It’s nearly impossible to scan the news without encountering AI. From OpenAI’s Sora bringing filmmaking to anyone with a prompt, to tools that generate documents, podcasts, and reports in seconds, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how things get made.
But here’s the question that matters for those of us working in health and human services: What does AI mean for designing things that genuinely serve human wellbeing?
This isn’t about whether AI is good or bad, or whether you should adopt it or resist it. Instead, we’re offering a frame to help you navigate AI thoughtfully—particularly when designing strategies, services, and systems where lives and trust are at stake.
The Algorithmic Nature of Making
Artificial intelligence operates through algorithms that learn from data. As inputs grow, the algorithm adjusts. It’s pattern recognition at scale—and that’s precisely where the parallel to design thinking becomes revealing.
Corporate design thinking approaches have long been criticized for their reliance on rigid frameworks and standardized tools. While helpful for bringing non-designers into the process, these methods can create what we might call “algorithmic thinking”: identify a pattern, program for that pattern, pursue consistent outcomes.
Apply the framework. Generate the output. Repeat.
This works—until it doesn’t. When you need a playbook you can replicate across contexts, frameworks deliver. But designing for living systems—organizations, communities, teams navigating complexity—demands something more adaptive.
AI promises us repeatable models. The question is whether repeatability serves your purpose.
From Algorithm to Intention
Not all frameworks are prescriptive. The Design Helix, for instance, is meant to be descriptive—a guide for those learning to design within complex systems, not a rigid set of steps to follow.
The risk with prescriptive approaches is that they miss the messy, inconvenient aspects of human systems. These are the parts that don’t fit neatly into sellable models, the dimensions where systems thinking reveals complexity that resists standardization.
There are certainly contexts where repetition has value. Enterprise service design often requires consistency. But as chef David Chang noted in a conversation with Guy Kawasaki, most great food experiences don’t scale. Chang believes that the very nature of a memorable, quality food experience isn’t amenable to scaling. The same holds for strategies and services designed for human wellbeing.
What AI offers is the design equivalent of fast food.
That’s not inherently problematic—if fast food is what you’re designing for. But strategy is about intention. Understanding yours matters more than ever.
The Craft of Strategic Design
Here’s where AI falls short: it can’t support the craft of design.
Making something meaningful requires care, reflection, and attention that generative prompts can’t replicate. While there’s skill in prompt engineering, it remains relatively flat—a unidimensional interaction with a tool. Strategic design demands engagement with people, ideas, tensions, and possibilities.
We grow through the thinking and making. This evolution grants deeper insight into what we create and why it matters. We’ve seen it repeatedly: leaders inherit programs they barely understand, tasked with enhancing or evaluating work whose foundations remain opaque to them.
Craft is the skill required for making things—but it’s also what you become through the act of making. Family physicians understand which aspects of their practice are more algorithmic and where artistry emerges. In complex systems, that distinction becomes critical.
If you’re using AI in your strategic work, recognize that the skill development and systemic insight will be limited. This isn’t about the quality of AI-generated content—sometimes it’s perfectly adequate for the task. But in dynamic, uncertain conditions where adaptation matters, algorithms will always follow you based on the past.
Only humans have the imagination to envision potential futures and design toward them.
That’s where strategic design lives.
Designing With Intention in an AI World
The emergence of AI doesn’t diminish the need for thoughtful design—it amplifies it. As these tools become ubiquitous, the capacity to think strategically about what to make, why to make it, and how it will evolve becomes more valuable, not less.
The question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s whether you’re building the capacity to design with intention, humility, and systems awareness—regardless of your tools.
At Cense, we help organizations develop this capacity through strategic design, systems thinking, and evaluation practices that support learning and adaptation. If you’re navigating how AI fits into your strategic work—or questioning how to maintain craft and intention amid technological change—let’s have a conversation.
Book a coffee chat and we’ll explore what strategic design might look like in your context.