name yet.

It’s uncomfortable, and also quite interesting, even a tad exciting. But it’s not clear when this geomorphic action will settle down, or explode entirely.

I’m aware the only truly cooked thing here is this post. Cooking, continents, terraforming, volcanoes, tide, and seismic activity. An unusual, but tasty, extended metaphor soup. Which feels apt in trying to talk about the chaos that is the design landscape.

But displaced isn’t cooked. Designers trying to find their footing should know the difference. So should the armchair design experts who have never once been responsible for how something looks, feels, or lands.