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I remember clearly when one of my close friends called me & said,

“Bhai, tune ChatGPT use kiya hai?”

“Bro! Have you used ChatGPT yet?”

It was around late 2022, while I had come to Bangalore for my graduation project at SRIB. It was the last semester at MIT as well. Every one of us had to submit a thesis (graduation book), a printed editorial book for your graduation project at industry.

At that time, AI was not as intelligent. It was the time when we were prompting in those chat-like interfaces, “Make it better”, & struggling with getting the best output. We were correcting our scattered paragraphs.

ChatGPT’s chat interface was taking the place of Grammarly, QuillBot or any online paraphraser.

It gave me a strength & belief that you can now do anything, like be a writer, or maybe you can now write good English at least.

So, coming back to the story. Every one of us was creating our grad books & that was the first time every one of us was tasting the joy of using AI.

It was able to generate basic drafts overnight. At that time it was magical.

Then eventually, a modality shift. What we were experiencing textually till that date, tools like Midjourney showed us the possibility visually. It was amazing.

Since then I have been using AI every day in my life. These past 3-4 years feel like light years of time have passed. So many things have changed. Today I am developing agents which can do work on my behalf while keeping me in the loop. I used to read about this kind of tech in childhood in sci-fi books or maybe in a movie. And it’s getting better day by day.

Recently I have seen in Bangalore some housemaid service companies sending their employees with cameras to record their work at a client’s home, to train the future AI robots. This is something I am seeing for the first time in my life.


What a time to be in, right?

2022: started using ChatGPT, did a graduation book, did secondary research for a work that we were doing in college. That’s how it started.

Then at Samsung Design Delhi the use was limited, but I was exploring tools like Cursor, Lovable etc. Visited the AI summit that happened in India, visited Kyoorius design fest & UX India to know what people are building with AI.

Took help to build a portfolio website.

Then comes Microsoft, the most extensive use of AI, right from drafting a reply on Teams to creating agentic workflows. This is where I learnt how to embed AI into tools & processes people & organizations can benefit from.

Mercury

What I have observed in this new world?

Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Be the decision maker.

AI will always please you with positive answers & there is a chance that you will get driven by that. In that situation your gut feeling might be telling you that this will be a bad direction. I have done it a couple of times but have horribly failed each time. It never works. Have a solid plan.

Have ownership over each pixel like you have over personal land.

Ask yourself multiple times if this is worth it. If there is a second thought, just junk it. Connecting to the previous paragraph, have faith in your judgement. If you are a designer like me you will definitely have been taught to observe things around you. Feel it. Empathize with it. Internalize every detail. And I still believe this is one of the foundations every designer should have, especially while going through a hyper-mechanical time period. Keep your human feelings alive. You never know from where inspiration will hit you.

Craft over everything

You must have seen the nest of a bowerbird & felt amazed by the intricate complexity of it. The question “Wow! How did that little thing even make it?” might have passed through your mind at that moment. Or maybe you have seen a beautiful vintage lamp at a curio shop & felt amazed by the beauty of it. That’s what comes from craft. Craft is the soul which gives a thing its unique nature. Its personality. It also leaves the craftsman’s identity in the piece, which can’t be duplicated, but one can get inspired from it.

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Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Be the decision maker.

AI will always please you with positive answers & there is a chance that you will get driven by that. In that situation your gut feeling might be telling you that this will be a bad direction. I have done it a couple of times but have horribly failed each time. It never works. Have a solid plan.

Have ownership over each pixel like you have over personal land.

Ask yourself multiple times if this is worth it. If there is a second thought, just junk it. Connecting to the previous paragraph, have faith in your judgement. If you are a designer like me you will definitely have been taught to observe things around you. Feel it. Empathize with it. Internalize every detail. And I still believe this is one of the foundations every designer should have, especially while going through a hyper-mechanical time period. Keep your human feelings alive. You never know from where inspiration will hit you.

Craft over everything

You must have seen the nest of a bowerbird & felt amazed by the intricate complexity of it. The question “Wow! How did that little thing even make it?” might have passed through your mind at that moment. Or maybe you have seen a beautiful vintage lamp at a curio shop & felt amazed by the beauty of it. That’s what comes from craft. Craft is the soul which gives a thing its unique nature. Its personality. It also leaves the craftsman’s identity in the piece, which can’t be duplicated, but one can get inspired from it.

Always carry a notebook

Yes! And I mean it. It was taught by one of my mentors. I got to know why designers admire a Moleskine diary. I have a bad habit of collecting notebooks & pens. These two stationery have always amazed me since childhood, before I even knew about design. Keep writing down your thoughts. Scribble on it. Sketch emojis. But make it a part of your life like your phone or earbuds. You never know when you need a piece of paper.

Have a vision

I believe AI has more capability in creating something in many cases than me, but what it does not have is the context & a vision. As a human I have a vision for anything I do. So I do like to keep the vision & delegate the task to AI to achieve the vision. It’s like you being the Director of the crew. The crew works on your vision.

We are creators as humans & we will be creating until extinction

Everything has become instant gratification. We try to get fast solutions to problems which human beings could not solve for years. And in the journey of doing that we create a lot of trash on the way. We generate 100s of screens without any reason & without understanding the cost to benefit ratio. We need to be careful about minimizing the trash as well. When a screen can get fixed with a couple of clicks directly in Figma, I would not prefer to go to Claude Code to explain the fix and invest more time. Time is directly related to the judgement we make at that moment.

Always carry a notebook

Yes! And I mean it. It was taught by one of my mentors. I got to know why designers admire a Moleskine diary. I have a bad habit of collecting notebooks & pens. These two stationery have always amazed me since childhood, before I even knew about design. Keep writing down your thoughts. Scribble on it. Sketch emojis. But make it a part of your life like your phone or earbuds. You never know when you need a piece of paper.

Have a vision

I believe AI has more capability in creating something in many cases than me, but what it does not have is the context & a vision. As a human I have a vision for anything I do. So I do like to keep the vision & delegate the task to AI to achieve the vision. It’s like you being the Director of the crew. The crew works on your vision.

We are creators as humans & we will be creating until extinction

Everything has become instant gratification. We try to get fast solutions to problems which human beings could not solve for years. And in the journey of doing that we create a lot of trash on the way. We generate 100s of screens without any reason & without understanding the cost to benefit ratio. We need to be careful about minimizing the trash as well. When a screen can get fixed with a couple of clicks directly in Figma, I would not prefer to go to Claude Code to explain the fix and invest more time. Time is directly related to the judgement we make at that moment.

What I feel is, imperfection would feel more real & connected than anything!

Remember those days when we used to have typos while typing on phones. We have come a long way from having typos to better word suggestions, even the whole message. But this much level of perfection & templatization can destroy the diversity & accidental discovery.

Remember when you mixed a color with another one while just randomly overlapping two circles in overlay mode & found something wonderful.

It’s the joy of the process. One downside of the process happening in the background is you can’t see visually what’s happening & can easily miss out on details or an unexpected finding.

That’s why till date every Rolls-Royce car or a Patek Philippe watch goes under a strict scrutiny of some experts before getting in the hand of the user.

Chasing Hearts

Try to win the heart

Move your pointer toward the heart or press Enter on it. Press Escape to release a held heart.

Heart: Right here.

Chasing Hearts

Try to win the heart

Move your pointer toward the heart or press Enter on it. Press Escape to release a held heart.

Heart: Right here.