Only Humans Design

In 1935, Walter Benjamin published perhaps the single most influential work of criticism in a lineage that redefined forms based on changing tools. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction arrived in response to photography and film, processes that weakened the claims of originals and made production cheap and images ubiquitous. He described the diminished “aura” of the original work of art, paving the way for Warhol’s Factory and foreshadowing today’s internet of memes.

Generative AI demands similar scrutiny, not as Art but as Design. This journey starts by unpacking the word “Design.”

The earliest reference to Design is the Latin designare which means to “specify or define a mark or sign.” From the beginning, the thought was removed from the act and while the designer often did both things, deciding an outcome and choosing the method were the two key components. As the craft broadened, the actions of designers did too and they named those subtasks things like scheme, draft and plan. It could indeed be argued that a large part of modern society performs some form of design, whether as lawyers, architects, software developers and even doctors.

The definition is built to accommodate the breadth of human agency. The most well-known and accurate distinction is from the economist Herbert Simon: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” The word and craft are broader than industrial designations for people who do layout or graphics or brands. We are all designers, choosing or designating an approach from the millions of possible ones.

AI is expanding our view of design but we must retain its critical essence.

It is tempting to fear disruption and automation in the face of Midjourney, Figma or ChatGPT. The software machines step into the classic definition just as the human describes an outcome, AI chooses by predicting the next word, the optimal layout, an image. It is tempting to believe that AI-design will reach human or better-than-human levels. All it takes is better models, sharper prompts or deeper data about audiences and preferences.

This is wrong. Machines can never design and we must remember why.

Design is the intentional organization of possibilities toward a preferred state. Only humans can do it, aided though we may be by AI. The AI simply can’t prefer things. It has no agency.

What changes dramatically is the aperture of designers’ lenses. We can now affordably ask for outcomes to business problems across domains previously unimaginable, moving from an onscreen pixel to a map of the city and across time from days to decades. AI hands us permutations previously unseen and we reduce, refine and expand. We dream.

A poignant example lies locked in sepia-tinted images of the 1880s, an age of industry and innovation. John Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge, the longest suspension span yet attempted and the first hung from spun-steel wire. A ferry crushed his foot at the site in 1869 and he died of tetanus before construction began.

In a reminder that design spans generations, his son Washington took over the project. In 1872 he ascended too fast from the caisson beneath the Brooklyn tower and never fully recovered, dying slowly for a decade while keeping a promise to his father. He ran the bridge project from a window in Brooklyn Heights, watching through a telescope and sending decisions out through his wife, Emily, who taught herself the engineering to carry them to workers.

Design extends far beyond a draft—it lies in ensuring the promise is kept. In 1878, Roebling’s inspectors caught the wire contractor cheating by swapping in spools that had failed the test. Hundreds of tons of bad wire were already spun into the cables, and could not be removed.

Design demands adaptation. Washington could not start over. He calculated what the cables could still bear, ordered 150 more wires into each one, and let the work go on. His father had built in a margin for people not yet born, and the son drew on the balance. The bad wire is still up there. So is the bridge.

Design requires humor. After the monumental project, panics broke out over fear of its collapse. The project’s final act, in a climate of fear and distrust, saw P.T. Barnum parade twenty-one elephants across the bridge. The design had worked.

Then as now, design lay in decisions and choosing. Neither generation of Roeblings made any mechanical element; mills drew the steel wire, crews spun it, and a liar supplied part of it. What father and son did was decide what the structure had to carry and how much margin it needed, and put their names to that for a century.

Generative tools are spinning wire now, faster than anyone can test it, and some of it is bad. Nobody can ask the machine whether the structure will hold, or hold it to the standard.

Our place as designers is at the window, promises in mind as we watch across the water.