Apple’s former design executive on tools, purpose of design and creativity in the age of AI

What is the purpose of design in the age of AI

With so many AI tools flying around, it feels overwhelming for any creative team to choose the ones that will make a difference. 

This is why last week, we decided to have a conversation with Charles Migos, Chief Product Officer, Founder of Intangible.ai, Design Leaders faculty member and one of the most exciting voices in design today. He is a design executive who has spent 30 years building tools for creatives, working alongside the industry’s brightest minds like Steve Jobs and in companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Unity.

In this interview, Charles speaks about how designers play an important role in the age of AI, from problem-solving and aligning teams to improving collaboration. We’ve picked out some of our favourite insights below. 

Watch it now as well as listen to it as a podcast on your favourite platform: Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Pocketcast.

Creativity is a team sport

There’s a lot of talk right now about how, with AI tools, one person can supposedly do everything, including design, code, and write. But Charles argues that that assumption misses something essential: creativity has always been a team sport. The best ideas come from collaboration: shared context, different viewpoints, and a real understanding of the people and situations that you design for. 

The real promise of generative AI isn’t replacing collaboration, but strengthening it: moving individual interactions with a model to environments where teams, stakeholders, and clients can all work together freely. And through all of that, the goal of creating outcomes that genuinely resonate with the humans that you design for stays the same.

Don’t wait for the perfect AI tool

If you’re stuck on what AI tools to start implementing in your team, Charles’ advice is to “get busy, get started” and “try anything”. There isn’t a point in waiting for the perfect tool. When using these tools, the best time to start testing is during a project’s discovery phase, then you can see how it informs your design decisions and practice. 

For Charles, piloting these tools is also important to think about. You don’t want to disrupt your team’s overall process, so find a project that is contained enough that you can experiment with these new tools and discover the impact that it can have on the overall design organisation, like collapsing “what used to take us months into literal afternoons". 

Stop treating design like art 

Charles argues that design is fundamentally problem-solving, not art. Quoting Tim Brown from his book ‘Change by Design’ – “design is too important to be left to designers" because anyone impacting the end result is, by definition, a designer. 

Your design practice should be structured to inform everyone in the organisation what the opportunity is, taking into account the company’s business needs, who you’re trying to provide services for, and how you’d design experiences and workflows to facilitate people’s success in that work. 

Focus on the right idea, not the quantity of them

With generative AI speeding up certain aspects of design, Charles argues that it will not cheapen the role of designers. In fact, “ideas are a commodity” when working with smart people. The issue for designers isn’t generating dozens of concepts in a 15-minute discussion; the problem is understanding what the right idea is, relative to what it is you’re trying to achieve. 

So while AI can come up with ideas, it is still the designer’s role to understand the overarching goal of a project and which idea will help to reach it. 

Creators need more than just text prompts

A lot of the conversation around design and AI centres around text-to-image, or text-to-anything tools, but that’s not how most designers think or work. Creators need more than just words; they need things to be tactile and allow for direct manipulation, because some things don’t translate well into words before they are seen. The current generative AI space doesn’t take this into account, Charles argues. 

Designers are problem solvers, and some ideas only click when you can move things around, touch the layout, or see it take shape in real time. Having a system combining both text and direct manipulation of a 3D environment is the best of both worlds, allowing for a more seamless workflow, and that’s what Charles has built with Intangible.