From Frameworks to Foresight: Designing in the Age of AI

When you’re working on something like skate., every decision from physics fidelity to how a player expresses themselves with a single trick,  is a design choice that shapes a broader culture. It’s about giving players the feedback, control, and emotional clarity to feel immersed and confident in every moment. That kind of expression doesn’t come from a template, it comes from craft.

Now enter AI — a powerful, fast-moving wave breaking across every creative discipline. Like any tool, it promises efficiency. But without human taste, editorial judgment, and cultural stewardship, we risk flattening what makes our work worth doing in the first place.

We don’t just need frameworks. We need foresight.

Why Frameworks Aren’t Enough Anymore

AI breaks our beloved design pattern libraries. In traditional design systems, consistency and scale were the holy grail. You documented your components, guarded your grids, and let the logic flow. But when AI tools can remix content, generate layouts, or even propose UX flows all within seconds your pattern library becomes a starting point, not a guardrail.

Take personalization: In player behavior design, we’re no longer just segmenting users. We’re generating dynamic, responsive systems that change in real-time. But does speed equal quality? And does personalization always mean better experiences?

Without intentional design leadership, AI-driven tooling can nudge everything toward sameness:  hyper-optimized, frictionless, and hollow.

What Foresight Looks Like in Practice

Foresight isn’t vision. Vision is what you want to build. Foresight is what happens after you’ve built it.

It’s scenario planning, thinking in “what ifs.” What if our AI-based trick suggestion system encourages players to grind the same move over and over for efficiency? What if an NPC generated by an LLM says something inappropriate at the wrong time in the wrong cultural context?

It’s designing systems that evolve, not just deliver.

Great foresight is less about being right, and more about being ready. Ready for unintended consequences. Ready to intervene when your system feeds back unexpected outcomes. Ready to say, “Pause. Let’s rethink this.”

Tools Are Table Stakes — Systems Are Not

Designers love tools. And today’s AI tools are incredible. We’ve used LLMs to generate test data, brainstorm UX copy, even write documentation. But tools only get you so far.

Principles guide systems. And systems shape how teams work and what they value.

In our work on skate., we constantly balance freedom and structure. We could use AI to dynamically generate challenge content — but how do we ensure those challenges feel authentic to skate culture, not machine-generated filler?

That’s where human judgment comes in. We’re not just designing interactions — we’re shaping how people make sense of them. And that’s where AI needs us the most.

Ethics and Imagination: Dual Responsibilities

With AI, we’re not just designing UI. We’re designing behavior ours, and our users’. Designers must now help teams ask harder questions:

• Should we make this fully autonomous? 

• Should we store this player data? 

• Should we auto-generate this animation if it feels off-brand or off-tone?

We have a responsibility to be imaginative not just in what’s possible, but in what’s responsible. Ethics isn't a permission slip,  it’s a design constraint. One that can unlock creativity, not stifle it.

How Leaders Can Equip Their Teams

As design leaders, we have to shift from managing workflows to shaping worldviews.

• Encourage AI literacy across disciplines. Engineers, PMs, and artists all need to understand the implications of AI not just the outputs.

• Make room for controlled experimentation. Build sandboxes, not chaos. Let teams try, fail, and learn with safety nets in place.

• Center taste, not just tooling. Algorithms don’t know your audience’s inside jokes, cultural references, or subtextual nuance. Your team does.

Cross-functional fluency, especially in AI's emerging capabilities, is no longer optional. It’s how we future-proof creativity.

Designing for Futures, Not Just Features

If the past decade was about shipping MVPs and optimizing flows, the next one will be about designing systems that grow with us  and sometimes, resist us.

Because in a world where AI can generate everything, what becomes scarce is taste. Meaning. Judgment.

That’s the job now. Not just shipping screens, but stewarding experiences. Not just thinking in sprints, but in consequences. Not just building for today  but for the players who’ll be skating these streets long after the code ships.

So yes, bring on the tools. But let’s lead with taste.