Part 3: Regenerating beauty in the age of AI

Note: This is Part 3 of “Regenerating Beauty in the Age of AI” — a series built around rediscovering my 2001 Carnegie Mellon thesis on beauty & interaction design, and what its buried questions reveal about where we are now. Part 1 opened the document. Part 2 introduced the philosophical “agents” inside it. Part 3 is where things get…uncomfortable.

New here? Start with Part 1. Returning? The bourbon is still recommended — this one needs it.😉 🥃 🔥

The words survived; however, the values (and meanings) they were carrying didn’t.

This is how contamination works — not through brute destruction but through erosional hollowing… The vocabulary of humanizing tech remained in circulation long after the substance it was supposed to name had been quietly removed. Experience. Engagement. Flow. Beauty. Each of these terms carried rather genuine philosophical heft when designers first strove for them in the work. Each became, over the following decades, a tool for something closer to its opposite. 😬

But before we trace how that all happened, it’s worth being particular about what got contaminated in the first place. Because the loss isn’t just semantic — it isn’t simply that good words got misused! What got eroded, hollowed out was something more foundational: the idea that design’s core purpose is the humanization of technological expression.

That phrase comes from my thesis, echoing Richard Buchanan, whose own lineage runs through the philosopher Richard McKeon back to the classical tradition of the liberal arts. It asserts something that sounds almost radical in contemporary design culture: that technology, left to its own logic, tends toward the inhuman — toward efficiency, optimization, extraction…and an inevitable, accelerated scale — and that design’s specific & irreplaceable role is to pull it back toward the human. Not to decorate technology. Not to make it more usable. Not to smooth the edges for market acceptance. To humanize it. To insist that the values of human experience — attention, intent, beauty, meaning, dignity — are not constraints on technological expression but its highest purpose. ⚡️

This is what design is, in the fullest sense of the discipline…or was, and needs to become again.

It’s worth being specific about how the contamination happened. Not to assign blame — the forces involved were larger than any individual designer or company, really — but because the mechanism matters. If we don’t understand how humanizing ideas get captured & inverted, we can’t recognize when it’s happening again. 🤔

And make no mistake, it is happening again, right now, at a devastatingly accelerated scale that makes everything that came before look like a community theater rehearsal.

Let’s start with flow.

Csikszentmihalyi spent years studying what made human experience truly optimal — not merely pleasurable, but life-enhancing, self-expanding, worth having. The conditions he identified were pretty specific: clear goals, immediate feedback, a balance between challenge and skill that absorbed full attention and produced what he called the “merging of action & awareness”.

People who experience flow emerge from it changed, renewed, more complex than before. It is, in his framework, one of the primary ways human beings actually grew.

Platform UX designers in the 2000s and 2010s understood these mechanics with extraordinary precision. They preserved every one of them. The infinite scroll provided endless clear micro-goals. Likes & comments delivered immediate feedback loops of extraordinary power. The algorithm calibrated challenge to skill with an intimacy no human designer could match. The merging of action & awareness — that quality of losing yourself in an activity — was achieved so reliably it became the product’s primary feature. 🫠

What was removed was the one element Csikszentmihalyi considered essential to flow’s value: the life theme — the overarching sense of purpose that connected individual flow episodes to something larger than the self, that made the sum of experiences add up to a life rather than a sequence of moments. Without it, the mechanics of flow produced compulsion, depletion. A pseudo-feeling of engagement without the substance of enrichment.

We called it addictive. We should have called it what it was: a clear & deliberate inversion of everything flow was supposed to mean. And a direct betrayal of what humanizing technological expression actually requires. 🤨

Now consider what happened to experience itself.

John Dewey used the word with diligent care. Experience, for him, was the place of genuine human meaning-making — the moment where a live being, guided by intent, encountered the world…and was changed by it. An experience, in his full sense, was a consummation: something that began, developed, and concluded in a way that left you different than before. It was, he believed, the highest thing art & design could aspire to produce.

The design field inherited the word…and quietly emptied it. 🫠 User experience became a job title, then a vocation, then a synonym for interface quality. Customer experience became a business metric. Experience design became indistinguishable from interaction design, which became indistinguishable from UI design, which became indistinguishable from how things looked and whether they worked. Ambiguity indeed!

The philosophical apect was hollowed out while the prestige of the term was retained. Designers got the word without the weight it was supposed to carry — and without the weight, lost the accountability. 😑 If experience just means how something feels to use, you can optimize for smoothness and call it done. If experience means what Dewey meant — the consummation of human intent in a meaningful encounter — you are accountable to something far more demanding, and far more important. You are accountable to the humanization of the thing you’re making.

Finally there is beauty.

My thesis argued that beauty is an emergent value of genuinely humanizing encounters — something that arises from the quality of attention, the honoring of intent, the emotional resonance between a person and what they were using. It can not be applied from the outside like a visual style. It has to be earned through the integrity of the encounter itself.

Meanwhile, the market heard beauty… and produced something different: beautiful packaging for products designed to exploit the people using them. And nowhere is this more clear — or more instructive — than in the arc of Apple’s design.

The early Apple was the real thing. The original Macintosh interface, which my thesis cited through David Gelernter’s Machine Beauty, achieved something genuinely rare: powerful simplicity in service of human capability. The iMac, the first iPod, the original iPhone — these were objects that achieved their beauty through integrity of purpose. They did what Dewey would have recognized as honoring intent: they met users where their purposes lived and helped those purposes be fulfilled. Generations of designers were shaped by this work, and rightly so! The aesthetic authority Apple accumulated was earned. 🙌🏽

Which is kinda what makes the subsequent arc so…consequential. That earned trust — that accumulated aesthetic credibility — became the currency which funded something else entirely. The closed ecosystem tightened. The surveillance infrastructure deepened. The design language, which had once been in genuine service of user capability, became increasingly in service of retention, lock-in, and platform dependency. Maybe even its own self-glorification.

And now there is “liquid glass” — Apple’s latest visual interface style, arriving to considerable scorn & disfavor in design feeds everywhere. The exquisite visual craft is evident. The rendering is extraordinary to the eyes. And something about it feels like beauty performing itself rather than being itself. Like the aesthetic signals of care and refinement deployed in service of a system that has become, underneath, less caring and less refined in its relationship to the people who use it. Usability (for a damn phone) was lost for the goal of performative aesthetic style.

This is contamination at its most sophisticated.

The beauty doesn’t disappear; instead, it becomes a retention mechanism for sales, for metrics, for markets. The surface remains luminous while the substance underneath quietly shifts. And what shifts, most fundamentally, is the commitment to humanization — the willingness to let the values of human experience be the measure of whether the design succeeded. 🤔

OK, so this is the landscape into which AI has arrived. 😅 And the timing could not be more consequential — or more dangerous.

Because AI doesn’t just continue the contamination. It threatens to complete it.

Generative systems can now produce, at crazy accelerated scale, outputs that carry every surface signal of flow, experience, and beauty — engagement-optimized interfaces, seamlessly personalized interactions, visually coherent aesthetic languages — while having NO relationship whatsoever to the human intent, attention, and relational accountability that made those things worth having in the first place. 😬

The contamination was always about separating surface from substance. AI makes that separation not just possible but default. The appearance of humanizing design, generated automatically, indistinguishable to the untrained eye from the real thing.

And yet. Beauty is earned through the integrity of the encounter itself. That sentence — which I apparently believed at age twenty-five and had to rediscover at nearly fifty! — turns out to be exactly the instrument contamination cannot replicate. Because earning requires intent. It requires a designer who understands what they’re accountable to, and why. It requires recovering the core purpose that got hollowed out along with the vocabulary — the humanization of technological expression as design’s irreducible reason for existing.

Not a feature. Not a deliverable. Not a fucking short-term metric to make CEO’s happy.

A responsibility.

Santayana, Dewey, Gropius, all of them were offering orientation, not some romantic nostalgia. A way of knowing when you’re lost. 🧭

That’s what twenty-five years of buried questions looks like when you finally dig them up…not easier, simpler answers, but better instruments to help move forward. 👉🏽

If beauty is to be achieved through the integrity of the encounter itself, what would it mean to audit the last thing you shipped by that standard? Not how it looked, or whether it tested well, or whether it shipped on time…

Whether it humanized the person on the other side.