OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silber

been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce. Surprisingly, designers are just the most Unhappy on every dimension. We're unclear right now what is expected of a designer. Someone who might be classically trained in a certain way of working now feeling like oh my gosh, I need to really change everything. You believe that's the best time in history to be designer. We're all extremely early in this process. There's just a huge opportunity for designers. Nobody should feel behind right now I think that if you literally start it today you're gonna have a leg up on pretty much but people there's just so much opportunity to change the way we work to make great things. If you look at engineering It's just a completely new job versus a few years ago. I'm curious how that translates to product design. Engineers have ten or sometimes like hundred XR productivity, but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still very messy and fluid. We had a podcast with Native Design Club code, Jenny Wynn. She talked about there's been this traditional design process. Prototype, mock, studies research, iterate, and now there's just no time for that. There's certain features for Chat GBT where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time.

We try a hundred things we throw out ninety nine and we finally ship one. And other things we really embrace building in public. We take big swings and then we learn quickly. Do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? I think it already is an incredible product designer. Today my guest is Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI. Ian's been in this role for three years now. Which is a lifetime in AI time. Prior to OpenAI, he was at Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram that I absolutely loved.

Before that he spent eight years at Instagram. The role of design is in such an interesting place right now, and Ian has such a unique and insightful and fascinating take. on the future of product design and what the AI tools that we use every day will look like in the future. A huge thank you to Sileo and Joel Lowenstein for suggesting topics for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny'sProductPass.com. For a year free.

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