The Productive Void
What enabled us to create AI is the very thing it has the power to erase.
I still have dozens of sketchbooks, many filled with ideas for logos, layouts, and other designs. These pages don’t just capture fully realized images, albeit sketches. They capture an entire process of thinking –the false starts, the unexpected discoveries, the gradual, iterative refinement of ideas. Today, those same explorations can, if you choose, be reduced to a single prompt: “Generate a minimal, modern wordmark for a SaaS product called _____.”
The immediacy is seductive. Recently, I found myself experimenting with one of the latest AI tools promising simple “logo generation.” Within minutes, I had generated dozens of logomarks — each one passable, but each one missing something essential that I couldn’t quite name. My eight-year-daughter, looking on, asked a telling question: “Dad, are you playing a game?”
Her question has stayed with me. After twenty years in design, I’ve watched our tools evolve from physical to digital to algorithmic, each transition sold with somewhat mixed messages: more simplicity and more features; more efficiency and more reach; more speed and more possibility. But as we race toward a future where AI can generate endless variations with a few keystrokes, I’m increasingly conscious of what happens – or in the case of generative work, what doesn’t happen — in the spaces between. These are the vital territory of human creativity that resists compression.
Yes, I realize it may sound as if I am arguing against a straw man. One needn’t stop at the generated logo, which is, after all, just a single image. It’s simply a sketch to launch from. It speeds up the process of concepting. I suppose I don’t have a significant problem accepting the role of AI in ideation.
But I have already seen how the immediacy of AI sets the expectation for process collapse. During a recent meeting, someone demonstrated generating a logo in seconds. When I asked whether the tool could produce an editable file (knowing, of course, that it couldn’t), the answer I got was, “does that matter?” Well, of course it does! To take a logo forward, to truly make it functional as the cornerstone of an identity system, a flat, uneditable image isn’t enough. When ends justify the means, the means too easily become invisible. But that’s another article. (Note to self: Process Collapse is the Silent Spring of AI.)
Back to hands and paper, then.
Knowing full-well that it’s become rather trite for people of my age to repeatedly bring up the merits of “analog” materials, I am going to do it anyway. And that is because the resistance of a surface agains a pen or pencil creates an important friction that works its way through your body and into your mind. That resistance is valuable; it forces us to slow down. That gives our mind time to process each move and consider the next. The best digital tools preserved some of this productive friction. Whether you’re working in Illustrator, Figma, or some other creative composition environment, there is likely a pen tool, and its virtue is not in being fast.
AI tools offer no such thing, by design. They collapse the space between intention and result, between thinking and making. They eliminate the productive void — that space where uncertainty leads to discovery. It’s the same void we experience when waiting in lines, walking from one place to the next, showering, washing dishes, stopped in traffic. These are the places where solutions to difficult problems bloom in our minds, not from toiling over them, but from letting go, albeit briefly.
The latency between mind and machine, whether that machine is a digital pen or one filled with ink, is a feature, not a bug. It’s to be preserved as fertile ground for observation and consideration. AI scorches that earth, at least in the context of image and design generation, at least right now.
To be clear, I am no luddite. The progress of AI is undeniable; the tools have already changed how I work in ways both subtle and profound. But as someone who has watched design trends come and go since the late 1990s — from glitchy bitmap Geocities chic to skeuomorphism to flat design; from Dreamweaver to Photoshop to Figma to AI — I’m as willing to change as I am wary of how quickly we can mistake convenience for improvement.
My son is three years old, and very much at the stage of development where his awareness of what he could have is not yet tempered by an understanding of how it arrives before him. A shrill demand for “more apple!” is repeated instantly because, well, toddlers have no patience. The current stage of AI has me thinking about that growth stage quite a bit. He is, after all, growing up in a world where, thanks to 21st century technology, the space between wanting and having grows ever shorter. He doesn’t know that yet, but I do. And I worry what kind of a person he might become if he doesn’t experience some friction. And this is, of course, a reflection of my concern about what happens to society when it no longer has to wait for anything. When frictions are sanded down by the mill of innovation to such a point that we — what? — lose the will to do much of anything? Obviously, we are not yet at that point — there is much good that AI could equip us to do — but also, one point leads to the next. What will the next be?
There is a certain irony to this line of thinking, I know. I’m writing this in a space surrounded by digital tools that would have seemed magical during my sketchbooking days back in college. Each technological shift in design since that time has imposed some kind of creative compression, each giving something and taking something away. AI will do that, too. But it’s the speed of AI that worries me most as a maker. It’s the thing about AI that has already prepared me to be surprised by my own world not too long from now. And though I try to reserve judgement — I feel it’s the intellectually honest thing to do at this moment – it seems we are at risk of losing access to the spaces between things, spaces we may not fully value until they are gone.
These are the productive void.
The thing to do isn’t to reject AI completely. I can already see that sort of resistance is futile. But can we preserve the spaces between things? Can we protect the natural resource of friction, of waiting, of gaps and iteration?
In my own practice, I’m learning to use AI not as a tool of compression, but one of expansion. Prompts become not endpoints but starting points. They create new voids to explore, new territories for my mind to inhabit.
My accumulating stacks of sketchbooks remind me that design has always been about more than just the outcome. It’s about the journey, the resistance, the productive uncertainty that leads to discovery. As we rush to embrace the power of AI, we might do well to remember that what enabled us to create it is the very thing it has the power to erase.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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