Design's role is interpretation, not taste or craft

Ashton Snook, writing for Dscout, argues that as AI shrinks the gap between imagining something and producing it, design's distinct value cannot rest on taste or craft, since neither belongs to designers alone. What remains, he says, is the responsibility to interpret a situation, negotiate competing constraints and steward an idea through an organisation, illustrated by a design-system programme where quality gains required moving decisions closer to engineering rather than refining components in a file. He extends that logic to agents, proposing teams map a workflow into what an agent can decide alone, where it must defer to a person, and who authorises departures from a principle. The harder question, who reviews an agent's reasoning, stays open.