2026-09-29 Tue
On the Impermanence of Design in the wake of AI
- The art of Design is a creative seance that begins with a prelude of Questions. Its acolytes construct the liturgy of creation with a prelude of questions to consider before taking any action, making any decision or making anything at all. Each question is a Sample, a marble pulled from a bag, each with a different quality, valence and relevance, that we put up to our eye and that we look through before proceeding, begging us to "choose wisely."
- What perspectives should we consider?
- What relevant personas do we not understand enough yet, and what can we do to listen deeper to the people that have them?
- What would be ideal?
- In an ideal world with no constraints, what would be possible?
- What problems exist?
- Which problems have been hidden, overlooked?
- What is our purpose?
- Which creative constraints might be practical or fruitful here?
- What hypotheses do we have?
- What precedents exist?
- Physicists first articulated the Physics/Observer/Effect after bumping up against the impossibility of perfect objectivity. The way we observe impacts the things we observe. Design flips the script here, in a gesture of Paradox/ical Hubris, asserting that the way we ask questions impacts the things we later make.
- Lately I can't seem to shake the feeling that the art of design is being challenged by the emergence of AI.
- We can build something quickly, and then that thing may, or may not, or may to a certain degree result in killing our want for it.
- Like many people, I'm pro-prototype. I love the idea of them, I love doing them, I love exploring the possibility space.
- But, design is turning into photography. Photography is a different sort of art. It's about being in many different sorts of places, meeting different sorts of people, taking many shots, and removing many shots. It's very different than painting the Mona Lisa. It's got a bit more of the aspect of a Slot/Machine; it's subject to a Poisson process: yes, no, no, no, yes, no, no.
- What chance does design have of surviving contact with AI? It's so much more exciting to do than to consider. As AI emerges, will a prelude of questions still be deemed to a necessary antecedent to the act of creation? Humans Satis/fice. Where will we get our recommended daily intake of Vitamin Struggle?
- Lately, I've been experimenting with a new method of interacting with AI/Agents, using My/Entity/System as a Declarative replacement for Agent/Skills.
- The entity system describes what goes where and why, and the AI just figures out what needs to be done.
- Normally this works without needing specific instructions. As an example, see Logseq/Entity/Music/Work. There's a description of what the entity is and how it's represented in the garden. There are no mention of scripts, and not really many step by step instructions, and those instructions that are there today are ones that I intend to prune away and make unnecessary over time.
- But Logseq Proxies or Logseq/Migra/tions are nouns that require a more complex set of verbs actions to take place. Will these survive the transition to the entity system?
Learned
- Claude Code sessions can be color-coded with the
/color command.
Filed
- langchain
- markets
- music
- obsidian
- physics
- strange loops