Today I’m diving @chris_becker’s article, Keep making (AI will not save you). He argues that your long-term advantage over AI is not speed, it’s your ability to think, generate ideas, and shape meaning…so keep making!
AI can generate images, copy, and layouts fast. But it does not understand context, tradeoffs, or meaning the way people do. It predicts patterns. It does not draw from lived experience. If you let AI do all the creating, your thinking gets softer. If you keep sketching, writing, and pushing ideas yourself, your thinking gets stronger.
Sketching builds real conceptual strength. Rough ideas force you to clarify what you mean. They also help you explore different directions so you do not lock into the first solution too quickly.
You highlight that the real advantage is not production speed in design, but its conceptual strength. Strong designers will use AI to amplify their thinking, while strong people will depend on it.
People whot can think effectively:
Frame problems clearly
Generate original ideas
See patterns and tradeoffs
Judge what is good or weak
So here’s what I’d love to discuss: What specific habits or practices should designers build today to strengthen their conceptual edge in an AI-driven world?
Let’s dig in with Chris Becker today. He’s a featured Helio author, and lectures at Otis College of Art and Design and Santa Monica College Interaction Design
Great to chat with you today @chris_becker, excited to jump in! You’ve been exploring these ideas for awhile, what gets you so interested in this topic of creative thinking?
@Bryan Great to forum chat. It is a great quesiton I suppose I am interested in creative thinking becuase I am a designer, and I teach design at ArtCenter, Otis, and just started at Santa Monica College. Being creative is hard but super rewarding and to be able to extend creative skills to others is a resounding feedback loop that I too am learning and being creative.
Love it. I’ve said before that creativity can feel lonely at first, then it really comes alive with a team when you start finding those sparks together. But it still begins with lived experience.
Your article resonated with me because I think people are jumping into feedback loops faster than ever, yet spending less time in deep, critical thinking.
What do you think people need to change in their habits or process to rebalance that?
That is very true. There is an inherent risk in making something. In art school, we talked about the “blank canvas” effect. The canvas or paper or clay or website looms large because it is both everything and nothing all at once. The creative act of marking the page and altering it is ultimately quite a radical act. In school (hopefully), we are given the opportunity to practice a lot, to fail a lot, and to grow creative skills that bridge that gap between intention and execution. With some of the new creative tools (AI mostly) that are emerging there is a significant risk that the “practice” the “failure” is pushed out. I suppose this is why I push for making more, as there is still a significant gap.
See the data follows this insight, and if we are honest, we recognize this to be true. Humans get lazy, although this feels too “hand-wavy-ie,” but it makes me think of the law of unintended consequences. These AI tools are powerful, but we are not considering how they will get over-indexed by systems and workplaces that already “see their workforce as lazy.” The workplace learning opportunities are also quite informal, but if a system is not growing or changing, it is dying.
It is an allegory for our creativity, too. When working with students, I always recommend that they seek out places where they can grow and learn. Ask questions about how they can use new tools, how teams collaborate, or how “outside the box thinking” is achieved. AI can be a catalyst in some of these, but only if the business or workplace is willing to commit to that opportunity as well.
I feel AI is the most useful early in the ideation process and helpful in pushing ideas in their fledgling state. ie. sketches, notions, crazy ideas. So yeah sketch more with AI.
For many people working from home, or in non-creative environments, how do they reframe their work in questions? Any techniques to get your team in that state of mind?
I think this is why I encourage making. (here is the designer in me) You can only understand the system through making. If you are working from home or in non-creative environments run small time-boxed experiments. ie. in 20 mins can I use AI on this task etc. etc.
Where AI has a lot of risk is that we don’t have a good understanding of “how it works” it still functions as magic and makes huge assumptions to give us the “right” answer.
With students I make sure that they don’t start with AI they start with their own thinking and the use AI to augment or inform and probe their own assumptions. This is relevant for the workplace too as we are focused on completing the task and AI speeds that up but doing the wrong thing faster is worse.
Reminds me of the Elon Musk quote. “The biggest mistake a engineer makes it optimizing something that should exist in system at all. (Paraphase)”
Take Claude for example. If you don’t know how the web ( html/css/js) are impletmented or at lease how they work together then what claude produces for a website is some what useless. Yes it works fast, yes it produces a “working” web artficate using tailwind but that is a lot of abstraction. In the hands of designer/dev an amplifyier in the hand of a CEO who see you as a expense now that is a big problem.
When working with designers it comes down to showing them that we know how to thinking about this systems and that means being specific about the experiences. We control the look and feel, we impact behavior, we infuse creativity to the space. An AI just faciliates.
This back and forth has been great @chris_becker- really enjoy your ideas and thinking. We’ will keep the thread open for others to join. Thanks again!
Last question: do you feel these roles are merging, or do specialists need to focus on understanding what is under the hood to generate better ideas?
I don’t think this means. Designers have to learn to code. I think we have to understand how to ask the right questions and how to define what is needed before we ever ask an AI to help. Not so ironically, these are the things designers have always done.
I think there is a whole new set of specialist that will be needed but specialty only comes from practice and with the speed AI is generating new tools the room for “snake oil sales” or “false expertise” will continue to grow. The only way to combat this I suppose to keep making.
My colleague (Tash Willcock) writes about X shaped people. I have discussed Pi - people as well but we just need to keep making.
(see how I brought it back to the article ) @Bryan thank you this was really fun.
This might be obscure, but do you remember group projects in HS / college? Where there was always the 1 (or sometimes even 2) people who just didn’t contribute and still got the same grade as everyone? Might be far fetched, but that’s what I liken this too.. you’re always going to have people who fall back to what’s easy and those who don’t and take their learning and growth seriously.
It separates players in the real world, IMO. Now, do I encourage AI laziness, of course not. But it feels like another application of separating those who want to excel and those who want things to be easy.
Great thread here, you two! Thanks for your thoughts @chris_becker !!
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