Taking a moment to enjoy the Kool-aid

Figma, a widely used platform for collaborative interface design, has acquired Diagram. This is kind of huge on an industry level but a few things jumped out at me from the acquisition announcement by Noah Levin, VP of Product Design at Figma.

“One way to think about it is the total space of design having a ceiling and a floor: The ceiling is how good a designer can be at designing, which is constrained by the available tooling; the floor is the minimum skill required for someone to participate in design. AI will lift this ceiling, leading to more creative outputs made possible by more powerful tools; it will also lower the floor, making it easier for anyone to design and visually collaborate.”

I think this is a great framework to summarize what’s going on here with the new flood of AI driven tools, products, platforms, and most importantly, methods.

I think this is also a useful way to think about impact for art production. The “ceiling” being lifted for art production includes tools for sure, but maybe more important is the creation of new mental space, allowing for a fresh vista of creative possibilities presented by AI. And the “floor” is the very important point about access to and the democratization of the production of visual culture, art, or whatever else: it’s an invitation to whole new communities and typologies of artists/producers, that will have an effect not so much on “who” we think of as being “real artists”, but how we as a culture will recalibrate the role of creativity.

I also like the way Rubin frames the evolution of design from “atomic structures (pixels)” to “molecular ones (components)”, and projects into an AI-enabled era where designers build “higher-level and higher-leverage molecular structures.”

For him, this might lead to a total reimagining of the digital interfaces that are in use today. Totally agree for design of course but again I’m drawn to imagine how this might translate over to an art production paradigm.

In digital art for example, what are the system orders that affect production? (1) A fussy and finetuned photoshop image > (2) Generative AI-enabled image production across multiple vectors (movement, style, platform) > (3) to what? What does it look like when artists can start there? If we look at it as a linear racetrack, we used to start at the beginning, then we teleported to being able to start in the middle, and now I’m wondering if we are going to be starting right at the point that used to be the finish line, meaning that we are completely re-setting the framework of what is possible.

Koolaid