Member-only story
Prompting is designing. And designers need to lead.
Forget “prompt hacks.” Designers have the skills to turn AI from a gimmick into a powerful, human-centred tool, if we take the lead before others lower the bar.
When ChatGPT first hit the scene, I remember watching a very senior person in my company at the time lean back at their desk and smile at the screen.
“Write a brand strategy,” they typed into ChatGPT. Five seconds later, the AI spat out 500 words of confident, polished fluff.
“There,” they said. “Done.” Without even reading the output.
This is the moment that keeps me up at night. Not because AI is going to replace me, but because it’s being used like this — as a magic vending machine for strategic thinking. No context. No creativity. No consideration. No humanity.
We, as designers, have spent our careers turning messy human needs into coherent, usable systems. It’s deliberate, careful, deeply human work. And now we’re watching an extraordinary new tool get reduced to cheap hacks, clickbait prompt lists, and mass layoffs disguised as “efficiency.”
The irony? The very skills people think are obsolete — empathy, clarity, the ability to bridge human intention and product logic — are the skills AI needs most.
