The future of designing with AI is co-creation

Most AI+UX discourse today is framed in terms of adoption vs. rejection. In prep for Designing with AI 2025, I talked with three experts on why this framing does designers a disservice.

I haven’t talked much yet about the panels at Designing with AI, in large part because it took a lot of time to find the right panelists. But I could not be more excited about who we have lined up to speak on “Looking ahead: Designing with AI in 2026”: Carla Diana, Kanene Ayo Holder, and Tom Armitage.

This was the prompt:

“This panel brings together an expert technologist, creator, and ethicist to discuss key AI developments and how these developments are impacting their work. From these three lenses, they’ll grapple with what this means for design over the next 12 months.”

Tom is speaking to the technology lens (you might recognize his work on Google DeepMind and Poem/1, the AI clock).

Carla (who just launched her new art installation MobilityTown) is speaking to the creative lens.

And Kanene is speaking to ethics (she’s an award-winning educator who is curating inclusive datasets for AI chatbots).

But as you talk with the three of them, it’s clear that the threads of technology, creativity, and ethics run deep through all of their work. (Other commonalities: they’re all educators, and all involved in spatial computing–which provides another interesting window into where AI is going.)

You won’t hear Kanene, Carla, or Tom describe themselves as either an AI evangelist or rejector; instead they discuss co-creation, navigating ownership, and avoiding “the big fat middle” of generic AI output.

Listening to them speak, it’s apparent that AI does unlock new creative possibilities, but designers’ success cannot be predicted through binary distinctions like adoption vs. rejection.

Indiscriminate adoption of AI will ultimately devalue design work.

While wholesale AI rejection means design professionals can’t offer an informed perspective on what’s coming.

The only sure thing is the need to equip ourselves with a deep and nuanced understanding of AI tools, so that we can co-create new ways of working.

This is going to be an incredibly valuable discussion for designers who are looking to figure out how that looks for them in their own careers. I hope you’ll be able to join us on June 11 at Designing with AI.