Star designers weigh in on the importance of knowing what you like and maintaining distance from technology
As artificial intelligence reshapes how designers create art, the question of how they can preserve their creative roles and navigate an increasingly uncertain landscape took center stage at a panel discussion on Friday at Herald Design Lounge 2026.
The panel brought together creatives from different backgrounds and countries, including Grammy-winning designer Stefan Sagmeister and Yu Ji-won, director of the Institute of Typography & Culture. The session was moderated by Lee Jin-joon, a professor at KAIST’s Graduate School of Culture Technology.
Amid such uncertain times, Sagmeister stressed that creators need a clear sense of what they want to pursue, along with the conviction to see their ideas through as technology continues to evolve.
“The key is having a strong taste — knowing what you like — and the charisma to actually bring the work to life,” Sagmeister said.
“What matters more than technical proficiency is a creator’s distinct vision to push forward the question of what you want to do with this powerful technology,” he added.
Yu, meanwhile, said that creators need to learn how to step outside AI and examine the technology from a distance.
“I’m currently working on a book that looks at AI from outside the technology itself, taking a more meta perspective,” she said. “It’s not about using AI to write a book. Rather, it is about looking at the technology that makes AI possible. That perspective itself is the subject of the book.”
As an example, Yu pointed to what she sees as gaps in the datasets used to train large language models.
“If you look at the dataset as a whole, you can see places where language is severely lacking,” she said. “I believe a designer’s role is to find those gaps and write poetry into the blank spaces where language does not yet exist.”
Rather than becoming fully immersed in AI, Yu said, creators should maintain enough distance to question the technology itself and consider what lies beyond it.
She further argued that the rapid evolution of technology is forcing the design industry to reconsider what it means to be a designer.
“I’ve said that the history of design is a history of responding to technology through beauty and through ways of looking after people. But now technology has changed into AI, so the environment is changing,” Yu said.
“If the environment changes, people change, and the role of designers changes as well,” she added. “So I think the first thing we need to do as designers is to rethink and redefine our role — and what we are within today’s technological society.”
yoonseo.3348@heraldcorp.com
