How do we lead design without process? (Q&A)

[Bryan]

We’re diving into @ryan_ford’s article today, Design is not a formula, it’s an odyssey: replacing the Double Diamond. He argues that design is not a clean, step-by-step formula.

“Design is not a Process, it’s an Odyssey. It is not a rigid structure with steps to follow, but a path you discover along the way with dangers, villains, and wisdom to be gained, and you often wind up right back where you started.”

Popular models like Double Diamond try to make design look neat and predictable. But real design does not work that way. It is messy. It loops back. Plans change. New problems show up. People interrupt. Feedback shifts direction.

Let’s jump into the discussion

You suggest thinking about design like a journey from an old story called The Odyssey. On this journey, designers explore ideas, test things, get feedback, change plans, and work with others. Sometimes projects finish. Sometimes they change. Sometimes they stop altogether.

There are five parts to think about in how you design:

1. The Beginning- You learn about the problem. You think about the people you’re helping. You gather information and set direction.

2. Exploration- You try ideas. You sketch. You test. You experiment with different solutions. Some ideas fail, and that’s part of figuring things out.

3. The Bridge- This is the hard part. You show your work. You get feedback. Expectations change. You rethink decisions. You ask, “Are we doing this right?”

4. Construction- Now you build the real thing. You collaborate with developers and teammates. You turn ideas into something people can actually use.

5. Conclusion- You define what “done” means. You measure results. You adjust if needed. Sometimes you loop back. Sometimes the project ends and the next journey begins.

Here’s the big question I’d like to explore: With AI tools rapidly expanding and product teams under pressure to integrate AI into their offerings, how does this shift the way design moves work forward?

Let’s jump into this with Ryan Ford! He’s a featured Helio author, experienced design leader, and we’re excited to explore these ideas with you.

[Bryan]

Love big topics like this, Ryan. Thanks for joining us today. I’ve been designing my whole life, and I think lived experience really shapes how we do our work.

Let’s start with how you first got drawn into design.

[ryan_ford]

Hi Bryan,
Thanks for inviting me here to share some thoughts.

Starting with your first question, how I got drawn into design, it was via a route that won’t seem entirely uncommon to many creators: as a child I was an art-lover, drawing and painting every chance I could, and so creating as sort of in my blood. I was fairly good at it (and still practice in my spare time) but also had a deep love of technology—I had family in IT and so I was around computers quite a bit. I began dabbling in early creativity software and found that I really just enjoyed “creating on the computer.” Where many folks have perhaps arrived at Design first and then circled around to using the computer for it later on, I arrived at “computer” first and then circled around to Design—it was a way to create things digitally, and for younger me that was fun.

But if we’re thinking about how I came to Design Design, it wasn’t really until the internet became a thing. I learned how to use Frontpage Express (a terrible Microsoft page coding tool…look it up) and began building websites on geocities (yeah, look that up too). From there I started to receive inquiries asking me to design web pages and then eventually whole websites, and I began journeying down the rabbit hole that is interaction design from there.

[Bryan]

@ryan_ford

I began dabbling in early creativity software and found that I really just enjoyed “creating on the computer.” Where many folks have perhaps arrived at Design first and then circled around to using the computer for it later on, I arrived at “computer” first and then circled around to Design—it was a way to create things digitally, and for younger me that was fun.

Love this. I had similar experiences as a kid.

@ryan_ford

From there I started to receive inquiries asking me to design web pages and then eventually whole websites, and I began journeying down the rabbit hole that is interaction design from there.

There’s a moment when enough people ask you to solve their problems that you start to see patterns. That’s when you begin thinking about how to help earlier in the ask. I think this is where design really clicks for a lot of people.

As the saying goes: fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Looking back over the last couple of decades, what pivotal moments in your career shifted how you think about design?

[ryan_ford]

There have been a few moments/experiences/roles which really shifted my thinking about design.

Like so many younger designers, an outsized amount of my perception of “the point of design” was rooted in how good something looked, or how fun something was to use—it was initially for these reasons why I loved making fun, delightful, or interesting web portfolios for myself in those earlier days. My personal website offered me the space (and still does to some extent) to be abnormal with design elements.

But the thing that first shifted by perception of the purpose of design actually began in studying it in a formal capacity. It’s one thing to make things on your own, another thing to be given design challenges by an educator and sit in a live critique of your work in front of classmates. My very first design teacher—at least the one of the most significance—was Paul Paiement. He’s more of a fine artist these days, and a revered one for very good reasons, but at one point in time he taught design. And in his class I was challenged to create logo designs, ad designs, and so forth. Classic print and branding work. And he (kindly) tore it apart in front of classmates. I began to realize that it didn’t matter how nice my design work looked, it mattered how effectively it solved communication problems.

From there, attending Otis College of Art & Design was another step in helping me better understand that Design was not inherently about aesthetics, but was about thinking and execution, and helped to root me in the craft of creating for utility. I had a whole class that was all about abstract creative thinking, and nothing about that class relied on deliverables (i.e. no logos) so much as it relied on artifacts representing a thought. Once you’re taught to think abstractly, it sticks with you and informs how you think about anything, design or otherwise.

I also think some specific jobs I’ve had truly transformed my capabilities and my thinking:

• I worked for a couple design agencies fresh out of college, and realized I hate design agencies. The model is impersonal, the problems are temporary, and they (tended to) care less about design so much as they cared about making a client happy. The design was a transaction. That model didn’t work for me—I needed to own problem spaces long term.
• Leading Design for DeviantArt taught me how to build teams effectively + build tools for communities. We accidentally innovated in a lot of areas, too, and wound up defining the ways in which social media would operate for decades to come. Like this text entry box I’m typing into here: we didn’t invent text entry boxes, but live WYSIWYG text entry formatting was something we came up with. Few people get an experience like that—building for millions of people during early internet days.
• Working for a startup called Pivotshare (RIP) forced me to learn to wear lots of hats, one of them being a front-end developer. All the JS Framework experience has helped me guide my teams to build better applications.
• And then more recently, my time at Vida Health was an accidental foray into designing for health outcomes, where I realized the health space is massively ignored by Design. There is real opportunity to create products that positively touch real human lives if only Design could be more present in the health field.

[Bryan]

@ryan_ford

My very first design teacher—at least the one of the most significance—was Paul Paiement. He’s more of a fine artist these days, and a revered one for very good reasons, but at one point in time he taught design. And in his class I was challenged to create logo designs, ad designs, and so forth. Classic print and branding work. And he (kindly) tore it apart in front of classmates. I

Love this- I have some of my teacher and mentors still “whispering” in the back of my head. You should be lucky to have these experiences.

@ryan_ford

I worked for a couple design agencies fresh out of college, and realized I hate design agencies.

Haha, I got you there. It’s one of the reasons we’ve always had technology and products incorporated into our approach. It’s kept us rooted in problems that we have to own. This is extremely hard.

Great experiences!

Ok, now let’s get to the pressing issues of design right now. AI is recking havoc on the inputs, acitivies, “process” and outputs… as well as the products and services being delivered. What do you make of our current state?

[ryan_ford]

It’s true that AI is flipping the table on everything we thought to be true about the practice and the industry of Design.

Here’s where my head is:

• AI advocates speak at length about how AI can perform many, if not most all, of the tasks “white collar professionals” do on a regular basis. In my experience, this is true: AI can do them, but doesn’t do them all equally well.
• AI tools can also “vibe design” and “vibe code” whole app/web experiences. But once again, through experience, we see the same trend: AI can do them, but doesn’t do them equally well.
• In the context of vibe coding, we see many tech companies (like Spotify, for example) proclaiming that AI is doing most if not all of the coding work. What they don’t tell you in the scandalous headlines is that there are still experienced engineers editing that code, guiding its creation, and refining it. So while AI might be originating the code, there are still skilled practitioners ensuring AI doesn’t accidentally bring the entire house of cards tumbling down. This is the key point.
• If we turn the spotlight back to Design, I believe that designers already can accelerate their work with the aid of AI tools, and that this will become an increasing norm over the years, but that AI will continue to lack the ability to think in a unique, novel, or strategic way about the work it’s doing. And so, if an AI is producing design artifacts, a human design practitioner will still be required to guide the tool’s output.
• When we talk about “AI stealing design jobs,” we’re making the decades-long mistake of conflating design artifacts with the act of designing. Design, as a practice, might commonly result in artifacts (screens, mockups, apps, logos, etc), but in actuality Design is more about solving problems. These problems are, for the most part, very human in nature; Design is always to be consumed or utilized by human beings. When we pretend that AI can do the job of designing, we reduce the importance of the non-visual aspects of Design that are, to me, the most critical parts about it. And, in a nutshell, AI has proven itself to be poor at understanding human needs, and may never be able to because it has no lived human experience to pull from. All AI can do is remix content it has already seen or pulled from, without understanding its underlying meaning. Humans create meaning for other humans, which is an innate and uniquely-human ability.

[Bryan]

@ryan_ford

Design is always to be consumed or utilized by human beings. When we pretend that AI can do the job of designing, we reduce the importance of the non-visual aspects of Design that are, to me, the most critical parts about it. And, in a nutshell, AI has proven itself to be poor at understanding human needs, and may never be able to because it has no lived human experience to pull from.

Excellent breakdown. In which parts of your framework are you seeing AI help you design? Where is it causing friction?

[ryan_ford]

AI is a great accelerator for templates or frameworks, or a great way to quickly apply structure to unstructured work.

We all probably already use it accordingly: generate a PRD framework, organize these files, organize these assets, and so on.

In these ways I think AI is incredibly helpful because now we can pivot our brain power more towards the acts of editing (easier) and away from the act of originating (harder). It’s that blank canvas effect—a blank canvas stares back at you, daring you to take your first brush stroke, and you hesitate because you don’t want to ruin the blank canvas for an inferior first stroke. AI throws the blank canvas away and hands you an imperfect output, and asks you to correct it.

Where it causes friction is when we assume its outputs are correct. I know we’ve all seen this behavior and probably made this mistake. And I’m not even talking about hallucinations. I’m talking more about asking AI to help you achieve some goal where you are either not an expert in the subject matter or you’re too busy to check the work. AI is, at best, a naive intern. You should assume it’s going to make mistakes, and assume it’s your job to correct its work. Don’t produce “work slop,” by ignoring its outputs and treating them as accurate.

In Design, we see the errors of ChatGPT translate into vibe coding efforts.

Vibe coding can help designers produce prototypical examples of a design experience, but even with precise design inputs (screens, Figma files, etc), the vibe coding tools make obvious mistakes. It turns out that vibe coding a concept into existence might help accelerate you 70% of the way towards your full idea, but it’s that last 30% of the way that takes the most effort as you correct every flaw and mistake.

Vibe coding also tricks non-designers into believing they are producing a valid design artifact. They see a website come out the other end of the machine and think “yeah this is good.” It’s never good. But it exists, and that’s a start I guess. This goes back to what I said earlier: that we so often conflate the artifact with the act of Design itself. And so vibe coding produces the artifact, but it does so disconnected from the actual act of Design: the thinking, the strategy, the problem solving.

And so where vibe coding can help is in the moments where we treat it just like we might treat a ChatGPT-produced PRD: it’s a template, or a good rough start that hand-waves at an idea. If we acknowledge that it’s flawed and lean into it, we can accelerate our design work by producing a larger bulk of experimental ideas that help us refine our own thinking, getting us closer to a more final solution to a problem—but one that likely still needs to be crafted by a human being at the end.

[Bryan]

Thank you so much for joining us today, @ryan_ford, and inspiring us to think about design holistically. We’ll keep the thread open for others to ask questions.

Last question: if you had to orient design leaders right now, where would you encourage them to focus their team’s learning?

[ryan_ford]

Push design leaders to orient their team’s towards anything right now, it would be towards greater emphasis on problem solving and the creation of utility, and less emphasis on artifacts.

To clarify: I’ve seen design leaders talk about how important it is, to them, that their designers are incredible practitioners of craft—they should be Figma experts blindfolded, or they should have an ability to make pixel-perfect/incredible designed aesthetics. AI is making this almost useless. In a world where I can go license a great Design System made by some other team with Storybook code components linked up, and do a little tweaking to make it look like my brand, there is less value in having Figma experts on the team. What you do need are great design thinkers who know how to produce value. If they can make stuff that looks nice, hey that’s great, but that’s no longer a critical part of the job. What is critical is their ability to think. Hire more thinkers, not more executors.