Everyone has an opinion about AI, but few have spoken with the designers living through this transformation. During Milan Design Week, product and furniture design student Suzanne Kably spoke with architects, interior designers and creatives from four continents to understand which human qualities they feel will be most valuable as AI reshapes creative work. Their answers offer a rare, on-the-ground perspective on where technology falls short, and where true design excellence begins. 

The Salone del Mobile never asks gentle questions. Step into its world, and you’re swept into a citywide pressure test of ideas, where creativity, innovation, and craftsmanship are constantly challenged.

This year, I brought a microphone to Milan Design Week and asked designers, decorators, architects, and creatives from around the world questions that rarely have simple answers. As artificial intelligence continues to redefine the creative industries, I wanted to learn what those working most closely in design believe remains uniquely human.

What Designers Around the World Agree AI Still Can’t Do

These conversations spanned continents.

Patricia is an interior designer who carries Brazil in her instincts but now calls Austria home. Marisa Bria, from Montreal, bridges interior decoration, construction and real estate. From Sicily, architect and interior designer Giulia Tarquinio brings the weight of Mediterranean history and a deep commitment to craftsmanship. Alongside them, a Russian interior designer and, later, Istituto Marangoni alumnus Sishir Baid offered perspectives shaped by different experiences, yet they all arrived at remarkably similar conclusions.

The Human Qualities AI Still Can’t Replace 

One question stayed with me throughout the week:

In a world dominated by AI-driven design tools, what uniquely human qualities will set exceptional design apart?

Although each designer approached the question from a different cultural and professional perspective, their answers shared a common belief: exceptional design begins where technology reaches its limits.

For some, that meant empathy. For others, it was intuition: the ability to understand a client’s unspoken needs, or sense how a space should feel, not just how it should function.

One Russian interior designer told me that while AI has taken over many tasks once handled by humans, it still cannot understand emotions or give a project a soul. 

Patricia reduced the same idea to its simplest expression, saying that what people will continue to value is the opportunity “to speak with a human and not with a machine.” Marisa Bria returned to the physical experience of space, insisting that no technology could replace the feeling of inhabiting and experiencing a place. 

Listening to these conversations, one idea became impossible to ignore: the instinct to let a room breathe before trying to impress. It’s the ability to understand someone’s history, insecurities, and quiet vision of home, and then translate that into something tangible. No prompt can capture this, and no model can be trained to reproduce it.

“The difference comes from human genius and creativity. Artificial intelligence can only combine things that already exist, not create something new” – Giulia Tarquinio, Architect and Interior Designer

Why Failure Still Matters in the Age of AI

The second question shifted the conversation from possibility to experience.

How has a personal failure influenced your approach to iteration in the design process?

 

What followed was not a catalogue of mistakes, but a collection of turning points.

Giulia Tarquinio shared stories of projects where materials just wouldn’t work together, prompting her to spend weeks collaborating with artisans to find out why. The experience ultimately made her a stronger designer. The Russian designer spoke about learning through proportion, realising that a room can correct its designer in ways that no drawing ever could. Marisa Bria described how she learned that aesthetic appeal and functionality are not always the same, and that the most beautiful material isn’t always the right choice.

Patricia, however, challenged the premise altogether. She does not think in terms of failure. For her, projects that take an unexpected direction are revealing the direction they were always meant to follow.

Together, these stories showed every way a designer can get things wrong, and every way getting things wrong can become the most valuable part of the process. No algorithm can replicate not just the mistake, but the designer who learns from it, and returns changed.

The Future Belongs to Designers With an Unmistakable Point of View

To conclude the conversations, I sat down with Sishir Baid, Istituto Marangoni alumnus and a designer whose perspective stood out for its clarity and conviction. I asked him:

If AI can generate, optimise and produce better, faster and more cheaply than any individual designer, what niche is left where humans are actually necessary?

Instead of seeing AI as a threat, Baid believes it will redefine the profession by raising the bar for entry. As routine and formulaic work becomes automated, only designers with a truly personal perspective—one shaped by experience, curiosity, obsessions, and lessons no algorithm can inherit—will stand out.

“The field is going to get smaller in terms of the number of designers. The bar for entering the profession will be much higher, but that’s how the world should move forward. That’s evolution” – Sishir Baid, Designer and Istituto Marangoni Alumnus

He also believes the future will belong to those who can carve out entirely new creative niches rather than competing in existing ones.

Reflecting on the relationship between design and materiality, Baid noted that while machines can manufacture with incredible precision, they cannot make the happy mistakes that sometimes unexpectedly turn a project into something better. Nor can they reproduce the distinctive randomness of a human gesture, a quality he sees not as a flaw, but as one of creativity’s greatest strengths.

“There is a beauty in randomness, something that only living, physical beings can truly harness. AI can generate randomness too, but it doesn’t carry the same degree of human innovation that leaves its mark on design” – Sishir Baid

The One Competitive Advantage AI Cannot Automate

So what makes you irreplaceable? After speaking with designers from different backgrounds, disciplines and countries, the answer was remarkably consistent.

The designers who will matter in ten years won’t necessarily be the fastest, the cheapest, or even the most visually impressive. They will be the ones with a perspective so personal, so deeply lived, and so uniquely their own that no prompt could ever reproduce it.

That perspective comes from noticing what fascinates you alone. From travelling to places that change how you see the world. From the books you read, the music you listen to, the conversations you have, the mistakes you make, and choose to keep. It comes from bringing your whole self into every room you design and every material you choose.

In a world where rapid, AI-assisted design is available to everyone, an irreplaceable point of view may be the only thing that can’t be automated.

Suzanne Kably
Product and Furniture Design Student, Milano