Fundamental Flaw of AI in Design

Designers often can’t describe the image in their head, and that’s not really a lack of skill, it’s the way creativity flows through your mind. And it’s exactly why AI image generation has a fundamental flaw baked into it.

What doesn’t work is typing a paragraph describing your vision and expecting anything real to come out right away. To be fair, sometimes it works, and honestly, that’s when I start to breathe faster and check unemployment rates. But mostly it doesn’t, because if you’re really after a creative process - unfortunately for our productivity (but fortunately for us human beings) - there’s no way to describe the image in your head until you put it in front of you. That image exists as a feeling, a spatial instinct, that only becomes real when your hand hits paper (or the cursor hits the endless digital canvas).

Donald Schön called this “reflection-in-action” - a conversation with the material where you draw, see what emerged, and respond to it. Gabriela Goldschmidt took it further: her research on sketching showed that designers literally discover ideas inside their own drawings they didn’t consciously put there. Early design sketches do not depict a finished mental image, but help to generate it; that matters for AI, because the weakness of language-first image generation is a mismatch with how design ideas often form in the first place.

So where does AI fit? I see two useful ways to nanobanana, at least for now:

First: the What-If. Feed the machine a mash-up like “boho aesthetics cafe themed for millennial culture” and react to what comes back, not as a final image, obviously, but as friction. The tricky part is to listen to yourself and hand-pick and articulate what’s good or what’s not, that’s where the experienced eye and cultural awareness kick in (aka Taste and Opinion).

Second: the Loop. Start with what’s given, sometimes a “white box”. Describe one layer of elements, see what comes back and refine your description. then, once you’re happy with it, move to another. Every step is a micro-conversation - reflection-in-action, like peeling an onion in reverse. The AI doesn’t replace the designer’s eye (aka Experience), it makes the loop faster.

Writing a prompt from pure imagination is a myth and a path to disappointment with technology. You need to see first, then describe, then refine. In the era of AI, the designer’s job isn’t generating images, it’s knowing what to feel when you look at one.

Bonus image: boho aesthetics cafe themed for millennial culture, so real 🥹