What Happens to Design After AI?

**Paul Bakaus** (0:00)
Designers, when using Claude, as opposed to engineers using Claude, would consistently get better results. And it's because of the language that they use.

**John Maeda** (0:07)
We have to remember that design in the European sense came from royalty and the desire to be distinctive because they were working with scarce materials. What's interesting about this era is that this idea of taste doesn't fit when all the materials available to everyone.

**Paul Bakaus** (0:23)
Right now, everybody's trying to solve whether LLMs have taste. These models have millions of definitions of taste. LLMs have been trained on the output of humanity, not on the input. So what led to a design decision is not something that the LLMs know.

**Anish Acharya** (0:38)
Maybe advice for our design engineers in the room. How have you in the past effectively communicated the value of an instinct versus a deadline or even another instinct which may be less important?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:48)
Yeah, that's a tough one because AI is making it easier than ever to create software. But what happens to design when anyone can generate an interface, a website or an application with a prompt?
Some argue that AI will commoditize design. Others believe it will make great design even more valuable by automating routine work and freeing people to focus on higher order creative decisions. In this conversation, A16z general partner Anish Acharya sits down with Microsoft VP of Design John Maeda and Peckable founder and CEO Paul Bakaus to discuss design, software, creativity, and what happens when AI becomes part of the creative process.

**Anish Acharya** (1:33)
I want to actually talk a little bit about perhaps to begin with the relationship between design and technology. I think there's some people who may view design as more spiritually close to art and others who see it perhaps in a more utilitarian fashion, the design of everyday things.
Perhaps, John, I can ask you to kick us off and talk to us about how you see the interplay between the two.

**John Maeda** (1:56)
Well, first of all, glad to be here. I used to think about this a lot when I was at Clannad-Perkins and thinking like why is it that design is important in 2014-15?
Why was it important? It was because this weird company called Airbnb was unusually successful. If you connect to why design became important, it was because of mobile.
Before mobile, desktop experiences could be crappy and it was okay because he didn't use them very often. But mobile had high usage and therefore, it was bad all the time, it would be painful. That's when it started to happen. In terms of the relationship now, however, I'm so excited to be on this with Paul because I've been a fan of this moment when we'd be able to auto-design. That's since the 90s when I was at MIT. We thought it was going to be possible one day, and now it's very possible. Thanks, and Paul, I think, is someone who's really at the cutting edge of all that.

**Anish Acharya** (2:51)
Incredible. So elaborate a bit for us. What do you mean by auto-design, and is the way that it works today, does that match the idea that you had back in MIT?

**John Maeda** (2:59)
Well, if you go back to the 1980s, there was a woman named Muriel Cooper, who was unusual because she was a trained print graphic designer. She designed those book fans of MIT Press. There's a beautiful logo at MIT Press. She designed that among other pretty major things at MIT's history publication. She was the one who imagined a world where people wouldn't want to use the terminal and might want to use this thing called Helvetica to look at things on the screen. So she predicted the whole desktop publishing revolution, electronic publishing revolution.
And at the time, she also had a bunch of people at MIT's AI lab. And MIT's AI lab was asking, how do we create things by machines that humans are good at? And so her lab focused on how to automatically design things with quote unquote AI at the time.

**Anish Acharya** (3:50)
Incredible. Paul, give us your view on the relationship and interplay between design and technology. Has it turned out the way you expected?

**Paul Bakaus** (3:57)
I think we're still working it out, to be honest. But I do see a lot of it converging in interesting ways. I remember seeing one of John's talks about algorithmic design a long time ago at some conference. And I always thought that I was always this oddball that was both designer and engineer. And I never wanted to be boxed in into any of those areas. But I think the reality is that it's now much easier to build yourself tools that help you with that, right? That help you algorithmically create design and supercharge your design with technology. And I think that's really exciting. So to me, they're one and the same. They've always have been.