Empathic Intelligence?

Although it might sound counter-intuitive - designing in the age of AI requires an equally critical focus on what machines cannot do, and maybe can NEVER do. AI liberates us to focus on embracing tactility, meaningful storytelling, human interactions, imaginative leaps. All of this is bound together with a precise and necessary focus on empathy and its role in society. 

While AI has revolutionized many aspects of design, it remains fundamentally limited in capturing and conveying tactility. Digital tools can simulate textures and materials, but the nuanced, sensory-rich experience of physically interacting with a design—how a surface feels under the fingers, how weight shifts in the hand—is something AI cannot truly replicate because it is not haptically understood. This limitation offers designers an opportunity to emphasize haptic experiences in their work, ensuring that design continues to engage not just the eye but the entire body. By focusing on materiality, craft, and physical interaction, designers can push beyond AI’s capabilities and reinforce the importance of human presence in creative processes.

Deep storytelling and the subtleties of human interaction present another challenge. While machine learning models can generate narratives, they lack lived experience, cultural intuition, and an understanding of human foibles—the irrational decisions, emotional contradictions, and spontaneous leaps of thought that shape real stories. To badly quote the overused meme “Until computers learn to hate themselves, they will never really write good stories”. Designers working in social or speculative design can use this gap to their advantage, crafting experiences that center emotional complexity and ambiguity rather than predictability. By weaving in humour, doubt, and imperfection, designers can create work that resonates on a profoundly human level, making space for interpretations and conversations that AI cannot anticipate.

Perhaps AI’s most significant limitation lies in its inability to experience empathy or take imaginative leaps untethered from existing data. While it can remix and optimize, true creativity often emerges from intuition, dreams, and the ineffable connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. Designers can harness this uniquely human capacity to envision radical futures, question societal norms, and engage in speculative design that challenges assumptions. In this way, design remains an inherently human endeavor—one that thrives on unpredictability, care, and an understanding of the world that transcends mere computation.

And so, especially writing this on MORPHIQ’s home page might feel wrong it is actually so, so right on another level.