I'm just now catching up on my backlog of links to check out, and am blown away by how correct this thread by Frank Elavsky sounds today, even though I bookmarked it on November 4, 2023. At the time I knew it made sense, but I couldn't put my finger on why, mostly due to my lack of will—and inability at the time—to be aware of the zeitgeist.
Out of the entire lengthy thread, these lines stand out the most to me.
The idea here is that the Designer is above mass-produced, mindlessly engineered crap. And this idea came about historically at a time when China, Japan, and Korea (in particular) were rising powers in manufacturing and engineering.
AI/ML in particular is now the engineer's response to over-engineering (or how we sift through a whole lot of stuff). Now the designers intellectual job (of finding and discovering) is in jeopardy.
Philosophically/functionally what design does for capitalism is in crisis. So layoffs of designers in particular I reckon are bound to happen first. Not necessarily because AI will take jobs but because AI/ML has come to challenge the grounds that capitalistic design is built on.
But *real* design should be counter- to existing patterns and predicted movements. Real design is anti-model, a resistance to modes of capital accumulation, exploitation, and bias. So in some ways, the "death" of Design Thinking may optimistically create room for better design.