Pop quiz — what are the four stages of the Double Diamond? (It’s OK, this one is an open-book test, you can look it up if you didn’t study).

Now, to check your answer, skip to the 29-second mark on this video, where a VP of Experience Design platformed by Figma gives an answer that is not only wrong, but laughably wrong. The mistake is on a deeply conceptual level: shedding the divergent “discover” step at the beginning puts the kibosh on both the shape of a diamond and on the validity of all three steps that follow it.

To both this design leader and this company synonymous with design, the double diamond is just a cool shape. It’s evoked not for the usefulness of the method it describes, but for creating an aura of Design Thinking.

Design Theater in the age of AI

I’ve observed before that the primary use cases of AI have been to scale existing misbehaviors. It’s tilted towards misbehaviors because the main driver of the scaling is not the technology. It’s the permission structure created by AI mandates — setting a lower bar for quality is inextricable from AI adoption, especially when the managers driving it set “adopt AI” as the objective rather than as merely a means of achieving something of real value.

I don’t really want to talk about AI, because I’m tired of writing about it and you are probably tired of reading about it. But I do want to talk about this permission structure.

UX design (and to a lesser extent, product management) has been suffering from a crisis of legitimacy for its entire existence (I talk more about that here). There were opportunities to build that legitimacy through both honest and dishonest means. One of the best illustrations of what the dishonest means looked like is Jonathan Korman’s recounting of “decision-driven evidence-making” that clients once asked him to do.

Nowadays, we call this design theater: the minimal application of user-centered design processes and principles to cover up a process centered entirely on stakeholder whims.

We observe that today with prototyping. The prototype is a tried-and-true tool in the UX designer’s toolbox, as a speculative artifact designed to provoke conversation. The vibe-coded prototype relies on that track record for its legitimacy, but enables an entirely different purpose. While the artifact it produces resembles a design prototype, conceptually it has more in common with the feedback loop of self-delusion that drives “vibe physics” and other dangerous usage patterns.

Vibe prototyping uses the veneer of design outputs. But without the process that makes prototyping work, it is design theater.

From vibe coding to aura designing

However, designers are neither powerless nor innocent in this struggle. We are not the side of good fighting against evil; when they go low we do not go high.

Design’s counter-attack against design theater and the lack of process was to lay on that process as thick as possible; to create legitimacy (or score aura points, as the kids say) through maximizing the number and visibility of our rituals and the resultant artifacts.

This is, in a sense, why the double diamond exists in the first place. At first, it was created as an approachable way for explaining what we do. But two decades after it was introduced, execs are actually asking designers to map our activities to these stages. We’ve become the victims of our own success.

Needless to say, real design process doesn’t actually look like that. I spoke to Cathi Bosco about why, but if you prefer a visual, Christina Wodtke’s essay has a good one. The key point here are the multiple feedback loops throughout; the “unsexy middle bits” that get swept away under the logic of clean diagrammable phases.

The trouble with legitimacy acquired through aura designing is that we have constrained ourselves to doing design activities that look like design to our stakeholders. UX “paves the desire paths” so we must go and do that, even if it’s counterproductive. UX is expected to “nudge” users, and so we must nudge; forget that nudges are rarely the best way to enable behaviors, and that a lot of the most popular nudge patterns don’t actually work. UX is when there are touchscreens, so we will put them in your car, even though it kills people.

The consequence of maximizing activities from the approved list of Things Design Can Do is that everything looks the same, but rather than breeding consistency and familiarity, it creates an all-permeating aura of confusion.

Fighting in the wrong arena

The problem with aura designing is ultimately the same as the problem with design theater: it reduces design’s value down to the artifacts that are produced. This is a sucker’s game at a time when AI can be used to bypass any thinking or value and arrive directly at the artifact. This is not solely a design problem (slop requests are becoming common across all workplaces) but it does span the entire spectrum of our work from fake insights to dismal outputs where no one involved has the expertise to tell good apart from bad.

If you want to stop playing the sucker’s game, and start speaking the language of outcomes rather than outputs, stop talking about designerly taste. Resist the lure of “more” and focus your energy on what it is you actually want to accomplish.

• What decision are you looking to make? How will you know if it was right or wrong?

• What behavior are you looking to change? Why aren’t people already doing the desirable behavior?

Sometimes the best course of action is not designing something. Sometimes, instead of innovation we need restoration.

And almost every time, instead of jumping as soon as we get our orders, we need to break them down into clues for the real right thing to do.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic