What do we call Design Prompting?
Design prompting is the natural evolution of design thinking in a context where artificial intelligence becomes an active co-designer within the creative process. It does not replace the basics of design thinking, but rather amplifies and empowers them, taking each stage to a new scale of speed, scope and diversity.
A design prompting process combines three key dimensions that we at GFT Design Studio integrate organically:
- The essence of design thinking.
We continue to work with what has always made design strong: empathy with users, clear definition of challenges, collaborative ideation, tangible prototyping and testing with real people. These principles are not going away; they are the human anchor that ensures that solutions remain relevant, desirable and people-centered.
- The multiplying power of AI
Prompts become new design tools: structured instructions that enable AI models to accelerate every stage. From synthesizing large volumes of data in minutes to generating dozens of creative alternatives in seconds, AI opens up previously unimagined possibilities. Thanks to it, design can explore more widely, test faster, and connect with much more diverse sources of knowledge.
- Human judgment
AI generates, but it is the designer who decides. Curation, ethics, strategic vision and cultural sensitivity remain a uniquely human value. At GFT, our teams validate and enrich what AI proposes, ensuring that solutions are not only feasible and efficient, but also inclusive, sustainable and aligned with business objectives.
Together, these three dimensions make design prompting a hybrid model, where human creative force and the analytical power of AI work in harmony to solve business problems with more impact and relevance than ever before.
New designer skills in the age of prompting
The fundamentals of design thinking are still essential: empathy, collaboration, visualization and experimentation. But now we are adding new competencies that we promote and strengthen in our GFT Design Studio:
- Prompt design: ability to design effective instructions to guide AI.
- AI orchestration: knowing how to combine different models and tools for each phase of the process.
- Enhanced critical thinking: discerning when to trust AI, when to challenge it, and how to validate results.
- Ethics and accountability: ensuring that AI outputs respect principles of inclusion, fairness and privacy.
- Augmented storytelling: using AI to generate narratives and visualizations faster, without losing the human essence.
And what opportunities arise for our customers?
Adopting design prompting means:
- Increased speed of innovation: cycles of weeks instead of months.
- Expanded exploration: solutions inspired by infinite knowledge sources.
- Team empowerment: non-UX experts can more easily co-create with AI support.
- Competitive relevance: companies that combine design thinking and AI will be more agile and precise in their innovation processes.
Conclusion: The future is collaborative and agentic.
Design thinking is not disappearing; on the contrary, it is being revalued as an essential human framework to guide design. What has changed is that we now have a powerful partner: artificial intelligence.
Design prompting is, in essence, design thinking augmented by AI. It allows us to maintain empathy, strategic vision and human judgment, while expanding creativity, speed and scale.
The future of design is not choosing between human or machine, but learning to co-create with AI as a teammate.
And in that future, the key question will no longer be just what can we design, but what can we ask to unlock new solutions?
