(This short statement was written for the Next Nature/Design Debate 2025, that took place during Dutch Design Week, on October 25, 2025 in Evoluon, Eindhoven. Geert Lovink in debate with Paul Hekkert about the thesis: “When machines create, there is nothing left for designers.” The event was framed like this: “Welcome to a world where everything seems “wrong”: eating meat, smoking, crypto, data, campfires, WhatsApp. Even your houseplant could be a climate culprit. We live in a time full of rules, do’s, and don’ts—where daily life seems to be guided by an invisible moral authority. But what if we didn’t shrink back in shame, but dared to move forward with imagination?”)
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Should designers fear AI? Silvio Lorusso responded with a firm no. He wrote to me: “Designers probably use it already all day, every day. But they might definitely fear bosses and clients who think they know What AI Can Do.”
Soon we will no longer laugh about AI slop. Eye candies will look flat, cheap and provoke an indifferent “whatever” response. “Captivating collections” with “super sweet” “stunning visuals” turn out not to be so “mesmerizing” after all. The minimal effort to churn them out turns all of us into creative nihilists. Or just uncomfortably numb.
Who knows, Large Language Models may end up as vanity engines, relentless bullshitters, timid courtesans. The systems have been trained to synthesize and summarize already digitized knowledge, filtered through techno-libertarian algorithms and engineers who find happiness in outdoor activities and creative hobbies.
What AI can’t do is criticize—neither you, nor itself. Indeed, it can barely add up. Unsurprisingly, what Silicon Valley has failed to do is building machines that can reflect and stumble upon serendipitous ideas in the midst of everyday emptiness. Computers remain cybernetic war machines that spit out conventional information for the sake of managerial control. The feedback loops were never designed to question society’s power structures anyway. Big Tech’s disruption logic was—and still is—aimed to optimize financial interests of its founders and investors. In their world view, designers are useful idiots that create aesthetic experiences that dress up the latest sales pitch, which will be dumped the moment these habitual technologies become dominant.
Designers can easily ignore the current wave of AI slop and instead focus on what machines can’t do. To the AI apps that can only generate trash and war, we say “No thanks”. No more data spew, please!
As the No Design Manifesto, launched at this event, declares, instead of turning design into a lecture on well-adjusted behaviour, we think of it as a space for radical curiosity. It’s not about statements that align neatly with policy, but experiences, affective atmospheres, and cognitive disunctures that invite us to feel, think, and act differently.
In a text written in the lead-up to this event and published by INC, Mieke Gerritzen, Ned Rossiter, Silvio Lorusso and I asked whether design will step out of the managerial straight-jacket and regain autonomy, or if it will humbly retreat into a submissive service role. This is no easy option since the hegemony of service economies infuses so much of the prevailing culture across art schools and academies.
As we write, design seems pretty well trapped in a contradiction with seemingly no option for escape: first, contributing to the destruction of the world, only to later redesign it in the hope of fixing it. Here we have techno-solutionism all over again. This will no doubt repeat itself once the designer gets bored with ChatGTP and realizes they need to pick a side in the AI ethics industry: prompt less, delete your chatbot lover!
Designers must choose whether to remain within the paternalistic ranks of the professional-managerial aspirational class or engage in a constructive populism that is not just about vitalistic chaos and misinformation. Subversive energies are key sources of freedom, hope, desire, and rebellion. The protestant guilt trip that already surrounds AI must end. Instead of proposing restrictions, let’s roll out alternatives that put a radical end to the tech-induced mental crises. The techno-induced lobotomy has to end, and preferably before the next market crash.
Be assured that the AI hype, made in California and criticized in Europe, will soon lose its appeal and show its administrative face of brutality. Rather than wait around for this grand revelation, and respond to the official disclosures, we can collective decide to make the first move instead. Why wait around for when the going gets tough? It already is! Let’s make the call now then, since the crisis is already wreaking plenty of havoc.
What does it mean to design problems? How can the disruptors be disrupted? Not simply respond to problems, but actively construct the scene of disruption. This is in fact a radical reversal of the usual sequence of things. Planning the problem, designing the deviation – these are strategic techniques that open up the possibility to set new directions, blue print new possibilities, and insist on Design First!
The key is to cultivate aesthetically compelling expressions of collective refusal, radical gestures that are not built on individual policing and atomized containment. Time to invent trip mechanisms and orchestrated disturbances that disorient the control tower. First step: ignore these boring systems. Break them before they even begin. As one of the memes included in the manifesto states: “Stop raising awareness, start raising hell.”
(thanks to Silvio and Ned for their input)