Judgement as a learnable skill

A lot is being said about “judgement” as the skill for designers who use AI. I’m not against it but what does it mean? Experience? How do you cultivate that and how do you teach someone to have this if they don’t learn it the traditional way. How do you teach an inexperienced designer handling an infinite output machine putting out 10x the volume what’s “good” and what isn’t?

Leading, steering, guiding, judging. These skills are the core skills for new designers. Skills gained by reflection, retrospectives and senior guidance.

This doesn’t change. And this is the responsibility of a senior, it still is to guide the junior, to focus on the why in their tooling. Evaluate their prompts. Prompts are the new design choices. Naked. Unable to hide behind anything as this prompt shows reasoning before being hidden behind output. Reflecting and evaluating prompts, prompt-chains and the decisions based on the AI output (do I use this or not, did it trigger the designer to do something different, etc) are reflections on design choices. Discuss the output. Reflect on the AI output together and why it’s good or why it isn’t. How much different is that compared to reflecting on output from other tools.

If you ask me, that’s what seniors have always done with juniors, only the tools changed.