Curiosity and Shortcuts

When I was in elementary school I did an online summer camp that was themed around NASA. One of our projects was to investigate whether there were any inhabitable planets in our solar system - we were placed into groups and each given a planet. I remember excitedly researching my planet (though I don’t exactly which planet that was anymore, Venus? Neptune?). I weighed the pros and cons and ultimately decided (as a very knowledgable 10 year old) that it was unlikely this would be a habitable planet. When I met with my group one of my team members cut us all short from explaining our findings, he said “I already looked it up, the answer is Mars. Let’s just jump to the next step”.

I remember being disappointed and feeling a bit cheated. I’d enjoyed researching and learning about my planet even if it wasn’t the “right answer”, but now that work felt wasted and unimportant.

The next step in the project was to design a colony on Mars. The assignment was to write up a description of the type of colony we wanted to build and how it would address some of the challenges that humans would face if they chose to inhabit Mars. I don’t remember how I stumbled on this but I ended up downloading Illustrator and using clip art illustrations to mock-up a design for the colony. It was made up of a network of geodomes (semi-transparent blue semi-circles), connected by covered vacuum-sealed tunnels (black lines), and I painstakingly found multiple clip art images of trees and brought them into the domes.

I absolutely loved designing an imaginary future, thinking of what could be, and making that vision real enough to share with my team and teacher.

I returned to this moment recently, as I reflected on any early interests I had in design and tech.

At it’s core, that’s what I do for work now as a Product Designer - imagining the future. I’ve always thought one of the super powers of product designers is taking what’s in everyone’s heads and making it tangible, so it can be discussed, debated, and dissected. This speeds up work and makes it easier to get alignment; but it also importantly gets everyone on the team excited about what could be.

Nowadays I notice some people wanting to use LLMs to shortcut around the tough questions, and while some chalk it up to efficiency gains and others to laziness, I don’t think this is a mode of working introduced by AI. Clearly my teammate back in elementary school also wanted a shortcut: he didn’t care to go through the exercise of researching his planet, he just wanted to be done, get the grade, and move on. Perhaps he was a particularly busy 10 year old, and honestly, that’s ok.

However, I choose to continue to lean into my curiosity. It doesn’t mean I don’t use AI tools. It means I’m working to use them in a way that fosters deeper curiostiy. What can I build? What questions does that answer? What parts do I still want to spend extra time on? What details and decisions aren’t worth outsourcing? The answers to each of these will be personal to each designer, builder, individual - and I’m still figuring out the answers for myself.

But I’d like to remember the younger version of myself, that was so entranced by the idea of creating a vision, of sweating over the details, of maybe doing a little more than was strictly necessary; not to impress someone else, but because it was… fun.