Is “design” creative?
Design isn’t what makes things creative. We are.
WRITTEN BY AUGUST HEFFNER, GROUP EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Defining Design
Design has always been hard to pin down. It’s a verb, a noun, and—worse—sometimes an adjective. Today, the role of designers is more confusing than ever. We run the gamut of responsibilities, expectations, and disciplines. Organizations that once united designers around a single mission now struggle to find a common language.
And persistently, AI is rewriting the playbook. Systems can execute with precision and mimic style—turning what once felt inherently human into something that can be automated. Which begs the real question: if design can be systematized, what’s left for human creativity?
We’ve grown up in design. Take Instrument, for example. It started as an engineering firm and added design out of necessity—to build interfaces. That’s how it often begins: bridging humans and machines. The history of user interfaces is short but packed with evolution. What started out rooted in logic has since expanded to include style, motion, and taste.
Today, designers are often asked two deceptively simple questions:
Can you make it work? Can you make me feel something?
Design = Make it Work
“Make it work” is the UX designer’s realm: logic, flow, digital architecture. It’s a scientific approach, shaped by best practices and engineering principles. “Make me feel something” feels more analog, more pre-digital—like designing an album cover after hearing the music or building a brand that connects through story and emotion.
These two categories rarely overlap. But they should. Because something that doesn’t work can’t make us feel anything but frustration—and something that works but feels dead can miss the point entirely.
Now, enter artificial intelligence. It’s not just automating the “make it work” side. It’s creeping into the “make me feel” space too—offering endless combinations of style, mood, and aesthetic at the push of a button.
If AI can do both, where does creativity live?
All images were generated with AI and then manipulated using traditional design tools to introduce grain, distortion, and softness. While contemporary AI systems are built to detect edges and produce clarity, this project intentionally pushes against that drive for perfection, drawing inspiration from early photography and Peter Henry Emerson's philosophy of "fuzziness." The result situates generative AI within a longer history of technologies that shape how we see, from early photographic processes to film animation and mechanical reproduction.
Design = Make Me Feel Something
“Make me feel something” can be systematized to an extent. We’ve mapped brand archetypes, emotional arcs, and color psychology. But again, creativity lives in the leap—the unexpected, the unscripted.
With Sally Beauty, for example, we discovered their visual identity wasn’t speaking to a huge, long-loyal audience—Black, brown, and textured-hair communities. A new logo wouldn’t fix that. What did? Expanding the brand to include their lived realities. That change wasn’t just design—it was human understanding.
I’ve pulled from my own life, too. When designing a museum experience, I remembered my grandmother’s advice: never eat before seeing art—colors are brighter on an empty stomach. Or when proposing a circle as a brand mark for a care-based organization, I remembered the elephants at the San Diego Zoo, who form a circle around their young during earthquakes. That’s a circle with meaning.
The Leap
We argue that both camps—functional and emotional—require the same tools: research, empathy, elbow grease. But here’s the catch. AI can research. It can even mimic empathy. And it never gets tired. It can try, fail, and iterate faster than we ever could.
Where it falls short is the leap.
Creativity is the leap. It’s the introduction of lived experience into problem-solving. It’s the human act of connecting dots that machines can’t see. It’s the one move they’ll never make. That leap is what designers bring when they pull inspiration from a whole different domain, when they think laterally. That is creativity.
Our work for OuraRing.com, took the leap by going against the thinking we’d come to understand as best UX practices: fewer clicks, show everything, remove friction. But in a world of information overload, we realized progressive disclosure—letting users discover things gradually—wasn’t just useful, it was human. That leap defied conventional UX logic.
It’s the same kind of leap that led engineers to study whale fins to build quieter wind turbines. Or cheetah legs to develop better prosthetics. Cross-category insights. Unpredictable human.
That wasn’t logic. That was lived experience.
So, is design creative?
No. Design is a methodology. It’s a structured way of working. It is not, by definition, creative.
But you are. And when you bring your lived experience—your leaps, your stories—into the design process, that’s when it becomes unforgettable.
