In Defense of the Detour

A hand-painted map of looping arrows from “a brief” to “the kind of thing that people remember”, via detours like “take the wrong direction”, “sleep on it” and “happy accidents”
Illustration by Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi, whose 1,374 Days I shared last year, is back in The New York Times with a visual essay on craft and AI. AI is useful when the problem is well-defined, but design and art are about getting lost along the way.

You immerse yourself in the world of the people you’re designing for, look for visual metaphors, stumble onto something unexpected, and push things around until they break, or until they make sense.

Anything worth remembering came from a person who did not know where she or he was going until arriving. No shortcut gets you there: the process leaves a trace.

She doesn’t dismiss the tools; her team uses AI too, but only once the design is done, to help carry it out at scale. The design is in the detour.