G'day Reader
Barcelona in March. Design leadership summit. Someone mentions AI.
The room shifts.
That particular quality of silence—part fear, part shame, part defiance.
I know that unnerving silence. I felt it myself when a junior designer used AI to solve in minutes what used to take me hours.
My first thought wasn't "how wonderful." It was "bloody hell". And I really struggled to name the feeling. It was some confusing mix of nostalgia for "back in my day", a twinge of jealousy perhaps that they didn't have to do the hard yards.
Really what it comes down to is fear? Fear of change, uncertainty and losing relevance.
Fear is not the problem. It's the compass pointing to what matters.
Because on the other side of it lies freedom. To think instead of produce. To discern instead of generate. To care instead of just delivering.
Last week, I sat with a designer who showed me how they used AI to explore 20 directions for an aged care interface they'd been working on.
Most concepts technically perfect. All wrong. But beautifully wrong—each failure teaching me what dignity actually means to someone losing independence.
The AI couldn't see what I saw: a dads's hands, trembling as he tried to use the tablet.
That's our edge. We've lived. We've felt. We remember.
Design was never about the UI, it was just the medium.
Design was about solving real human problems creativity.
AI isn't the solution, its just a new medium to solve human problems creatively.
Riley
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Riley Coleman | Founder
AI Flywheel
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P.S. If that fear feels familiar or you want to learn to design for the new medium of AI. I'm gathering eight design leaders at end of this month to transform their practices.
Reply "Transform" if you'd like to explore this together with peers, I'll forward you details