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A guide to AI prototyping for product designers
AI is more than a product; it’s a platform that will change how and what we design — and who gets involved.
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At Config 2023 (Figma’s annual conference), Noah Levin, VP of Design at Figma, introduced the concept of the Ceiling and Floor in product design and predicted the role of AI in design.
Noah defined the Ceiling and Floor as follows:
- Floor: There’s a minimum skill required to participate in design. It takes years of training, practice, and self-learning to become a designer.
- Ceiling: There’s a limit on how good you can be at designing and influencing a product — even the best designers often struggle to bring their ideas to life without engineering help.
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Noah then predicted the role of AI in design is to shift both the floor and the ceiling. It’s lowering the floor — allowing more people to create, prototype, and ship ideas faster than ever. And it’s raising the ceiling — giving designers superpowers to develop, iterate, and push the limits of creativity.