Design Process Isn't Dead, It’s Compressed

Summary: As AI speeds up design work, the argument to "throw out the process" misrepresents how experienced designers work.

There's a lot of discourse around the design process right now: throw out the process, trust your intuition, skip the research, and start building. Jenny Wen, design lead at Anthropic, has been one of its more prominent voices. The argument sounds compelling, especially to designers under pressure to move fast.

The Argument Against Process

The recent argument against design process goes something like this:

Where the Argument Falls Apart

These observations aren’t wrong. But they don’t prove that process is unnecessary. They describe what experienced designers already do: they internalize process and adapt it to their work, moving fluidly through discovery, ideation, and evaluation rather than treating them as rigid steps. What looks like “ skipping the process” is just compressing it — running faster through the stages and using experience as a guide.