Cooked is not a climate

Designers are cooked. Or so I’ve been told many times over the past 2ish years. So much cooking.

But, let’s leave aside for a moment whether it’s true.^[1] Let’s start with the word “designer.”

What is a designer, exactly? Brand, graphic, UX, industrial, interior, motion, service, spatial, bag — the term is so broad. It covers so much. It used to confuse and piss me off that searching for designer online would typically point to Product Design, more often than not, software. But some pure shower thoughts led me to this analogy: Design is basically a continent, made up of multiple countries and territories. And right now, the design continent is dealing with some seismic goings on. The tide of AI laps at the shores of some countries, while others sit comfortably inland, oblivious or ignorant to the rising sea level.

When people say “designers are cooked,” they know not what they mean. They’re gesturing at a full landmass and calling the weather.

The terraforming has already started

AI isn’t just eroding coastlines. It’s causing full-scale terraforming. Underwater volcanoes. New landmasses forming. Fault lines cracking open in places nobody expected. Some of it is genuinely exciting. Some of it is, frankly, shit and a bit terrifying. Both things are true and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What’s been interesting to watch is what AI has exposed. A lot of people’s understanding of what designers actually do — and why it matters — turns out to have been pretty thin. Now that they can prompt their way to something that looks vaguely designed, they’re discovering that taste and craft aren’t features you can toggle on. You either have them or you’re going to produce a lot of confident mediocrity very quickly. AI design or creative generation is still a whole lot of dice rolling.

The map is becoming fiction

Meanwhile the map most of us have been navigating by is quietly becoming fiction. The version of the job that apparently needs replacing is itself mid-transformation.

Some of us are refugees, searching for territory that might not have a name yet.

That’s uncomfortable. It’s also, quietly, quite interesting. Even a tad exciting. But it’s not clear when this geomorphic action will settle down, or explode entirely.

I’m aware the only truly cooked thing here is this post. Cooking, continents, terraforming, volcanoes, tide, and seismic activity. An unusual, but tasty, extended metaphor soup. Which feels apt in trying to talk about the chaos that is the design landscape.

But displaced isn’t cooked. And knowing the difference matters — whether you’re a designer trying to find your footing, or an armchair design expert who has never once been responsible for how something looks, feels, or lands.