Earlier this year, through its Leading Design program, Clearleft brought 40 design leaders together in New York to shape a shared vision for the future of design leadership in a world of artificial intelligence.

Collectively we wanted to share an asset at the end of the day which would reflect the discussions, meditations and conclusions about the impact of this disruptive technology. I was privileged to be there on the day, and I’m delighted to share the outcome with you now.

Whether we like it or nor, generative AI has arrived to the masses. It has brought with it a huge amount of hype and understandable discontent. It also brings a set of capabilities to every desktop which would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. But as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

As design leaders we need to tread a fine line between what is acceptable and useful, and what is problematic and harmful. This is precisely what the discussions on the day addressed, and why they came together as a set of critical questions for design leaders working with artificial intelligence.

I had the pleasure of editing the document into series of prompts, conceived by design leaders for design leaders. It does not attempt to provide any answers, but it does offer up critical questions to ask of yourself, your colleagues and your organisation.

To give you a flavour, here are some key questions we captured:

• Product design: Is AI necessary to solve this problem? Consider the problem you are trying to solve or the human need you are attempting to address. Ask your colleagues whether AI is the right tool for the job, or whether there might be cheaper, better, more performant non-AI alternatives. Consider whether you are using AI to improve the product, or inserting an AI feature in search of a problem to solve. AI should be an enabler not an irritant.
• Design practice: How do you preserve the human touch in the process? AI can generate output quickly and tirelessly, but humans bring heart, soul, empathy, imagination and their lived experience. Think about where human craft should fit into your design processes, and whether you should deliberately add friction into the process around AI.
• Design leadership: Who are you leaving behind? GenAI could potentially ease the entry of junior designers into the profession, but at what cost? Curiosity, collaboration and critical thinking are key tools of the experienced designer – they help us simplify and humanise solutions to tricky problems. Consider how you’ll ensure newer members of your team will gain these attributes on the job.
• Organisational impact: Are we prepared to stake our reputation on our use of AI? The current crop of LLMs does not come without their controversies and questionable ethics. Their significant energy consumption may not sit well with your organisation’s environmental commitments. Almost all models were trained on copyrighted material without permission of the intellectual property owners, including journalists, artists, authors and scientists. The models themselves contain inherent biases due to the nature of their training data – the good and the bad of the world wide web. What’s more, these biases can be tweaked in the direction of the political leanings of AI company owners, which may also run counter to your organisation’s values.

Read all the critical questions for design leaders working with artificial intelligence.

I owe a huge thank you to all the design leaders who attended our Leading Design event in New York and contributed to this guide. They brought untold experience, wisdom and care to the conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed hosting a table and editing the document we came up with afterwards.