Intention is at the core of designing products. Product design is the rendering of intent.
Usually, people go through three phases in expressing their intentions.
- People start with a low intention and are more focused on expressing it. Early career professionals (junior designers are in this phase, thinking a lot about how things look, how tools work, what style to use. Additionally, there are people in this phase who don’t value design as much, thinking it’s shallow and superficial, and that using a good enough front-end framework is enough for design. “Just make it look nice” or “Copy what Notion does” are attempts at expressing an intention that was already unclear. Intention is unformed, without shape, it’s more of a wish for something to exist. It’s why “just generate a website with AI” style efforts fail.
- Over time, some will get better at having a clear intention. Mid to senior-level designers and people who develop a good product sense will get here, they have a clear intention that they can also express with their tools (like design, writing, or code). There is an internal image of what good looks like and how it should be expressed.
- Unfortunately, most things (almost certainly most software worth creating) need multiple perspectives coming from multiple people. These perspectives have to come together in a shared intention. The task of the person designing changes is to create a shared intention, a common understanding, combining the clear (or not so clear) individual intentions that can be expressed. Senior to senior+ designers, driver contributors are in this phase.
AI tools (more specifically, the current breed of generative tools) don’t carry an intention. They create plausible things based on the input they are getting. The output will be probably right most of the time (especially as we get better and better tools). But there is no innate intention, so they also cannot create or propagate a shared intention across multiple interactions with multiple people.
AI tools have some use in expression, as they can quickly express an intent. If the intent is well-formed, the expression will get better. But a well-formed intent is also an act of expression. If people try to ask the tool to shape the intent, it will fail, mostly since AI tools are not great at creating high-density expression. At least writing well, but also designing and coding well, are still highly useful expressions of intent that fit into a chain of tasks, maybe containing AI tools down the line.
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