John Maeda's Simple Recipe for Better Products in the Age of AI

Maeda revisits The Laws of Simplicity twenty years on and arrives at a shorter recipe: a great product needs only good decision-making and good engineering (“if the bridge does not stand, no one’s going to drive across it”), with product coherence and a small, concentrated dose of craft on top. He traces how design’s “important” skills keep dissolving, from the X-Acto knife and rubber cement to drawing interfaces, while the creative capacity stays in demand, and argues that agents move the problem from Donald Norman’s gulf of execution to the gulf of evaluation: when users can just say what they want, design’s job becomes assuring them it was done right.