Figma's Chief Design Officer, Loredana Crisan, defines taste not as an innate gift, but as a byproduct of intense care and effort. It's the visible result of anticipating needs and considering every detail, much like hosting a perfect party. This embodied intuition is developed through countless hours of practice.
Figma's Loredana Crisan points to research indicating that people disengage when they perceive content as inauthentic and created solely by AI. This highlights the enduring value of a human point of view, positioning AI as a tool to enhance human expression rather than replace it entirely.
Figma's Chief Design Officer, Loredana Crisan, views AI's primary role as a tool to broaden designers' creative horizons, much like writing evolved from accounting to literature. The goal is to change what designers are able to imagine and dream up, not just improve efficiency.
Figma's Loredana Crisan argues that relying solely on text prompts for design is inefficient for refinement, comparing it to "dictating a painting over the phone." While AI can generate a starting point, true creative control requires direct manipulation tools for tweaking details like organic shapes or precise colors.
Figma's CDO explains that new tools enable designers to build systems, not just static screens. Using node-based interfaces, they can create workflows or "mini-apps" that generate various outputs based on inputs, embedding brand and intent into a reusable system rather than a single artifact.
As AI accelerates content and code generation, the primary challenge is no longer creation but the overwhelming volume of work that needs review. Loredana Crisan notes that teams are becoming bottlenecked by review cycles, highlighting a need for new collaborative and automated review workflows.
Counterintuitively, a Figma study found that developers are the most likely professional group to state that design's importance is increasing and that they are personally doing more design work. This signals a deep cultural shift where design thinking is becoming integral to engineering, blurring traditional role boundaries.
For non-deterministic AI systems where every output can't be controlled, designers' roles must evolve to creating "evals"—systems that define and test for quality. Figma's CDO argues this is crucial for ensuring experiences generated by algorithms or LLMs consistently meet the desired standard of "good."