The Evolving Landscape of Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

How AI is transforming design practice

Introduction

Design, as a discipline, has always been at the forefront of innovation and adaptation. In recent years, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to reshape the very foundations of design, offering new possibilities and challenges for designers and technologists alike. As we navigate this transformation, the principles of simplicity become increasingly important in managing the growing complexity of our technological landscape.

Technology has made our lives more full, yet at the same time we’ve become uncomfortably “full.” This paradox sits at the heart of design’s evolving relationship with AI — we’re creating more powerful tools that simultaneously promise to simplify and complicate our world.

The integration of AI into design processes has been gaining momentum. As noted in the Design in Tech Report 2025, “AI is not replacing designers but transforming how design is done.” This transformation is evident in a few areas …

Rapid Experimentation

AI has significantly reduced the cost and time required for design experimentation. Where designers once had to laboriously create multiple iterations, AI can now generate dozens or hundreds of variations in seconds. This democratizes aspects of design while placing greater emphasis on curation and creative direction.

The economics of experimentation have fundamentally changed — AI experimentation is becoming significantly cheaper and faster. For example, GPT-4o now costs just $2.50 per million input tokens, down from $30 for GPT-4 a year earlier. This shift has made sophisticated AI capabilities accessible to a much broader range of creators.

The Emergence of the “Agent Era”

We are witnessing a shift from AI models to task-completing agents. As Lilian Weng defined in her influential tweet, an “agent = LLM + memory + planning skills + tool use.”

These AI agents are capable of executing complex design tasks, potentially revolutionizing workflows and creative processes. Rather than just generating options, these agents can understand context, integrate feedback, and refine their outputs accordingly.

This represents a significant evolution from earlier AI tools that required extensive human guidance. Today’s AI design agents can often understand and implement sophisticated design principles without step-by-step human instruction, working in continuous loops that were previously cost-prohibitive.

Evolution of User Experience

Traditional User Experience (UX) design is evolving into what the report terms “AX” or AI Experience. This new paradigm is “reducing UI in favor of direct AI execution,” suggesting a future where interfaces become more intuitive and less visible.

Nick Dobos’s “@context decorators” provide grounding for prompts, enhancing AI accuracy. Meanwhile, Harley Turan’s semantic zoom capabilities allow users to navigate complex information intuitively, and Peter Vidani’s visualization of reasoning traces makes AI thinking transparent.

These innovations appear across different spaces:

• Chat interfaces: Moving beyond simple turn-taking, as seen in Alexander Chen’s elegant three-circle interface that reimagines conversational AI.
• Document spaces: Managing multiple sub-conversations within content, as Tyler Angert demonstrates, or Matthew Siu’s color picker for words that enables semantic exploration.
• Table spaces: Transforming spreadsheet-like interfaces into networks of intelligent cells that collaborate, exemplified by AnswerGrid and Elicit’s Living Documents.
• Canvas spaces: Creating flexible, infinite workspaces like Amelia Wattenberger’s email organizer or tldraw’s collaborative drawing tools.

Challenges and Considerations

While the potential of AI in design is immense, it also brings forth new challenges and ethical considerations:

• Trust and Usability: As AI becomes more prevalent in design tools and processes, there is a growing need to establish best practices that improve trust and usability. Designers must consider how to create AI-powered systems that are both transparent and user-friendly. Simple principles like providing AI notices, showing citations, giving status updates for latency, and enabling user feedback have become fundamental UX patterns for AI interactions. These create appropriate “friction” that helps users understand when they’re interacting with AI versus humans.
• Responsible Governance: The integration of AI in design introduces new risks that require careful management. The 2025 International AI Safety Report outlines different types of “loss of control” over AI systems:

Loss of Control -→   Active Loss  -→   Intentional Active
                |    of Control   |    Loss of Control
                |                 |
                |                 -→   Unintentional Active
                |                      Loss of Control
                -→   Passive Loss
                     of Control

This framework helps designers understand the spectrum from active override of human control to passive over-reliance, highlighting the need for appropriate safeguards in AI design systems.

• Human Adaptability: With the rapid pace of AI advancement, human adaptability becomes crucial. As the Design in Tech Report emphasizes, “Human adaptability is key to thriving in an AI-augmented future.” Designers must continually update their skills and embrace new technologies to remain relevant in this evolving landscape.

The Changing Role of Designers

The rise of AI in design doesn’t spell the end for human designers. Instead, it heralds a shift in their roles and responsibilities:

• Collaboration with AI: “Vibe Coding”: Designers are increasingly working alongside AI tools, using them to enhance creativity and productivity. As described by Carly Ayres, this collaborative approach “is more conversation than code,” allowing designers to focus on intent rather than implementation details. Early pioneers like Geoffrey Litt demonstrated this by combining voice input with AI coding assistants to rapidly prototype designs.
• Focus on Higher-Level Thinking: As AI takes over more routine tasks, designers can focus on higher-level strategic thinking, problem-solving, and innovation. This shift allows for a greater emphasis on the conceptual and emotional aspects of design — precisely the areas where humans still far outperform AI.
• Interdisciplinary Skills: The convergence of design and AI requires designers to develop a broader skill set. Understanding the basics of AI, data science, and programming becomes increasingly valuable in this new era. Designers who can bridge these disciplines will be particularly well-positioned to lead innovation.

Looking to the Future

The future of design in the age of AI is both exciting and uncertain. As we move forward, keep thinking about the switch to make: UX → AX

The rise of Agent Experience, or AX, represents a paradigm shift where interfaces are designed not for humans but for AI agents themselves. This often implies “No-UX” in the traditional sense, favoring direct API access over graphical interfaces. This evolution is facilitated by emerging standards like /llms.txt, which provides structured information and instructions for AI models to understand websites and services more effectively. As machine-to-machine communication becomes more prevalent, designing for agents may become as important as designing for humans.

Human curation, judgment, and sensibility remain vital differentiators for the foreseable future. As Elizabeth Goodspeed articulated in her influential essay “AI Can’t Give You Good Taste,” there remains a fundamental human dimension to aesthetic judgment that AI cannot replicate. Pablo Stanley’s energetic Layer Slayer performance illustrates this point perfectly — it showcases a level of personality, improvisation, and humor that remains uniquely human.

This confusing and fascinating moment for humanity echoes past responses to technological revolution. William Morris of the Arts & Crafts movement famously said, “We do not reject the machine. We welcome it. But we desire to see it mastered.” Today’s designers face a similar challenge: embracing AI’s capabilities while ensuring human creativity and values remain central.

Conclusion

The integration of AI into design is not just changing tools and processes; it’s reshaping the very nature of design itself. As we navigate this evolving landscape, designers must embrace the potential of AI while also addressing its challenges.

By thoughtfully incorporating AI into our design practice and continuously evolving our understanding of simplicity, we can create a future where design and AI work in harmony to solve complex problems and enhance human experiences in ways we have yet to imagine.

References

Maeda, J. (2025). Design in Tech Report 2025.
Ayres, C. (2025). “Double Click: Vibe Coding.” Figma Blog.
Weng, L. (2023). “Agent = LLM + memory + planning skills + tool use.” X.
Goodspeed, E. (2024). “AI Can’t Give You Good Taste.” It’s Nice That.
International AI Safety Report. (2025). UK Government.
Morris, W. (1888). “The Revival of Handicraft.”