The top skills designers & creators will need to develop in the next 10 years to stay ahead of the curve
Get ahead of the AI curve and the end of the knowledge economy with these design-adjacent skills
There is no denying that the nature of design and creative work is changing in the wake of the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and the tools that leverage it.
AI paves the way for the language-driven generation rather than the hand-crafted creation of a huge range of assets, far beyond what it can accomplish today.
Forget about simple image generation, and imagine generating full design systems that are cohesive with a set of brand guidelines and meet W3C accessibility guidelines.
Forget about simple text-based idea generation, and imagine AI being able to identify areas to improve specific metrics across sets of designs or even live web pages, apps and digital products.
And with these changes the nature of the work we do begins to shift as well, moving from the actual ‘creation’ work, to much more of a focus on creative asset generation, curation, communication and presentation. This shifts the role of design into much more of a management-oriented job, albeit the management of multiple AI-driven tools and operators, rather than the management of actual human beings.
There is not doubt that the potential for AI and it’s implications on the work that designers and creatives do is huge.
So what are the skills we’ll need to thrive as designers in the next-generation of design?
1 — Strategic Vision
The first skill on this list is the strategic vision of our design efforts.
What this means really comes down to how we see our design efforts impacting the organisation, community, and to a greater extent the world.
In a world where a lot of the ‘doing’ has been consumed by the AI tools that we use on a day to day basis, the effort of our work shifts more towards the less tangible but arguably more important ‘thinking’ part of design.
Strategic vision can manifest in many different ways, but really at it’s core is about switching how we think about design work from ‘how is this executed’ to ‘why are we executing this’.
It is about considering the impact of design work on a much more macro scale, and being able to iterate and develop a vast amount more ideas that can achieve this impact through the use of AI-driven tools.
When the ‘doing’ work itself can be completed hundreds of times over in the same time it would take us to design it by hand just once, the effort comes in reviewing and selecting the right path forwards, and making sure that the path we select is the one that aligns with our core vision for what we want to achieve, both at a team, organisation, community, and world level.
2 — Storytelling & Presenting
The second skill that we can develop in order to get ahead of AI-driven change in design and creative industries, is storytelling.
This speaks to our ability to present and pitch ideas back to our organisation, to our users, stakeholders, and to our communities.
Because what is the point of being able to generate hundreds of ideas or even an effective strategy and vision if we cannot sell that idea back into the people who have the power to help us deliver it.
It is about learning how to talk to other people in our organisations in their language, not designer-jargon. It is about understanding the human power of an effective and simply told story that speaks to the shared goals of a group of people in order to motivate, empower, and ultimately ensure buy-in and resource to execute effectively.
Storytelling is a hugely important skill in the creative industries at a management level, but will become even more so throughout all roles as the efforts of our work become more focused on finding the right solution rather than creating the work.
3— Exceptional Personal Taste
An often overlooked skill, and not one to be ignored. The power of great taste is often what makes the difference between something great or something good.
In the TV show Beef, the mother of the character George at one point says ‘taste is more important than talent,’ and in a post-AI creative industry, this will be more true than ever.
Taste is about what we like and don’t like, but is also more importantly about the variety and types of things we have been exposed to and are aware of. At the end of the day, if we don’t know what world-class design looks like, how can we possibly pick it out of a line-up of hundreds of AI-generated versions?
If you’re looking to develop this skill think about how you can expose yourself not just to the best that design has to offer, but the best that ALL creative fields have to offer, because everything is connected.
If you are tasked to design something for a new pottery brand for example, how will you know what to create without knowing the language of that particular medium and it’s customers? Or knowing what people in that field view as professional, or feel is a good representation of what they do?
4 — Solitary & Small Team Problem Solving
So how do we consolidate problem solving and idea generation in a world where much of the execution and doing work is being left to artificial intelligence?
We already know that there are dangers to over-collaboration when it comes to creative problem solving, and we will begin to see the pull-back from large-scale collaboration as AI-driven tools become more and more embedded in our processes.
What this means as designers and creatives is that we will need to become more comfortable and familiar with creative problem solving both in isolation and in much smaller groups of 2 or 3 people.
Doing so will unlock the speed afforded by AI-generated solutions, but also enable us to make quick, impactful decisions about the right path forwards, whilst still having a sounding board in our small team or the larger organisation to rule out incorrect or unsuitable solutions.
We also know that solitary work can increase creativity when it comes to divergent idea generation specifically.
As we move into a world more reliant on designers tackling higher-level strategic thinking, as well as crafting stories around our ideas in order to sell them back to organisations, we’ll also see an increase in solitary or very small-team led innovation and creative work.
5 — Delegation & Allocation
The last skill on this list is a skill most commonly associated with a manager.
As we become more and more reliant on tools for execution, we’ll need to become better and better at effectively delegating, both to other humans who operate other tools and functions within an organisation or team, as well as delegating work to various different AI operators and tools that serve specific functions that we can leverage.
Knowing how to delegate effectively will be the difference in the execution of a solution being great or just average, but will also be the difference in the delivery speed and effectiveness of that solutions.
We have already seen the advent of prompt-generation as a job in itself, and we will see this as a skill more and more embedded into the skillset of a wide variety of creative roles.
So, what does this mean for me as a designer?
Well, this is a speculative list of skills that we might need in the future, so definitely don’t drop everything to learn these overnight!
What it does mean though, is that we should be aware of these skills, and based on the trajectory of AI and the advancement of AI tools, we should look at opportunities to add these skills as well as leveraging them in our work to create and build value and opportunity for ourselves in the future.
We may be able to use these to justify a new promotion, or land a new role in a more senior position, or even to help change the narrative and impact of design as a function at our organisation.
What is certain however, is that the creative industry is about to undergo a bigger change than it has seen in decades, and it is up to us to make sure we are at the forefront of that change, ready to take advantage of new technology, and leverage new skills in order to build the careers we want.