Designers love a new tool, especially one that opens new ways of thinking. LLMs are shiny! shiny! new! new! and the possibilities are quite real. Having spent the past year building, experimenting, and researching, I've developed a clear-eyed understanding of what they can do and where they fall short, including how they work, how they were built, and the broader economic and environmental implications of their use.
There is good and bad, and still much to discover, but what I do know is that automatically reaching for the same tool before considering the problem fully is hardly good design thinking. My first priority as a designer is deep understanding: gather context, ask questions, research, talk to people, poke around, and generally, fuck around and find out why.
I maintain a healthy curiosity and a healthy skepticism about AI-based processes. My approach to design prioritizes the need of the problem over the tooling: it is quite easy to write a prompt, harder to ask a good question, and even harder to figure out if it’s the right question.
Responsible use matters to me, not just on an execution level but on a human one. There are no clean datasets, no hallucination-free models, and all of them use vast amounts of energy, offsetting huge environmental costs to those with no say in the matter. "AI first", or default without consideration, is not a neutral act. Good design is not a generated outcome—it requires curiosity, judgment, and genuine care, and I strive to bring that to everything I do as a designer.