To say that AI has had an impact on designers is an understatement. No one expected AI to begin by affecting white-collar work, let alone the so-called creative parts of it. But that’s exactly what happened. One model after another came to excel in creative fields such as writing, design, music, and even film.
Designers haven’t stayed quiet. They began mocking AI-generated work and pointing out its flaws, eventually denying the technology outright. They were right at first, but not in the end. The technology caught up quickly and began producing outputs that many would find hard to fault. That’s when the discussion turned to identifying what AI couldn’t do, so that designers could occupy that space and remain relevant as designers for longer.
But I’ve never subscribed to this idea. I’ve argued in previous articles that framing this as “AI vs. Designer” misses the point: AI is a tool like any other, and an “AI + Designer” frame yields far better results. Thinking about this, I recalled that there was a time when I didn’t consider myself creative because I couldn’t draw. Then I discovered Photoshop and suddenly had the tools to express myself and give shape to the ideas in my mind. AI is a tool that’s going to let me take that to the next level. So I naturally began asking the question: “What’s now possible that wasn’t before?” These are some of my explorations.
Corners
Designers have strong opinions about the corner radius they use in their creations. After a previous release of macOS, there was an uproar over how the corner radius of various applications within the ecosystem had become inconsistent. The dissent was so great that even Apple’s design team took notice, making it a point to highlight during their next keynote that they had fixed the corner radius situation.
It was therefore no surprise that people like PosterLad had made this an art form. I love his work, and I loved a specific poster he created using simple boxes with varying corner radii. Since I was just starting down this path of creating artwork with AI, I thought I’d recreate his work and give it my own flavour. I made the required jump from a static form to a digital one, where I could include interactions. So Corners was born. It took me a while to get it just right, but it was only possible because I didn’t have to do the coding myself. The end result was deeply satisfying — I played around with it for a good ten minutes straight. Hovering over any of the boxes changes the existing radius of each corner with deeply satisfying, smooth motions. It was almost mesmerising.
Corners Ball
This was an attempt to improve on the existing Corners work by integrating a storyline. What if beauty was the purpose of life? What if there were some perfect shapes, and everything was right in the world when they existed, but became completely dark and dreary when they didn’t? I noticed that in the previous artwork, some boxes had a corner radius applied on all corners, creating circles. So I used that idea and made only the circles orange, while the rest remained brown boxes. Then I integrated a surprise element for when no circles were present on the screen. This transformed an interesting artwork into an encounter. Someone looking at it and playing around with it was led to understand that there was a story behind what they were seeing. My hope is that someone gets what I was going for.
Stillness
I think we’ve all heard the story of Newton sitting beneath a tree and discovering gravity when an apple fell from it. To me, the most striking part of the story was that he had the time to sit beneath an apple tree in the first place. Starting with that idea, it occurred to me that some great things can actually happen when you’re bored. It’s the stillness that creates the fertile ground upon which the seeds of new ideas can be sown. So this interactive artwork was meant to communicate exactly that: open it up, sit still, do nothing, and see what happens.
Sal
One thing I’ve always felt is missing from most user interfaces is personality. They’re optimised to be efficient and functional, which is important, but they often feel sterile. I wanted to explore whether you could infuse a distinct character into an interface without sacrificing usability. So I created Sal — a coin-swap interface with a personality. When you pause at an input box, Sal drifts off and dreams. When you type in a large amount, he cautions you to be careful. When you hit submit, he leaves the room and turns off the lights because he cares about the environment. The interaction isn’t just transactional — it’s a conversation with a character. The result proved to me that interfaces don’t have to be purely functional to be effective. They can be functional and have a soul.
Code is Law
If you’ve ever dealt with contracts or lawyers, you’ll notice that the legal framework has a lot of parallels with code. The approach is similar in the sense that both are responsible for indicating how people and systems ought to function. There needs to be as much clarity as possible, and in fact any ambiguity often leads to errors (or court cases) and requires intervention for resolution. So I wondered if I could take legal text regarding the buying and selling of properties and convert it into code. Furthermore, I wanted to see if it would communicate the differences between the laws of different countries. So I examined how the laws of India specifically differ from those of Spain.
The output you can see on the screen is a fake IDE that shows a side-by-side comparison of the two systems. It was my intuition that writing it as code would let me identify the faults of each system and detect whether corruption was built into the legal framework. This is usually identified by the number of scenarios that are not covered.
While the code didn’t reveal any obvious corruption, some interesting aspects emerged. First, the Indian legal system’s code was actually shorter than Spain’s — I really expected the opposite. Second, while Spain’s was more concerned with payments being received by the government, the Indian legal system seemed to worry much more about whether permissions had been sought for all necessary actions. Spain is concerned about making sure there are funds to run its social institutions and has codified that into its laws. Indian laws have the same intention, but seem to approach the solution by positioning the government as the one to grant permission.
The Hindi word used to refer to the government is sarkar, which derives from Persian and carries administrative roots from the Mughal era. Beyond its modern meaning of “government,” it was historically used as a deferential address to authority — a linguistic echo of a top-down relationship that persists in the system’s structure.
But this relationship is so ingrained in the minds of citizens that it seeps into every aspect of daily life. I remember when I ran a design agency in India and we had to do something for a client. I discussed the topic with my office manager and his first instinct was to figure out who we needed to seek permission from in order to do it, rather than figuring out how to execute the task.
India gained independence nearly eight decades ago. But regardless of whether the rulers’ faces changed, the relationship between the sarkar and the citizens never changed. It just got encoded as law.
What’s Now Possible
I recently got pulled back into the same old argument: AI art isn’t real art, only hours with a pencil or brush confer the title. I asked the question I’ve asked before — should I not be an artist because I never mastered those tools? Banksy used stencils. I used Photoshop. The tool’s only job is to serve expression. Hours spent learning to mix paint or control a brushstroke are admirable, but they shouldn’t be the gatekeeper of expression.
These pieces were my way of testing a boundary. What happens when a corner radius moves? When stillness becomes the input? When an interface has a soul? When law looks like code? Each one started as a question I didn’t know how to answer — and AI gave me the means to find out.
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