The Quest for Meaning in an AI-driven World with Brad Frost – Lean Cast

I had the great opportunity to chat with Behrad Mirafshar on the Lean Cast podcast. We covered a lot of ground about design systems and AI’s impact on the field of digital design. I really welcomed the opportunity to dig into these things that feel really relevant and important. Feel free to give it a listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify:

Here’s a (slightly cleaned-up) transcript of our conversation.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Hi everyone, it’s LeanCast, another episode of it. I am here with someone that I’ve been wanting to speak to for so long. I’ll give you the backstory of it, so you know why. We have recorded over 75 episodes. I think we get over 200 listened over for each episode. I cannot thank you enough. We are bringing more interesting people. The person I’m speaking to, I need to give a very, very, very, very, very special introduction.

First time I bump into him, well, his work, was long time back, when I was working for a design agency, and we were trying to design a big website platform for enterprise, and I was sitting on my desk first day, hired, energized. The project manager came in with a big, big pile of A4s wrapped, tied together. Sort of felt like a book. He threw it on my desk, he was like, “Behrad, for this project, we are going to follow Atomic Design framework.” I don’t know why, Brad, he printed it, it was a long time ago, so not sure, I didn’t ask really. But, I started reading the book and I was really fascinated by how you broke down the, basically, components that designers use in their day-to-day work into atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages. Since then, I was like, “That makes so much sense.”

Fast forward, after seven years or so, I’m here with the one and only Brad Frost, author of Atomic Design, the most important relevant book on design system still to this date. So, if you haven’t read it, read it, it makes all sense to you after you read it, why you need design system. Really excited to have him here. It’s everyday I open my Twitter and look at ChatGPT-3, 4, and new revolutions of slew of AI products, how it’s revolutionizing the work of digital product designers. Oh my goodness, how it’s basically putting design system even more on the map. Hopefully, we can get to talk about that, whether Brad is agreeing to it or not. Long introduction. Brad, how are you doing today? Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Brad Frost:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, and that was a really, really kind and enthusiastic introduction. I really appreciate that. I’m doing great today, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Brad, it’s been a long journey for you. Design systems are not a new topic to you. You’ve been dealing with this for such a long time. If you want to look back and see how the concept of design system has evolved, yeah, how do you see it?

Brad Frost:
It’s an interesting time to be reflecting on this because actually as it happens this year, Atomic Design turns 10 years old. So, it’s like, “Okay, so that’s something.” But, obviously the notion of design systems has been around in some way, shape or form for a while. But, I’ll walk through what that last kind of 10 years has looked like. So as I set out on my own, and at the time, around 2010 through 2013, it was responsive design, right? That this was the thing, and that that was where I was coming from. I was working as a mobile web developer. That was a thing for a while.

So at the time, and I was really fortunate to kind of be in that space because I worked for an agency that did work for brands like Nike and stuff, and so it was like, “Oh, we are working on a website for this new device that Apple is coming out with, and we want to launch nike.com,” and that thing was the iPad. So, it was kind of being there at that beginning stage of it’s like, “Well, how do we do this? How do we create these experiences that work well on mobile devices, on these new emerging tablet devices as well as, of course, a bunch of different shapes of desktops and laptops and stuff?”

So, that was what I was focused on. As I did that work, it became clear that it’s not, “Well, how do we get this whole site to become responsive?” A lot of it was just around, “Well, this stuff just kind of squishes, fine. But, the navigation, or this data table, or this carousel, or this this kind of thing, is tricky.” So, it wasn’t the entirety of a page that was hard to make responsive, it was certain components of that page that were hard. So, that led to a project that I called, This Is Responsive, which created, showcased and aggregated a bunch of responsive patterns. So, “Oh, here’s navigation and here’s seven different ways you could slice it.” So, that was my first voyage into thinking of things in terms of components versus like I’m just creating a webpage.

Around that same time, tools like Bootstrap and Foundation were starting to come on the scene and were like, “Here’s these components and you could build things out of them.” That was the state of things. There were a lot of pattern libraries, and really amazing people — Anna Debenham comes to mind — doing important work, and say, “Here’s this pattern library and you can copy and paste this HTML, and here’s the thing, this style guide or pattern library,” and that was the language.

While I was doing that work, I found myself saying, “Man, it’s great, this story of ‘Here’s components and you could build things out of those components.'” But I thought, “There’s not a lot of nuance there. There’s still a lot of room for interpretation error, and just it’s not entirely clear how these things come together to form full experiences.” So, that’s what led to the creation of atomic design, which was something like, “Okay, well there’s the smallest components, and then there’s simple components, and then there’s more complex components, and then those things all come together to form a whole user interface screen, and then we have different scenarios of that user interface screen,” and so that’s what atomic design became: a way to think about user interface as this very interconnected, hierarchical thing.

As the name suggests, it borrows from the natural world; you could blow up literally any piece of matter in the known universe and be left with this finite set of periodic elements that then combine into these simple molecules, which then keep combining into more complex things, which it ultimately becomes sometimes giant celestial bodies or whatever. It’s amazing, it’s beautiful, it’s elegant, and it works, and it maps pretty nicely into this world of user interface design. So that was the birth of it, and as part of it, I created a tool called Pattern Lab, which was almost a precursor to what’s now the industry standard is Storybook. But, at the time we thought, “Well, we need a way to actually do this,” and so that was a tool that we created in order to make that happen.

Yeah. So, along the way, just through a bunch of our client work, we were able to test this whole thing out. But, again, our clients weren’t asking for, “Please give us a design system or deliver us this pattern library.” It was a total kind of afterthought, they were hiring us to make them a new responsive website for brands like TechCrunch and Entertainment Weekly, which is a big US magazine publication. So what we were doing was delivering responsive websites, and along the way we are also delivering, saying, “Oh, by the way, here’s this really thoughtful pattern library.” And our clients were like, “Yeah, that’s nice, *trash can*.” They didn’t have any use or see any utility in it, they weren’t really interested in that.

But, over time, it started becoming more and more of a concept. So, the term design systems really kind of started to take root in maybe 2015-ish or whatever. I remember it was the tail end of me writing my book that I went back through and started replacing the word pattern library with design system a little bit. So, it was that concept started taking hold, I think, around then. Then, since then, it’s been more of an explicit thing that organizations are asking for, and are starting to see, as we just have so many things and different pieces of software scattered across an organization. Everybody, teams of people the world over, are creating the same buttons, the same accordions, the same form fields, the same whatever. You take 20 different teams and 20 different buttons and 20 different text fields and stuff, it makes a lot of sense to say, “Hey, maybe we should just do this once and just put it in one place, so that everybody then uses.”

So, that’s been the journey to the present day, and now it’s really exciting because this stuff is proving its value. It’s hard to do, it’s hard to get right, largely from a people perspective. It’s not technically from a design perspective. From a development perspective, this stuff is easy. You ask any designer on the planet to say, “Hey, design a button.” Or any developer, say, “Hey, develop a button.” It’s the easiest thing in the world. You could knock that out in an hour, but that’s not really the challenge of these things.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Let’s stay here, because you made a really good point, and from the people standpoint, it’s very hard to put together a design system for big organization. Why is that?

Brad Frost:
It’s a lot of reasons. I think it ultimately boils down to different people doing different things and having a different set of priorities. I think that that’s the most charitable and natural thing; if you are a company and you have several software products: a marketing site, maybe a piece of software that users buy and then log into, okay, there’s two things right there. So, you have a marketing site and then you have the actual product. Those things have different goals, those have different priorities, they have different roadmaps, they have different teams working on them. So, just things like that, which is kind of a natural thing.

When you multiply that… A lot of our work is with big Fortune 500 companies and companies like that. When you multiply that into you now have dozens and dozens and dozens of different pockets of the organization, building different websites, building different native apps, building kiosks, building emails, building the whole nine yards, and you have a bunch of these people all just pointing in different directions that have different priorities. From that perspective, it becomes really hard to say, “Well, what I’m doing is actually similar to what these other folks are doing.”

Everybody’s just kind of head down with their horse blinders on, and are focused on building great products, which is, again, that that’s what they should be doing. But, then, so what becomes the opportunity then is to say, “Okay, we still need to have these people that are actually focused on building the best products possible.” That with the marketing, website team needs to be working on making that marketing website the best marketing website that the Internet’s ever seen, and then the people who are working on the actual product, that the marketing site is selling, needs to be making the best product.

So, that all makes sense, but then there becomes this thing of, “Well, there’s this opportunity for either someone else or something else to be able to pull shared knowledge, shared assets, shared just things that ought to be shared, things that ought to be consistently rolled out thing, effort that should be shared to pull that down to a shared layer, that everyone can then make use of.” In that way, and this is the basic crux of the benefits that design system provide, is that rather than each one of those teams having to build that button from scratch or build that card from scratch or build that whatever from scratch, every single time they need it, they’re instead able to just pull from the toolkit and move on to bigger and more important product design and development decisions.

Behrad Mirafshar:
So, it’s been 10 years that you wrote that book, and fast forward, now we have in big organizations, even at small ones, you’ve got design system teams that their sole role, well, range of responsibilities is to maintain and develop design system. I’ve worked with several organizations that you need to make a request to the design system team if you want to introduce a new component, and that would go through a process of evaluation. If it gets approved, you could introduce that, and update the library. So, when you started writing the book, I mean, you didn’t necessarily have to look into the future, but did you foresee a future like this, that so much of product design process will be heavily impacted by the framework of design systems?

Brad Frost:
Yeah, I think a bit of that. Whenever I wrote the book, a good deal of it was kind of focused on the mechanics, just we’ll say the basic concepts, but then also the process of how you go about making it. But, then I did tack on a chapter at the end that was maintaining a design system, and that was, again… The book’s about, what is it, seven years old? So, the concept… Maybe seven, close to eight, maybe, years old. But, the concept of Atomic Design is turning 10, but then the book came a little later.

So, that stuff was still in its infancy. There weren’t a ton of teams out there that were doing this work of governing and growing and evolving a design system. It’s that stuff still is a little bit being defined and being refined a little bit. But, it does make sense when you consider these things and what they do and what they unlock, that just like plants, you got to keep watering them and you got to tend to them, and that if you don’t do that, they’re going to die, right? That’s just how that goes.

So, it does make sense for there to be some effort in tending to these things. I think that some of the design system efforts that we’ve seen fail, a lot of times comes from that lack of ongoing tending and stuff like that, and also, we’ll say, a thoughtful governance. Now, it sounds like what you were just describing though of like this, “Oh yeah, we need to put in a request to the design system team,” and all of that, and that’s true and that process can exist. It’s also interesting that it’s, in our work, this is yet another reason why design systems are hard is that there’s an art to all of that stuff, which is to say, the design systems kind of move at a slower pace layer than product design, right?

So, product design teams are like, “I have this ticket in front of me. I’m trying to get this feature done by the end of the sprint, and the design system team is kind of deliberately moving at a slower pace because they’re not just thinking about it through the lens of one thing, they’re considering things from a pretty holistic perspective,” and that naturally means they have to take longer, look at more things, make it more flexible and resilient, and test it more, and stuff like that, because if you just rush and just keep chucking a bunch of new components in because some person somewhere needs it, you’re going to end up with a mess on your hands pretty quickly.

So, anyways, so that that becomes a little bit of the art of it like, “How do you do this important, holistic, structural, systematic work, while also not being a giant blocker to every theme that has needs?” So, that becomes part of the process where it becomes “How do we establish a governance model, governance process? How do we establish good healthy relationships with or between all these different teams that are relying on this stuff, so that we all have visibility on the design system, and while the product teams are able to raise their hands and make suggestions and improvements and things like that, but without slowing everybody down to a snails pace.”

Behrad Mirafshar:
I really agree with this statement that there’s a art to it, and if product teams, in coordination with design teams and tech teams, could arrive at a cadence that they could update and maintain design system, it would be hugely beneficial to them, because everyone would do less of busy work or boring work or tedious work, and they could just focus on parts of their process or part of their work that is exciting to them, and add more value to the business and customers at the same time.

Brad Frost:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly it. The way I see it, I see all of this through the lens of respect. Which is to say we want to be respectful of people’s time, energy, and talents, and when everybody is forced to put their brains on hold in order to draw and build more rectangles, it’s just not a respectful use of people’s time and talents, and I see a lot of this work as, “How do we unlock people’s potential? How do we unlock our different teams’ potential? How do we free people up to focus on substantive and important issues?” Versus, “Oh, I didn’t get around to that because I had to draw a card for the 17th time.” Right?

Now, there’s some weird stuff that gets mixed in here because you have a bunch of people who have spent a bunch of years learning how to draw and build those rectangles. So, we see it a bit where it’s almost like a deer and headlights situation where we’re like, “Yeah, you don’t have to do this stuff anymore,” and they’re just kind of like, “What do I do with my hands?” And it’s like, “Do a million other things.”

Behrad Mirafshar: Other things.

Brad Frost:
There is so much work to be done. No one comes out of the other end of a project. You launch a thing, there’s always work to be done, right? There’s always the things that you didn’t get around to doing, and it’s like what a lot of this design system work is is, again, freeing people’s brains and bodies up to execute more and better and more substantive stuff.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Yeah, I think, us, in the product design community, we have to do, continuously now, soul searching of who we are as product designers. Because I’m talking to my team too, Brad, and I’m telling them that, “Get ready for our works to be disrupted on a faster regular pace than ever.” So, it could mean that for all of our illustrators, that they might not, for example, spend so much time behind Adobe Illustrator, or Blender, what have you, because this automation tools and AI tools is going to really take over a huge portion of their workflows, and I think it could be very unsettling for a lot of people, a lot of folks that they used to be, for example, do you remember folks drawing icons like [inaudible 00:26:33]?

Brad Frost: Yeah.

Behrad Mirafshar:
It’s such a lovely… I used to go on YouTube and watch those fast forward videos that the icon designer would design every icon. It’s such a meditative Friday night with glass of red, I should say.

Brad Frost:
I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Yeah, I don’t know how to… I just wanted to get you in on this that I think all of us now need to be having this conversation with ourselves, with our team, that, “Okay, to what extent our works are getting disrupted? To what extent that we need to…” For example, if I used to do a lot of things with my hands, maybe now in the new age of work, not necessarily so, and then I have to find other ways to satisfy my needs of working with hands, for example.

Brad Frost:
Yeah, I think that that’s exactly right, and I think that you’re exactly right, and it’s a good piece of advice to really do that self reflection, to really do that assessment of what does it mean to be a product designer in this day and age, in the future. But, moreover, it’s just kind of like, “What do I like to do?” And I think that coming back to those people who have spent a lot of time, they find that meditative practice of going into a design tool and sweating the details and the thickness and the stroke width of an icon, it’s very interesting because it’s like, “Oh, that is very satisfying work. That is really important work that is sweating that detail,” all of that.

The same holds true on the development side. There’s the smell of a brand new HTML page or CSS file or whatever. It’s like, “Ah, this is great.” And now it is just worth saying, as a matter of fact, it’s like, “Absolutely, the machines are encroaching on this space,” and what it forces us to reckon with is, “Well, why are we doing this? What are…” Because the what and how are going to continue to get automated, they’re going to continue to get more efficient, a lot of this stuff, again, just a whole bunch of UI just doesn’t need to be made straight up, AI or no AI, back to just design systems in general.

Again, it’s like this, “Well, what do you mean I don’t need to build these forms from scratch?” And it’s like, “Yeah, get used to that because this is becoming more of a commodity. This is becoming more of…” The what and how, all artistry aside, and it’s like it’s not meant to diminish the craft of it, in the same way that a lot of people can spend their lives. I know knife makers, for instance, that forge things by hand, and it’s like it truly is, it’s a craft, it’s a gift, it’s a talent, but it’s also not how most people get their knives, we’ll say. They get their knives from a machine that splat out a thousand knives in an hour.

It’s just like we could talk about, I think, the societal impact of that, and I think that that actually is an important topic, and I’m happy to go there, but it’s just coming back to, “Well, if you’re a designer or developer or whatever.” It’s like, “You really do have to come to terms with the fact that these things are going to encroach on it.” So, I’d encourage people not to be too precious about the what and the how, and instead use this opportunity to really, exactly like you said, the do that soul searching, go, “Well, why am I doing this? Why are we making the things we’re making?”

That human-guided process of it’s just like, “How do we create something that is successful but also thoughtful, ethical, accessible?” All of that stuff, user- centric. It’s like that stuff is harder to automate, and I think that there’s going to be areas of that that are impacted or at least guided in part by the machines, but at the same time, it really does force an identity crisis that I actually don’t necessarily think is a bad thing. So, I guess, that would be my piece of advice is just like notice the discomfort that comes with it. If you feel threatened by this, really explore why that is.

So, it’s like brass tacks level, I think that that’s what we’re doing. But, again, this bigger picture, I think, really does pretty immediately go into things like, “What do people do for work? How do we define value in society? How do we decouple people’s productive output?” “Oh, what are you doing with your hands.” Versus like your ability to live in a house with heating and cooling and things like that and be able to feed your family. I think that those types of things are absolutely the conversations we should be having, and this is, by the way, this is nothing particularly new, meaning that the industrial revolution really kicked off these same conversations where, “Oh yeah, you don’t need 700 people in a field harvesting wheat. You have a machine that can now blast through that in a couple hours. What do you do with those 700 people?”

I think that we have grown whole new levels, a managerial class, a bunch of bureaucratic work, a bunch of other work. We have kept apace in this machine age, but as this information age is really taking root and now is being totally gasoline on a fire with this AI stuff, I think these conversations around things like universal basic income and things like that; these are becoming not some far future things, and are increasingly happening now.

There’re fewer cashiers that at supermarket checkout line and all of that. We do need to talk about labor, we do need to talk about worth, and in my view, it really does come back to respect, which is around how do we not just create more drudgery for people because we need to give them some money so that they could feed their families? How do we just make a more respectful society that honors people’s time and talents and ability and frees people up and doesn’t force them to be working seven jobs? If the machines can alleviate that, then we should do that, but we also should make sure that people don’t starve as a result. So, it’s really fascinating and gets into some pretty existential stuff pretty quickly.

Behrad Mirafshar:
No, it is, and I’m really happy that you are going in there, because these are the conversation to be had, these are the conversation that are not easy to have, because then all of a sudden you talk about what is fairness? What is purpose? What is equity? These are the conversation that we need to have, and if we close our eyes to it, because we have had experience in the history of humanity with a system that try to create a equal environment for everyone, and it’s called communism, and it didn’t end well.

Brad Frost:
Yeah, nice in theory. Right.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Yeah. So, if we close our eyes to this topic, and not openly talk about it, we might put ourself in a position that we have to make fast, abrupt decision about how we should work together or live together, and end up coming up with suboptimal super bureaucratic systems that don’t benefit no one.

Brad Frost:
Yeah. Yep. That’s exactly right, and that by the way, is what we ought to be dedicating more of our brains space to.

Behrad Mirafshar: A hundred percent.

Brad Frost:
As people are… You consider yourself a product designer, developer or something like that, it’s like that there’s a design problem for you. I’m not saying… But, it does, I think, all of this, yeah sure, having good e-commerce sites, and sure, having… There’s still going to be that stuff. I think that there’s going to be a lot of opportunity and employment and stuff like that in these worlds. But, I do come back to the, “What does it look like if…” I’ll just use one example, date picker. Date picker is what I see as one of the most disrespectful-

Behrad Mirafshar: Agree.

Brad Frost:
… obnoxious, terrible things that literally if you think, the world over, millions, upon millions, upon millions of hours of human beings’ time is spent designing, building, debugging, testing, maintaining these stupid things that should be standardized. There actually is a standard for it, but it’s because its current implementation is just a little subpar, you have millions upon millions upon millions of peoples’ labor, the world over, doing that, and that is not a respectful use, that is not a healthy use of human beings’ time and potential.

So, I don’t see design systems are going to solve the world’s problems. But, I do think it does really boil down to, “What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Is this a good use of time and energy and resources? How do we make the most of our limited time on earth, individually and collectively, to make things better?” I think that kind of clutching pearls and saying, “But, don’t take away my rectangular drawing.” Is kind of a thing that’s, again, I think, worth examining and exploring.

Behrad Mirafshar:
I think so too. Today I was reading, I’m trying to catch up with this AI revolution, this we are experiencing. I was reflecting earlier, Brad, that ChatGPT got introduced in end of November last year. Now, we got this ChatGPT-4, and this morning, I was looking up on my Twitter, and there was demo of it. The gentleman drew a simple website on his paper, and then, I don’t know, scanned it even through Slack, and then ChatGPT output was a simple website. It wasn’t a breakthrough website. It wasn’t like, “I’m going to use this website.” But, it was a simple website that you could start to build, design, add to it, and finalize it, and that’s a first version of it. Folks don’t understand that, whenever I talk to folks, they’re like, “Oh no, that’s so easy. That’s simple.” But, it’s like, “Hey, that’s the first version. Wait for two months and see what happens to it.”

So, I saw this, and I saw another post, and I want to pick your brain on this that another folks on Twitter said, “The future of design work will be centering around developing design system, one part, and another part would be service design.” Like, “Why are we doing this?”

Brad Frost: Yeah.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Right? What’s your take on this? What’s your reaction on this sort of a good tweet?

Brad Frost:
Yeah, I think I agree with that, in large part. I think that how interfaces and products come into being is going to increasingly be encroached upon. I think that it’s important and imperative for what those things are built with to be thoughtfully crafted and whatever. Now, again, I think that there’s going to be some automation and efficiencies gained even in that, just by default making things more accessible and whatever. I think that there’s a lot of just really rote things that can and should be automated and improved, and so even in the design system kind of creation world, I don’t think that that’s fully protected from all of this, but certainly, yeah, the ability to draw a little whiteboard sketch and have that turn into a real thing? My God, yeah, by the end of this year, a hundred percent we’re going to have some pretty sophisticated ways of doing that.

Whenever you think about, and you best believe that Squarespace and Wix and the rest of them are able to just graph that on. I do see it as these layers similar to, “Okay, I help organizations create design systems. Those ought to be thoughtful.” But, then how you wield those, yeah, it becomes a tool. It becomes a really quick, and I would presume, a increasingly effective way of not just creating pie in the sky prototypes, but actually getting this stuff over the line and into the world.

So, yeah. But, coming back to the service design part of your question is I think these things can’t be trusted on their own as we’ve seen already, even as they improve. I think that it’s important to have the discernment to be able to say, “Is that good design? Is this a good user experience? Is this good service? Are these actually sound features? Do these things need tweak?” So, in a lot of cases, the mechanics of the construction of this can be automated left and right, but there still needs to be this very human, again, “Is this ethical? Is this accessible? Is this sound to design?” and I think that there always needs to be that.

Like humans giving a humanity check to what’s being produced, because otherwise it’s just in the same way that some of the AI generated images and stuff like that are seemingly nonsensical. We need to have that human eye to make sure that things actually make sense, that they’re actually useful. So, that’s what… I don’t see it as a one or the other kind of thing. Yeah, I see it as the machines are going to just eat through the stuff that are pretty standard, fair, and boiler plate, and repetitious, and whatever, and that should be welcome, again, just like going through and having to do these chores is just not fun.

So, we should welcome that, we should embrace that, but it does mean that we need to really start exercising the muscles that, again, focus on the why, that get into good UI/UX, product design, service design, development, all of that stuff, the meaty fundamentals that we all ought to be focused on. But, I think a lot of people are a little bit more distracted by the rectangle drawing. So, it’s like now’s the time to beef up the fundamentals, as I see it.

Behrad Mirafshar:
I will say that those folks that really try to understand this new revolution and try to ride it very well, they can really use this massive, massive, massive tools at their disposal, to pimp up their design outputs, the quality of what the… Because, as if when we get to a point, I don’t know when, tomorrow, next month, two months from now, three months from now, six months from now, that you can interact with ChatGPT visually, and then you say that, “Hey, ChatGPT, I have this idea in mind for this login screen. I don’t know. I want to like give me 20 different options with these kind of styles. Give it to me, and has a plugin to Figma, and get all those options into Figma,” and then that would be the starting point of your design process, so to speak.

Brad Frost: Yes.

Behrad Mirafshar: Oh my goodness.

Brad Frost:
Yep. “Show me these different things. Show one that’s left align, center align, right align. Show one with a button group that says this versus that. Show me one with single sign-on option. Show me this with a dark background versus a light background,” and you just have that happen literally automatically, it’s in seconds. Again, all you need to do is look at the power behind the Stable Diffusions and the DALL-Es and all of these just really robust things. They’re painting entire universes, these fantastical just like… It’s like when you just, coming back to bootstrap, it’s like, “Man, oh man, that stuff is just so common and so easy, that AI’s just going to like…”

Yeah, I’m sure that there’s a bunch of people on the planet right now doing exactly this, figuring out the most easy and efficient way to make it happen. So, it’s not that far of a cry to predict that, yeah, by the end of the year, there’s probably going to be some pretty viable players that at least can get teams pretty far down the road, like you’re saying. It’s a tool that becomes part of the toolkit versus you’re totally out of a job, but it does just, again, force us into a more thoughtful intellectual realm compared to just a production house. So, I think it’s inevitable. It’s pretty wild.

Again, I can’t help but just immediately going back, it’s like we work with a bunch of organizations, a lot of organizations have a lot of offshore teams, a lot of that stuff, I get really, I think, concern, that is the word for sure, because our society and how we go about putting value on things and skills and whatever, entire economies, are built up around, “Oh, we’re just going to farm these chores out to places,” and, “Oh, we have all of these engineers in this country,” and if you have the machines coming in to rip through that stuff in a matter of minutes, what the hell does that do?

Behrad Mirafshar: Oh yeah.

Brad Frost:
It’s bad. So, again, I think the urgency around figuring out… I treat this as inevitable. I think that the trajectory it’s on, but I think it is up to all of us to really have the conversations that are more political, more societal in nature, that basically start to raise the flag of, “Hey, this is coming at a really fast clip and is going to disrupt entire industries that have been growth sectors for a very, very long time, and that felt really sound bets.”

Yeah, and then of course there’s the power dynamics of these things, which is to say the people who do get the equation right are going to wield massive amounts of power, and how do you have checks and balances? How do you regulate or temper that stuff with some thoughtfulness and humanity? That stuff worries me a fair amount because I think that there aren’t proper safeguards, and we’ve been doing nothing, at least in the States, but deregulating a lot of things with disastrous consequences. So, there’s not a lot of precedent for this; people aren’t even getting their heads around what this stuff even is, and it’s just going to blindside everyone.

Behrad Mirafshar:
I think so. I think I don’t want to be negative about this, and I really admire that you are trying to look at it from a standpoint of a designer. I get it. For a lot of executive folks that are listening to this is like, “I feel like Brad is doing his best to stay really practical and look at the topic from the designer standpoint, not a political standpoint,” because it’s easy to be political, and often when you get political, you focus on the problem so much, and you don’t offer solutions, and we don’t want to be like that, we want to be designers and offer solution. But, I really agree with you is the pace is such a fast pace that we will be surprised, as a society, in the US, in the Europe, we will be surprised and there will be a point that we are like, “Oh my goodness, what if we had thought about this few years back?”

Brad Frost: Yeah, yeah.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Right? I think then, when we hit to that point, then the question here is, “How fast are we going to be to course correct and come up with a set of regulations, set of measures that ensure that our economic engines move forward in a way that doesn’t leave people behind?”

Brad Frost:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that that’s right. It’s like that trajectory, again, I see it as inevitable. So, it really does all fall squarely on how are we going to collectively react to it, and it’s interesting, and it’s not something that is like, one, you can’t put this genie back in the bottle, I think. You can’t just shut it down and say, “We’re not going to do it.” I don’t even know if there’s really a way to pump the brakes on it even. It’s not like you could slow the rollout of it or anything like that. It’s kind of on its own path. But, I do think that, again, I can’t help but keep coming back to, it’s just like it really is forcing our hand into thinking of just, “What do we value as a society? How do we make sure that people are taken care of when, yeah, a bunch of jobs are going to evaporate overnight?” It’s wild. It’s wild.

But, yeah, I don’t know. It is, I think, important to have nuanced conversations about-

Behrad Mirafshar: Absolutely.

Brad Frost:
… all of this, because it’s like… This is what I think really concerns me with a lot of the discourse around it, as well as coming from the creators of these things themselves, where, like good technologists, and like whatever, they’re excited, they’re seeing this world through rose colored glasses, and I think one of the biggest design principles that every designer working on the planet right now, people building stuff, should be asking the question, again, AI, no AI, is like, “What harm can people do with this thing? With the thing that I’m creating, how can somebody use that to do harm?”

I think that that is a universal design principle that ought to be on the front of everyone’s mind whenever they’re making things, whether that’s banking software, whether that’s a design tool, whether that’s chatbot, whether that’s an AI tool, whether that’s like just this user interface that we’re interacting through. All of that needs to be a front of mind consideration, and I think that that’s the thing that I see as the most troubling, where it’s like there’s just some real clear risks to this stuff, and I see the people who are producing it trying to diminish it, and it’s like you don’t need to diminish it, because we get the value of it, there’s so much good that can come from it, but you also just need to be frank and honest and upfront and really own the potential downsides of it, because they’re there, and pretending like they’re not there isn’t going to make them not exist, it’s just going to make you look foolish when things ultimately go wrong.

So, it’s just, I think, we need to have honest and open and nuanced conversations about all of this, and to not villainize it or demonize it or say like, “This is a savior.” It’s like reality is always more complicated than that, especially with stuff that’s this powerful.

Behrad Mirafshar:
I think so too, and I think ever increasing… I think, first of all, I mean, just to be really candid is like us designers, we don’t have to stay in our field me, we might need to, for example, level up and get more involved in the design of processes, in the way how government works or how some of our societal structures work. There’s increasing need for service designers, there’s increasing need of researchers to understand the complexity of our socio-technological environment. Yeah, it’s ever increasingly what I’m lacking, and that when I look at the conversation on Twitter, or sometimes on YouTube, is that I think we need to have, I’ve said it before, we need to have people with a open mindset, people who are philosophically open, because there is no… For me, us designers, it’s very clear, everything is in gray area, there is no black and white. There is sometimes blacks and there is sometimes white, but most of the time it’s gray. But, I think that level of openness is not widespread in society.

Brad Frost:
I think so. I think that a lot of the media channels and the media environment have the affordances of those platforms, of tools like Twitter and things like that, have proven to be pretty divisive, right? And the Facebooks and the Twitters and everything, and the YouTubes, where it’s just like the stuff that is incendiary and hyperbolic gets the views, gets the eyeballs, and that encourages people to devolve into these black and white camps, and that’s a shame because they don’t have to be, and that’s where, yeah, the word “nuance” is just one of the things that I am starving for. Literally any topic of conversation could benefit from more nuance, and just like you said, open, honest, coming at it from a point of curiosity, coming at it from a point of really trying to genuinely understand, versus trying to form an opinion about something and then go to the mat defending it, it’s just like it’s not productive, it’s not helpful.

Behrad Mirafshar: No.

Brad Frost:
I do think, you’re absolutely right, that designers are pretty well positioned to model that behavior, and I see it in our work with organizations. It’s like to help other folks understand, executives to understand a product, people to understand, more like IT people to understand, to have designers kind of come in and ask questions, not in a threatening or finger pointing way, but really to help unpack, “What are we doing here? How could we be doing this better?” And opening the door to collaboration, to arrive at some things that people feel good about, that is, “Oh, this will be good for our customers, this will be good for our users, this will be good for people, but this will also be good for our business and stuff.” It’s like we need to be doing that exact process in many, many different realms. Yeah. So, the urgency of all of this, I think, is something that’s becoming increasingly apparent.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Brad, we’ve been talking a lot on the bird’s eye view. I think it happens when you have two folks like us in one conversation.

Brad Frost:
Yeah, they do.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Yeah, I do. I’m really aware of the time as well. I’ve been really trying to have this tough conversation with you for 60 minutes. You might, I mean, cognitively, in a position, that you might need to have some rest. I would like to get your brain on this. A good portion of our listeners are up and coming designers.

Brad Frost: Yeah.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Right? I feel like entering the product design world is getting trickier than ever, especially after this conversation.

Brad Frost:
You may want to reconsider your decision to enter this field *laughs*

Behrad Mirafshar:
I would like to get your two cents on it, and I don’t expect you to have a clean answer on this. So, for the last few minutes, what’s your two cents words of advice to younger designers who sort of started or who’d like to start enter the space? Take it away.

Brad Frost:
Yeah. I think what we’ve been talking about is still really relevant, and I’d say that my advice to really any young person, period, but young product designer, is I think really understanding, “Why you are attracted to this field?” To understand at a really soul level, “What is it that you enjoy doing, and why do you enjoy doing those things?” For me, it’s like I’ve always loved a good puzzle, a good jigsaw puzzle. I like creating things, and it’s just like that’s the instincts that I have. It’s just those tendencies or notions, and I think it’s really important to know thyself, as they say, in order to apply yourself in any role, because, as we’ve been talking about, this landscape changes all the time, whenever we started in this field, the tools were totally different, the processes were half-baked or non-existent, yet all of this stuff is going to keep changing, and that’s good, and just acknowledge that.

So, what do you do when it’s hard to grasp onto something that’s moving so quickly? I think that the first answer is, again, to go inward and to really understand yourself, what you’re attracted to, what types of things you like applying to do, and that’s going to serve you really well, because all you need to do is look at some of the worldwide stats around… We no longer work in a world where you work for a company for 35, 40 years and retire with a gold watch, you’re going to probably change jobs a bunch of times, you’re probably going to change careers at least once, just statistically speaking. So, it’s so incredibly important to carry yourself with an understanding of what your talents, your ability, your potential is, and what your tendencies are, what you like doing and what you don’t like doing. To do more of the things that you like, and less of the things you don’t. It’s that simple. Do what you like, do more of that, and all the while, when you find things that you don’t like, figure out ways to do less of that.

How that plays out in a product design world, especially in your early days, you’re going to be confronted with a bunch of things. You’re getting your foot in the door, you’re going to be exposed to certain tools, you’re going to be building certain things, you’re going to be playing around with different things. Maybe you’re doing user research, maybe you’re doing interviews, maybe you’re doing wire frames, maybe you’re doing all sorts of things, front-end development, maybe you’re restarting the router whenever it goes down, and you’re figuring out how to do different things. I think it’s important to be open to the possibility that you can get set on a path that is wildly different than what you have in mind now, and that that’s true for many, many, many, many people.

So, again, keep an open mind, keep that curiosity, figure out of the activities that you end up doing professionally or just even in your school, say, “Ooh, I like this. I want more of this. I’m curious about this.” Or, “Ooh, this doesn’t sit right with me.” When those things happen, notice, say, “This doesn’t sit right with me, and this is a chore, and I never wanted to do it again.” Or, “This doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe I should stick with it a little bit longer because it’s important.” So, it’s important to discern, “Is this an uncomfortable thing or something that I just absolutely hate?” Or, “This is important enough where I need to power through for at least a little while.”

So, just notice those ebbs and flows in your trajectory. “I like this tool. I like this activity. I like working in this way. I like working, building new stuff, versus maintaining existing stuff.” There’s so many different dichotomies that are out there, and you just have to keep that self-reflection going. You have to keep every single day going, “How do I do more of what I want to do and less of what I don’t want to do?” And know that the environment’s still going to change, and next year’s landscape is going to look different than this year’s landscape, and stuff like that.

So, I think that that’s really my biggest piece of advice. But, also coming back to what we were talking about earlier, I do think that there are more fundamentals. We tend to have an infatuation with tools. I’m a front-end developer by trade, and just different frameworks and different tools. I was listening in on an online conference yesterday, and it was just so funny as somebody that’s like, “I am a developer, but I’m not that far in,” and just the list of buzzwords and product names and package names and project names. It was almost comical to me, and it’s like, “I know that that list next year is going to be totally different, or at least not the same.” So, it’s important to just recognize that.

The thing is is that you’ll be hired to do something, and you’ll need to use the tools that are available and the processes and whatever. You’re going to work using some of the real stuff, but at the same time, you really need to be working on establish that foundation that is more conceptual, that is more evergreen, that is more just kind of like that stuff is tried and true, good foundational concepts, good usability principles, good human-centric design, good accessibility. Just those types of foundations are going to survive and transcend the kind of flavor of the month that you’ll be working in from project to project along your career path.

Behrad Mirafshar:
I cannot thank you enough. This has been one of the most relevant conversation I’ve had in the past six months, and I’m filled with honor. Thank you a lot, Brad, for being really open, being really candid. I think a lot of… You walk the fine line and try to touch upon really some important topics that some folks avoid to talk about. So, I really appreciate that you went there. I appreciate that you came on the podcast, being so kind enough. Folks, that was it. I knew, I told you this is going to be a really remarkable podcast. I hope you get something out of it. I opened my eyes to a lot of new topics. Thanks, Brad.

Brad Frost:
Hey, thank you so much for having me, and for having, I think, an important and relevant conversation. So, I’d say it’s been really great to be able to express this stuff and have an outlet for it, because that’s been pretty front of mind for me for a while, so I really appreciate the opportunity to chat about it with you.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Yeah, I’ll make sure that it’s going to go live next week. That’s because we have a long queue for the episodes, but I’ll put it on top of the list because I think a lot of designers would benefit from listening this.

Brad Frost:
That’s great. Awesome. Well, thank you.

Behrad Mirafshar:
Thank you, folks. Until next episode. Ciao.