Not Every Design Needs to Solve a Problem
Art, Speculative Design, and AI
Throughout my career as a product and UX designer, I’ve approached design as a means to an end.
Behind every interface is an intention: to turn an idea into something useful. A finance app helps people make better decisions about money. A social platform helps them connect. An e-commerce experience makes buying and selling easier.
Different products, different needs, but the expectation is usually the same: it has to work. It has to serve a purpose.
Over time, I’ve started to wonder what that expectation leaves out.
What if a design doesn’t make a task easier? What if it introduces a little friction instead? What if it leaves people with more questions than answers?
Does that make it less valuable?
Or does it mean we need a broader definition of what design can do?
What if we approached design like art?
Art often begins with a question, an emotion, an observation, or an idea an artist wants to explore.
Its starting point might be: What do I want to express, explore, or make people think about?
Design often begins with a need, an opportunity, or a problem.
Its starting point might be: What can I create to achieve an intended outcome?
These aren’t fixed boundaries. Art can be functional, and design can be expressive. But in product design, where outcomes are often measured through usability, conversion, and engagement, there isn’t always much room for work whose value lies in the questions it raises.
I think there should be.
What if, occasionally, we put on our artist hats? What if we made things not because we knew they should exist, but because we wanted to explore what their existence might mean?
For me, that possibility is one of the most exciting parts of being a designer.
Enter speculative design
Speculative design gives us a way to explore that possibility.
Rather than focusing only on how things work today, it asks how things could work and whether we would want them to.
The result might be an object, an interface, a service, or a story from an imagined future. It doesn’t have to be ready for production. It needs to make an idea tangible enough for people to engage with, question, or challenge.
Imagine a job application portal that asks for access to your lifetime AI conversation history.
The company says it helps assess your potential beyond your CV. You can decline, but applicants who share their history receive a “verified fit” badge.
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Designing that portal wouldn’t have to mean endorsing it. It could be a way to ask:
- When does personalisation become surveillance?
- How meaningful is consent when saying no puts you at a disadvantage?
- Who gets to decide what our private conversations reveal about us?
The interface becomes a way into a much larger conversation.
That is the shift: from designing a solution to designing something people can think with.
Why this matters for AI
AI makes these questions feel less distant.
As designers, we’re increasingly asked how to integrate AI into products: Where should the assistant sit? What should it automate? How can it make the experience faster?
Those are useful questions. But they aren’t the only ones worth asking.
What happens when an assistant knows us well enough to influence our choices? What skills might we lose when convenience becomes the default? What happens to people who don’t want AI involved in a particular part of their lives?
Speculative design creates space to explore those questions before a product decision becomes an everyday expectation.
It lets us move beyond Can we build this? to What might change if we do?
AI as both a subject and a tool
There are two ways AI fits into this practice.
First, AI can be the subject of the speculation. We can imagine how it might reshape work, relationships, education, or identity, then create artefacts that help people discuss those possibilities.
Second, AI can help us develop the speculation. It can support brainstorming, generate variations, or help prototype fictional conversations and interfaces.
But generating an unusual concept isn’t the same as developing a meaningful speculation.
The Designer still has to decide what the work is questioning, whose perspective it centres, and which assumptions deserve scrutiny. An AI-generated future can reproduce familiar biases just as easily as it can look new.
The tools can help us make the imagined world visible. They don’t remove our responsibility to think critically about it.
Making room for a different kind of value
I don’t think we need to abandon function or stop solving problems.
I think we need to make room for another kind of design practice alongside them.
One where an interface can be a question. A prototype can be an argument. A fictional product can help us notice something uncomfortable about the present.
Perhaps designing like an artist isn’t about giving up purpose after all.
It’s about recognising that usefulness takes different forms.
Sometimes, the most valuable thing a design can do is help us decide what we don’t want to build.
This article marks the beginning of my exploration of speculative design.
References
Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300252392/atlas-of-ai/
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262019842/speculative-everything/
Tharp, B. M., & Tharp, S. M. (2019). Discursive design: Critical, speculative, and alternative things. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262349994/discursive-design/
