Ayumi Lee
Read full on Path To Design
Feb 2026
My Design Origin, Approach & Outlook
I started undergrad in international business, but felt like something was missing. Hackathons were picking up momentum, design thinking was finding its way into every classroom, and it turned out that the way I think in visuals, my fondness for motion, and having the personality that pulls people in were things technology needed most.
That’s when I started taking design classes, teaching myself as I built a data analytics startup as the founding product designer, and learning firsthand how human-centered design tackles the hardest problems in healthcare and enterprise during my internship at IDEO.
Biggest challenge as a designer
The hardest part of working in AI right now is that everyone can make things. Vibe coding has lowered the barrier to building so significantly that engineers, PMs, and designers are all prototyping in parallel, often in different directions, without a shared understanding of what we're actually trying to solve. Getting everyone back into the same room with the same mental model takes great effort.
AI has made us more productive, but it has also raised the bar for what's expected. Because spinning up a prototype is so fast now, there's an assumption that vision work should move at the same speed. The workload shifted upward. We're expected to produce more exploratory, speculative work on top of everything else, because the cost of making something looks lower from the outside than it actually is.
What now?
Despite the collective concern around AI slop, automation, and the design bar being raised when anyone can generate a baseline interface, I still enjoy the creative expression and the thrill of doing the hard thing. I still think being a designer is cool^^
Read on IDEO
Feb 2022
Creativity
starts with play
