Designing For Humans

Peter Hayes has spent his career asking the first question of design. In the age of AI, it turns out to be the most important question anyone can ask.

There is a question every designer learns to ask before anything else. Not what are you building? Not how will you build it? Not what tools will you use? The first question, the one that precedes all the others, is: who are you designing for?

Peter Hayes has been asking that question for the better part of his professional life, and the education that shaped him is worth understanding before anything else about him, because it is not the education most people who end up in his field come through. He studied photography, art history, and design, and eventually earned a master's in photography. What those three disciplines share, at their core, is a training in how to see. Photography teaches you to understand what a viewer actually registers, as opposed to what the mind fills in from habit. Art history teaches you to trace how visual language has meant things to human beings across centuries and cultures, what images have carried, what they have communicated, why some of them have moved people for generations. Design teaches you to make visual communication function, not merely look good but actually work, in the hands of a real person with a real purpose. Together, they build a particular kind of professional mind: one that starts with the person receiving the work before it starts with the work itself. Hayes has spent years applying that mind to small businesses, helping them translate who they are into something their customers can see and feel and trust. The discipline, whatever the medium, has always come back to the same starting place. Not what you are making. Who are you making it for?

In the age of AI, Hayes has found that foundational question more clarifying than ever. This is not because the question is new. Designers have been asking it for as long as the discipline has existed. What has changed is the ease with which the answer can be lost. When artificial intelligence makes it possible to produce a website, a marketing campaign, or a complete brand identity in a fraction of the time and cost those things used to require, the pressure to move quickly can quietly crowd out the consideration that should come first. Who is this actually for? What do they need it to feel? Will it speak to someone, or will it disappear into the noise of everything else being produced at the same accelerated pace?

What Hayes keeps returning to, working through those questions for business after business, is a conviction that is simple to state and considerably harder to practice in an environment designed for speed: humans are the point. Not the technology, not the process, not the efficiency gain. The person waiting at the other end of whatever is being made. That person has always been the reason for the work, and no amount of acceleration changes the fact that if you lose sight of them, the work fails.

Something Is Missing

To understand where Hayes's particular way of seeing comes from, it helps to know that he grew up on the East Coast, in Massachusetts, in a large family, and came to his education through a longer and less linear path than most. Driven by an early passion for photography which he first learned from his father in their basement darkroom, he traveled extensively while navigating his higher education. He first earned an AA, then a BFA, and ultimately an MFA, focusing deeply on photography alongside a broad foundation in art, design, and art history. He lives now in Minneapolis with his wife and their ten-year-old son. He describes himself as mid-career, plenty behind him and plenty still ahead, with the energy and curiosity of someone who has not yet decided that the most interesting problems are behind them.

When AI became something he could no longer set aside professionally, his first response was not alarm. It was a more careful kind of attention, the sort that comes from someone trained to watch what an image actually does to a viewer. He noticed the layoffs filling his LinkedIn feed. He noticed organizations putting more faith in AI than the circumstances seemed to warrant. He noticed something else, too, something more personal and harder to name: that the AI-generated creative work he was seeing, however technically accomplished, was consistently missing something he could feel but struggled to articulate.

"When I look at AI-generated stuff, there's something missing," he says. "It can get super close, and it can be good. But it's missing something. Nuanced and subtle and hard to define. That uncanny valley of generated content, where it doesn't resonate with me as the end user."

Research is beginning to confirm what his eye was already registering. A 2025 thesis from MIT's Sloan School of Management conducted two experiments on human perception of AI-generated content, one involving text and one involving images. It found that content inhabiting the space just below full human authenticity consistently triggered discomfort rather than connection. Participants showed a strong preference for naturalness, human imperfections, and vulnerability. As the study put it, while human flaws enhance relatability, deviations that disrupt perceived humanity trigger the uncanny valley. The closer AI gets without fully arriving, the more unsettling the gap becomes.

For Hayes, this is not an abstract observation. The small business clients he works with through his design practice are trying to communicate something real about who they are to people who might choose to give them their attention and their money. AI can generate material at a pace no human can match. What it cannot supply is the empathy that makes material worth generating in the first place, the sense that a real person thought carefully about what another real person would need to feel in order to trust what they are seeing.

The Beginning and the End

There is a frame Hayes reaches for when he wants to cut through the noise of the AI conversation and get back to what actually matters. Whatever sits in the middle of any creative or commercial process, he says, the beginning and the end are human. The client is a human. The customer is a human. The first part of the equation needs to be human, and so does the last.

This is not a sentimental position. It is a structural one. Every organization that exists was created by people and exists to serve people. The value chain, however sophisticated it becomes, begins with a human being who has a need, a hope, a frustration, or a desire, and ends with another human being who either has that need met or does not. What sits in between can be optimized and automated and accelerated in almost unlimited ways. But the moment an organization forgets who occupies those two positions, it has lost the thread. AI can compress time, reduce cost, and expand the capacity of a small team beyond what was previously imaginable. It cannot supply the reason for doing any of it. That reason has always been, and remains, the person waiting at the end.

The practical consequence of that belief shows up in how Hayes thinks about the technology itself. He is not opposed to it. He uses it, watches it, pays attention to where it helps and where it introduces distance between the work and the person it is meant to reach. What he resists is the assumption, increasingly common in the organizations he observes, that producing more faster is equivalent to communicating better. It is not. The speed of production and the quality of human connection are entirely separate variables, and optimizing for one at the expense of the other is a trade he is not willing to make on behalf of his clients.

Modeling

The question of how to hold onto the human in an environment that keeps accelerating is one Hayes is navigating not only professionally but at home, in the daily rhythms of his family, where his ten-year-old son is watching everything his parents do with their screens, as closely as he listens to what they say about them.

His son wants a phone. He is not going to get one yet. This is a decision Hayes and his wife have made deliberately, and the more interesting part of it, the part that goes beyond the phone itself, is what they do with their own screens in front of him. Because what Hayes has come to understand is that the rules they set matter less than the behavior they model.

Research published in Pediatric Research in 2024, drawing from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study which tracked more than 10,000 adolescents, found that parental screen use was directly associated with greater screen time and problematic device use in their children. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in its Family Media Use Plan guidance, specifically notes that parents model media behaviors for their children, and that what they do consistently matters more than what they say occasionally.

Hayes understands this intuitively. "If he sees me on the screen all day," he says of his son, "that is just what you do as a kid. But if he sees me doing other things, it is proof. I'm not just telling you. I need to actually get outside and do things." He and his wife talk about it openly as a family, explaining why they limit screens at certain times, why the light from devices matters, why balance is worth fighting for. They do not have it perfectly figured out. They are paying attention to it together, which is itself a form of modeling.

The same principle that operates in that house operates at organizational scale. The norms around AI that leaders model today, how they use it, what they refuse to delegate to it, where they insist on keeping a human in the room, will shape how the generation behind them learns to relate to these tools. Modeling is not only a parenting strategy. It is a leadership one.

What He Is Hopeful About

The question of what to be genuinely hopeful about in this moment is one that many people find difficult to answer, and Hayes understands why. Rather than dwelling there, he redirects toward a smaller and more immediate question: not what AI is going to do to the world at some macro scale, but what is actually happening at the level of the people and communities closest to him, where the evidence is more tangible and the texture more real.

What he tends to find there is more encouraging than the broader conversation would suggest. He watches the people around him and sees human creativity showing up in specific, personal, unrepeatable ways: a neighbor doing something remarkable with their hands, a colleague finding an unexpected solution, a small business owner building something that carries their actual personality rather than the flattened version a template would produce. What he finds there is not a counterargument to everything that is difficult about this moment. It is a reminder that the things worth protecting are still present and visible to anyone willing to look at the right scale.

"That creativity," he says, "is powerful, and it allows for hope on an individual basis."

In the age of AI, he believes that work is not becoming less important. It is becoming more recognizable as important, because the contrast between the generic and the genuinely human is sharpening, not softening.

The first question every designer learns to ask, who are you designing for, turns out to be the one that matters most in this moment. Not because the technology is beside the point. But because the technology is, in the end, in service of a person. And the person is always the point.

Peter Hayes is a visual communicator and designer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This conversation is part of the Humans & AI: Everyday Stories series by HumanCulture.

Sources

Kishnani, D. (2025). An empirical study on human perceptions of AI-generated text and images [Master's thesis, MIT Sloan School of Management]. MIT DSpace. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/159096

Nagata, J. M., et al. (2024). Associations between media parenting practices and early adolescent screen use. Pediatric Research. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-024-03243-y

American Academy of Pediatrics. (2024). Family Media Use Plan. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/media/Pages/default.aspx