Design is a conversation

Can we put the vibes aside and focus on what matters?

Design is so many things — too many things, in fact.

I’ve always wanted to create a really expensive hard-bound coffee table book that outlines 1,234 definitions of design, with large colorful diagrams, pictures, and examples from various creations and industries — all legitimately falling into a unique definition of design.

The thought that it could appeal to so many people because it hits such a multitude of professions and contexts in different ways. BTW, I’m calling dibs publicly now, so don’t even think of stealing my idea.

Anyways, talk about a loaded word.

It’s a noun. It’s a verb. Sometimes it’s visual. And sometimes it’s as simple as planning something out with no visuals at all.

It’s strategic and tactical. Buttoned-up and messy. Detailed and conceptual. Sexy and vanilla.

Post-it notes? Design. Moodboards? Design. Wireframes? You got it.

As words go, it holds infinite meaning from the people who invented it — us humans.

In overly simplistic ways, it represents the output. In other more complicated ways, it signifies the methods and the process.

It reflects our thinking — our intuition and our exploration.

Really, what a powerful word.

Why would we ever want to abandon it?

A while back, I read Suff Syed’s provocative Why I’m Leaving Design — And What That Says About the Future of Design.

Like so much AI discourse, it already feels like a relic of last month’s unchallenged talking points. In it, the author says:

“The word design has become so broad, it’s lost its shape. It means everything and nothing at the same time.”

I get it. I really do. I’ve seen “design” slapped on everything from metal tumblers to data architecture plans. But my instinct isn’t to walk away from the word. Not at all. It’s to hold onto it. To keep fighting for its depth and specificity — even as it keeps stretching into infinity to fit new tools, new contexts, and now, our conversations with AI.

After all, our words are part of our language — our first user interface. The OG UI.

And while I like to think we’ve open-sourced our language to some degree, I’m fairly certain it’s not democratically driven either. Our power structures create meaning, and we allow them to — often without much thought. In today’s minute-by-minute pace, we rush to change our language with infuriatingly meaningless upgrades.

Know what I mean? Or is it TL;DR? Kk?

One of my least favorite new upgrades, which we adopted quickly without much thought is the word “vibe.”

Vibe coding. Vibe writing. Vibe design.

Vibe isn’t just the wrong adjective. It’s the entirely opposite word. To vibe is to be human. That’s why it’s the word we reach for when we can’t quite describe something, but we feel it.

Want proof? Go down a rabbit hole with me. Look up “T. Rex reactions” on YouTube. Over and over, you’ll see young people slowly becoming transfixed with unexpected emotional appreciation. You’ll see a similar turn of human reaction as the music and the lyrics slowly sink in — hitting them with feeling from the ghost of glam rock past. Towards the end you’ll nearly always hear the same thing:

That dude (Marc Bolan, of course) had a real vibe.

https://medium.com/media/384caa9f2a95a13492db1f0311e0ea09/href

He’s on fire! […] He has a ‘vibe’ that nobody else has.

And he could transmit it instantly through music. That’s good design too — a human-to-human transmission of meaning. I might sound like a word prude here, but whatever we’re doing with AI probably shouldn’t be mistaken for that kind of magic. Sure, “AI-assisted output fishing” might not sound as sexy, but it’s a lot closer to the truth.

Given the choice, I’d definitely like the word design to have more flexibility in our daily use than vibe — but that moment’s probably past us. Because if words matter — and they do — then so does the way we frame design itself.

From the mountain of meaning that fits design, the definition I think I like the most is something I landed on years ago in preparation for a job interview. I was flying out from rural Pennsylvania to Seattle to present my design portfolio. The presentation was fine. I hit all the usual notes of process, output, and results. But what I liked most was the title slide:

Design is a conversation.

Back then, I meant the interplay — and many times the resolution of tension — between business, technology, and users (or product, engineering, and design, if that’s your triad du jour). But it’s also a mix of quiet and not-so-quiet moments that create a contextual conversation:

• The hours spent in research interviews, listening for the patterns beneath what people say.
• The facilitated sessions that finally bring alignment to a room full of competing perspectives.
• The brainstorming sparks that always seem to arrive in the shower or on the daily commute.
• And the silent conversations in every designer’s head — the doubt, the panic, the obsessive curiosity.

All of that is design.

And now, there’s a new voice in the room — creeping its inevitable way into every product — if not most decisions.

A voice that answers instantly. That can summarize a hundred pages in seconds. That never gets tired, and never gets bored.

Our conversations with AI.

AI tools have promised us rapid research, instant outputs, and pattern-spotting that once took weeks. They’ve also given us more talking to do — not less. Now, the designer’s mental roundtable isn’t just stakeholders, teammates, and our own inner voice. It’s a machine that’s always “in the room,” offering suggestions, asking for clarifications (assuming we’re prompting responsibly), and sometimes hallucinating incredibly dumb answers.

It’s like having an eager intern, a skeptical editor, and a compulsive brainstormer all rolled into one — and you have to decide when to listen and when to just sigh and go with your gut.

Design is still a conversation.

It always has been.

The question isn’t whether AI joins the conversation — it already has, albeit with mixed results, which may soon be meeting a harsh reality.

The question is whether we stay good at listening, and better at choosing which voices deserve to be heard.

Because at the end of the day, humans are multitudes. Machines are just memory.

We wake and we sleep. We dream. We live through highs and lows that shape our decisions in ways no model can predict.

AI is, and can only ever be, an algorithmic approach to context, semantics, and sentiment from a massive amount of information — a disguise of human output. But designers? We’re more than output. We’re connectors of meaning.

And when we have the right conversations, I just love our vibes.

Keep in touch

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Find me on LinkedIn or my personal website, mschindler.com.

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