AI Design Tool Canvas

Building with AI tools is great. Designing in AI tools, less so.

An important part of the design process is to iterate on different variants of a solution. These iterations happen at all levels of product design. You may have a new idea that you want to inject into an existing flow, or a new way you want to present information on the UI.

Canvas based tools have been successful because they afford designers space to lay out and work through multiple variants of a design in one space. However, as they exist today, AI tools force designers to iterate on a single version of a product at one time. This means that designers are less likely to explore the boundaries of a solution, at the risk of breaking a good or safe solution though it may not be the best.

So I wanted to explore a tool that allows a designer to branch a design into exploratory variants, while also giving the designer space and flexibility to design with AI not just at the view level, but at the flow/app level as well.

AI should impact the way that designers actually use tools should change as well. For instance, AI might finally make it possible for designers to design on a tablet. In this concept, users can take a stylus or their finger and reference spaces on the canvas or existing components to an AI assistant in the same way they would talk through a concept with another human. This makes it clearer between the user and AI, what exactly needs to be designed. Another common constraint to designing on a tablet is the problem of 'too many tools, not enough space'. Here again AI can help. As the user is creating or editing components, the AI assistant can spin up in-time, component-specific controls allowing the users to directly tweak the UI.