Why designers should stop worrying about AI replacing craft and start focusing on taste and strategy
By
Tom May
Summary
An anonymous designer writes to an advice column expressing anxiety that AI is making production and craft skills cheaper, while the truly valuable skills are shifting to strategic thinking, taste, and knowing what's worth making. The article reframes this not as a crisis but as an opportunity for designers to pivot toward higher-value skills like curation, judgment, and design thinking that AI cannot easily replicate.
Source
Key quotes
· 3 pulledIt's not that AI is coming for me. It's that the thing I've spent 15 years getting brilliant at—the making, the craft, the production—is becoming the cheap part.
What still seems to matter is everything around it. Knowing what's worth making in the first place. Having taste.
Execution at the click of a button might not be the career crisis you think it is. You just need to shift to the skills that are in demand more than ever.
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