AI use already speeds up sketching, research, copywriting, and generating variants, but the next shift changes how work is done and what designers are accountable for. The move from AI Designer to AI Experience Architect focuses on owning workflows and the unmapped parts that are not contained in any LLM. Figma’s reduced priority in job postings signals that design still matters but is increasingly embedded in broader roles. AI-exposed work is framed as substitution versus augmentation, with design aligning to augmentation, which opens an architect role. Jevons paradox explains how cheaper design effort can increase total demand for design, creating new opportunities and seats for architects.
"The shift from AI Designer to AI Experience Architect is not about working faster, it is a change in how you do your work and what you are accountable for. One of the earliest signals is that Figma is still in job postings, but lower on the priority list. Design (not production) still matters a lot, it's just part of other roles."
"A faster pencil makes you more productive inside an existing workflow. An architect designs the workflow itself, including the parts nobody wrote down which means it's contained in no LLM, ever. Goldman Sachs splits AI-exposed work into substitution and augmentation, and design sits on the augmentation side. That is why the architect seat is opening up and it's ours to take."
"Here's why - Jevons paradox. When a resource becomes cheaper to use, total consumption usually rises rather than falls, because new uses become economically viable. William Stanley Jevons watched this happen with coal in 1865 - more efficient steam engines did not reduce coal demand, they exploded it."
"The version playing out in design right now is that as AI makes design work cheaper per unit, more things become worth designing at all. The leaders planning to replace designers with AI are making a Jevons mistake, treating design as a fixed cost rather than an elastic one. The paradox does not guarantee the work grows - that depends on whether the value is captured by designers or extracted from them - but it does explain why the seat exists."
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]