The era of creative builders: Rethinking the role of design

Friends, I have a confession. I am both envious and terrified of the juniors currently entering our creative industry. I often sit in staggered disbelief as one of our young team members treats building a piece of custom, generative software with the same meekness as I did saving PNGs 19 years ago.

Everything has shifted over the last few years. And continues to shift month after month… We have all watched as agencies and individuals have shrunk and grown into the positivity of being able to build and create so much more. To create in too so many new ways, both as teams and individuals.

Engineers having access to creative, creatives to dev, devs to design, design to photography. We’re living in a time where so many ideas that were previously barred behind technical capability have made their way out into “sweet” public pasture. A time where explorative innovation has flourished, with emerging technology forming not only a new way of operating, but a new avenue and cadence of design and expression.

Yambo Studio’s Plnty. A perfect example of creative leaders being unlocked by new capability

We, as I’m sure you are, are knee-deep in this new “building” era. We’re all buckling on our custom tool-belts every morning, each one cut and stitched by the scissors and sewing-machines that *insert LLM of your choosing* built the night before.

It’s a time where tech is going through such a rapid democratisation, so much so that each of our creative and operational processes can be custom cut to the needs of the brief. Where team members once had a clear outline and skill-set, now we have a team of people who can re-draw their silhouettes each week.

But, with any democratisation, how you adopt these new capabilities becomes the key focus. For the people that view volume as progress, godspeed. And for their bosses… ditto.

Fidelity first, always.

Any tech or tool adoption for us has always been to serve three purposes:

• Improving the quality of everything we make.
  
• Allowing us to make something truly different.
  
• Allowing us to better understand where things are headed.

In the case of AI, if it detracts or distracts from any of those, it is sidelined (read: forced to enter content or daily brief writing purgatory).

A famous proverb from circa 1999 still rings true in today’s landscape, “If you wanna be with me, baby there's a price to pay, I’m a genie in a bottle, you gotta rub me the right way”. *rubs laptop*.

In my career, technology has always operated in unison with creativity, the stuffing in the centre of the Oreo that we are constantly trying to get everyone to eat. Sure, there are cases where new tech can lead the thinking. NFC, Flash, capacitive sensors, VR, 3D printing, software breakthroughs. Hell, the “internet”. Powerful technologies becoming available to the masses and handing creative directors a “do this” Post-it. But for us, the tech is always there to improve the output.

This builder era is really testing the foundations that protect this notion. Finding the balance of what tool to use and how to use it, when you can build any tool you need. A time where very supportive LLMs that affirm your decisions (and their own) can build so much so quickly, all via natural language.

As empowering as this new creative building era is, the remarkable simplicity of being able to “make” is a deceptive bugger. Speed can be perceived as competence. And the ability to build “something” can be perceived as a solution.

For the inexperienced this can overpower the key creative judgement that we so heavily value at MakeReign. Protecting the creative part of that building equation means always viewing these new technologies through the lens of innovation, not automation.

The magic of the creative human.

The largest challenge is nurturing and teaching that judgement. Sure there is the ache of process cohesion, and keeping up with the times, but managing when and where to use this new technology takes Top Trump.

When the patience-moat of technical knowledge is no longer filtering out the bad ideas, the lazy creative, the easy wins, we have to focus our team’s gaze onto what is most valuable in the creative machine. The jet fuel of AI needs to go into the right tanks, not all over them.

As a creative builder achieves technical proficiency, the intentionality and leadership needed to keep their mind sharp becomes substantially more fundamental to their capability as a modern designer.

It’s crucial to pull that tech-crutch away, any time speed or automation is starting to damage their inherent skill as a creative resource. Luckily for us, the quality of output does most of the heavy lifting there. Quality that is so evident across so many metrics.

Just look at NBER’s paper. App submissions soar whilst app usage and average ratings go in the opposite direction. It highlights how, although so much has changed, so much has stayed the same. How when making becomes simple, deciding what deserves to be made becomes so much more complex. An era of new norms, and once again, learning to be exceptional within them.

And this era is still so new. It’s undefined, exciting and unknown. We adopted AI early, initially to understand its strengths and weaknesses. To allow us to implement in ways that improve the team’s innovation and output. And now we see those teams and individuals who are willing to explore and tinker, to build, to redefine. They are starting to understand where and what technologies to introduce into their ideas.

With our inaugural Builders Table coming up next month, we are offering a place to explore how others are working together with new, and old, tools in ways that help all of us understand what it is that we are going to build next.

As history will show you, any new technology starts with mimicry, especially one that is built to mimic. But where things are headed next is what excites us most about where we are today.