Why Design is More Valuable Than Ever in the AI Era

Andrew Hogan traces his path in research back to trying to beat his older brother at real-time strategy games, watching how other people played and comparing notes to get better. That instinct took him through an agency, seven years at Forrester, and now Figma, where he describes his job as research on research and design, analyzing the industry to give people one clear view of a very complicated moment.

The trends he's tracking pull in different directions. Figma's AI report found more than 80% of designers and developers believe working with AI will be essential to their success, while only about a third trust AI outputs in shipped work. More apps are being created than ever, which makes design the differentiator in what he calls the rise of the app layer. Roles are blurring too, with more than half of non-designers now doing meaningful design work, and yet engineering managers report design mattering more than it did two years ago. He reaches for the early automobile to explain it: the first cars steered with a tiller, and it took real design work to arrive at the wheel. New technology always goes through that.

On Figma Make, what he's seeing is everyone on a team prototyping, not just designers. It's no substitute for thinking through interactions or asking who the work is for, but a prototype communicates an idea in a way a description can't. His advice for people breaking in: make things in public and write your thinking down rather than outsourcing it, then bounce it off AI and feel free to ignore what it says. Get good at the things AI handles badly, like information architecture and designing within a larger context. Most of all, refine your sense of what good actually is. A first draft takes ten seconds now, so the differentiator is knowing what's missing from it.