Elizabeth Lin: Rethinking design education in the age of AI

0:01Not understanding what's happening is really frustrating and navigating that ambiguity is really frustrating. And so a lot of what I've been trying to help students understand is how to get out of that mindset and keep pushing forward until you solve the problem or come back to it later. I think the pushing through is one of the hardest parts.

0:22Have you played around with Cursor? If not, it's definitely time. Designers with no coding skills are passing Cursor their Figma files and getting working apps out on the other side. And if you have no design to work with, you can just prompt this AI-powered development environment to get a solid prototype of your idea. Elizabeth Lin, founder of Design as a Party, recognizes that Cursor is going to expand the capabilities of designers. She's built a course that introduces designers to Cursor and challenges you to build while you design. We talk with Elizabeth about how she's using AI tools like Cursor to help designers prototype faster than ever before.

1:03Why she thinks now might be the perfect time to try something new in your career. What's missing from traditional design education? Elizabeth also shares what she's learned about vibe coding, why debugging is the hardest skill for new students to master, and how she's building a business around the idea that learning should feel more like a party than work. By the way, you may have heard that we just launched the Design Better Toolkit, a collection of resources that we love and use regularly. The toolkit gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

1:37And one of Elizabeth's courses, Prototyping with Cursor, just happens to be part of this bundle. You're going to get$100 off her course, as well as a$500 credit towards Airtable, discounts on read.ai, perplexity, and other tools, and discounts on other courses from platforms like Shift Nudge from our friend MDS. To get access, you'll need to be a Design Better premium member at the annual subscription level. Visit dbtr.co slash toolkit to learn more and take your career further. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter.

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3:18We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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4:29And now, back to the show.

4:36Elizabeth Lynn, welcome to Design Better. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, we're excited about what you're doing. You've been doing a lot of stuff with AI, vibe coding. You've got a background in computer science and you're bringing that together with design and education. Maybe you could give us the quick tour of how you got to this intersection that you're at today. So I guess the short version of the story is a couple of years ago, I left my full-time job as a product designer and I decided to follow my dream of becoming a full-time design educator by starting my own design school. It's currently called Design is the Party.

5:16I recently started teaching a course called Prototyping with Cursor because I found that Cursor and other AI tools were really exciting to use as a designer. They really helped me be more creative and helped me build really cool things. And with my background in computer science, I was like, I think I know enough computer science. I remember enough computer science to make it easier for non-developers to pick up. We'll come back, I think, to your background and how you got into design. Because, again, you started in computer science. But just because I think it's on a lot of folks' minds, certainly Aaron and I have been playing around and using these tools a lot to build actual products.

5:55Talk to us about Cursor. How did you happen upon it? how to use it in your workflow, and then you can maybe speak to the course itself too. Yeah, sure. So I started experimenting with Cursor late last year. I was building some random side projects, and I found it really helpful in making some of my very difficult to accomplish implementations become a reality. So one of the specific things I made was this design quiz that would tell designers what their design aesthetic was. And I had this dream of making like a constellation with stars that would connect depending on where you fit in on different axes.

6:33And I really didn't want to do math. And so I basically asked Kirsten, I was like, hey, can you do this? I sent screenshots and kind of explained how it should work. And after a few tries, it worked. And I was like, whoa, this is so cool. And being able to accomplish something I normally wouldn't be able to and make my dreams become a reality really made me feel like I was building websites in Neopets as a kid, it kind of had that same feeling to me. And so that was really my aha moment. And why Cursor rather than other tools? There are things like Replit and others out there. What does Cursor bring to you that maybe other tools don't?

7:11Cursor, for me personally, wasn't as scary because I've used a lot of code editors before. And so I think I was to that format. And it felt like I had more freedom and flexibility and less stuff was hidden behind a black box. And out of all the tools I tried at the time, it seemed to have the best results for trying creative ideas. I could type really vague prompts and it wouldn't necessarily silo me into using a popular design system like ShadCN. It would actually do creative things. Like I told it to make a hover state for a button because I didn't really feel like thinking about it. And then it put like shooting stars across the button using the sparkle component I'd put somewhere else.

7:53And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. And so I started iterating on it more based on what it had created and the creativity really stood out to me. I was using Claude for the model back then. So for somebody who's got more of a design background and starting to just dabble more in the code side of things, what are some recommendations for you around just kind of dipping your toes in the water? I think there's tools like Claude where you can actually deploy a little app, we've used it before, like make this spinner for a workshop or something like that that can just deploy directly as an artifact.

8:22But if you are trying to make something more complicated, like an app, where should somebody get started to just understand how to start using these tools? I think there are a lot of those zero to one tools that really go pretty far. So Claude does this, v0 does this, Lovable, there's so many out there. They're honestly all pretty similar, and they do a great job of putting together the overall architecture and structure of a project for you so that if you do want to bring it into a code editor like Cursor, it is not as scary and you don't have to think about like, how is this getting made? What should I tell Cursor to do?

8:57Because all the structural aspects will be there. And so I think I'd recommend trying those out a little bit. People like different ones, so it really depends on what your style is. All the vibe coding stuff that I've done, I've done it through language. I'm describing what I want to essentially get functionality and then I have enough skills coding that I'm sort of designing it in code. But you talked about uploading screenshots to give the thing an idea. To what degree is that possible these days? If we're designing a totally complete UI and then we're bringing that to cursor and saying, please build this out, what are the possibilities right now?

9:36I think the possibilities keep growing every day, but if you paste in a screenshot of a pretty standard mock-up that doesn't do anything too chaotic or out of bounds, it will usually get it pretty okay. For example, if you wanted to generate a basic landing page based on a screenshot, it could probably do that pretty well. It does get pretty overwhelmed with too much context, and so sometimes you do have to start smaller. Now with MCP servers, you're able to connect these agents to Figma so that they can talk to Figma, and the accuracy is a lot higher. It still gets stressed out with a lot of context, which I think will improve soon.

10:14But it's very good at implementing a button at C's or a hero image. And then you can kind of build up from there and get pretty far. Talk to us more about the MCP server for folks that aren't familiar, like me. Yeah, it's a very hot topic right now. And I feel like I'm still learning about it every day. But I think the short explanation is right now, tools like Cursor, they can't see what's happening in a Figma file. So if you send a link to it, it won't see the file like you do. And so MCP servers allow these tools to communicate with each other. And so Figma's MCP server will allow Cursor to get the code from the Figma file that's generated with dev mode.

10:56And it will also get the variables in the frame that you have selected. And it'll also get a screenshot of the frame that you have selected in Figma. And so with all that context, it helps Cursor kind of understand what you want to build better and implement it to the best of its ability. So that stands for model context protocol? Yeah, model context protocol, yes. So it's essentially just giving more context to the model than you might otherwise give it. Exactly. This is kind of amazing stuff where we start to glue all these things together. How's this change in the way that designers design and developers develop?

11:33up? That's the question that everyone has been asking me right now. And I think we're currently in like such an early phase that my answer has been, I don't know, we're like figuring it out. I know a lot of design teams are currently trying to train their designers on using tools like cursor and they're building kind of like a playground environment within their teams so that designers can build prototypes in a playground code environment and create interactive click throughs using those components. So it's kind of like separate from the actual code base because it doesn't have all the other components that engineers might need.

12:10And so they're able to create prototypes with more of a playground environment. So I think designers are going to be able to create more interactive prototypes more quickly, and maybe their designs won't always live in static mockups anymore because it's so easy to prototype a cool idea really, really fast. You described this as click-throughs, which is the type of prototyping that we've been using for many years now. And those just seem so primitive compared to what is possible now. Like, if you're connecting Figma directly with something like Cursor, you're not just building click-through prototypes.

12:47Like, you've got functioning forms and interactive menus and state and all kinds of different possibilities with the UI. Yeah, exactly. So think about two years from now. What do you think will be different about the way that people build products? So if we just put to the side the role of a designer, put to the side the role of an engineer, and we just say people who are making products, two years from now, if things are moving as they are, or maybe they move exponentially faster, what does that look like from your perspective? I hope that people build things faster and try new ideas faster. I think this was true even before AI tools started getting really popular.

13:34But I think with AI tools, teams can iterate faster, get feedback faster from users, and the cycles will all be faster. It's faster to generate ideas and see what's possible. And so I think product teams who are adopting this will learn faster and be able to learn more quickly with what they're doing. Where do some of your students or people that are just getting into this, where do you find that they get stuck and how do they get unstuck? I ran a beta version of this course to test that exact question before I made it more public. And the biggest thing that people got stuck on was actually debugging.

14:13I think as someone who studied computer science, I didn't realize how useful that skill is, just getting unstuck in general. So I spent a lot more time trying to figure out like, okay, here are some strategies for what to do when you don't know what's happening. And a lot of times students will still rely on me to give the answer. But I've been trying to train them to like, okay, here are some ways you can try to figure out what the actual problem is. And then maybe talk to the agent to figure out how to solve the problem. And I think getting in that mindset is really hard because not understanding what's happening is really frustrating.

14:47and navigating that ambiguity is really frustrating. And so a lot of what I've been trying to help students understand is how to get out of that mindset and keep pushing forward until you solve the problem or come back to it later. I think the pushing through is one of the hardest parts. I've found with a lot of AIs that there's this recursive loop of regression sometimes where it figures something out and then it regresses back to a previous iteration or challenge. Granted, I've done a lot of vibe coding stuff with ChatGPT, so I'm sort of going between my development environment and an AI back and forth versus cursor, where it's like everything in one place, and it can see everything and keep track of things better.

15:31Do you find that happens where it's like this regression? All the time. I think someone told me once it's like working with a junior engineer, where it's like if they have too much information, they'll get confused and overwhelmed. And so knowing how much context to give agents at different times is a pretty difficult skill to learn, but you learn through trial and error. And so I always encourage students when something isn't working to start a new chat with zero context and then try asking again. Because sometimes it will get stuck on doing something it was doing before because that's what you asked it to do before.

16:01Sometimes I'll even say like, okay, you're getting confused. Let's start from scratch. Here's the current state that I have. here's the one thing I want to do. And I try to keep it simplified to like a single problem. My instincts are often like, I want to do this and this, and while you're at it, do this. Because in my human brain, those things are connected. But I have to whittle it down to a simple thing to make progress. That happens to me all the time. Sometimes I'll feel like, okay, let's try like these five bullet points and do them step by step. And then I'll do the first bullet point and forget about the rest.

16:37So doing one at a time definitely helps a lot. I wonder if there's instances, and I'll give a real world example here, but where the model might be hallucinating or providing an answer that's just way off base. So I'm in the process of building some landscape stairs outside and I had ChatGPT help me. I gave it sort of the rise over run of the distance of the stairs and helped me calculate and get materials lists. I did a pretty good job at that. But then I had a slight design change where I put a landing into the stair pattern and it could not understand that no matter what I did. I was like, how does this change the rise of a run?

17:10It's like, it does not change. It's just a pause. I'm like, no, it's actually longer than a natural. You know, I give it like drawings. I tried everything. It's like, no, no, there's no change. I'm like, I think you're wrong. So I'm just wondering, like, you know, you have a computer science background, so you might be able to sort of identify something where, okay, actually this is not taking the right approach here. But for somebody who doesn't have that background, would you recommend like, hey, try this in a different tool, cross-check it? What's your advice around that? There are a few different strategies.

17:37A lot of times I'll ask students to try switching to a different model. So sometimes if you try switching to a different model, the other model will figure it out. The models are constantly changing, but oftentimes I find that Cloud is more creative. Sometimes the OpenAI models are better at solving a really complex problem. It just really depends. And so switching the model is a great strategy. I've personally found that Cursor, for some reason, always agrees with me when I'm like, you're wrong. And sometimes I'm like, actually, I was wrong. It's randomly really positive. And I'm like, no, actually, I was wrong.

18:09They're like, you're right every time. It's just really funny to me. So I think that's definitely really hard because it's hard to know when the agent is wrong versus when you're wrong. And trying to figure that out is definitely something to learn. I find that, too. It's often just so agreeable. And I'm not even certain, like, am I asking the right question here? I find that sometimes my approach is to ask for the answer to a specific question versus saying, like, how should I approach this problem? And broadening or widening that aperture of the question. Do you have a strategy for how to prompt it and get the types of help you want?

18:47Yeah, a lot of times starting off with what do you think is wrong helps. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. Once you do, you'll get access to every full-length episode, all ad-free, monthly AMAs with inspiring people in design and tech, and recordings of all our past AMAs. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, just email us at subscriptions at the curiosity department dot com and we'll help you out. Your support makes design better possible.

19:27Invest in yourself and the design community by subscribing at design better podcast dot com.

19:41Design Better is supported by Framer. For years, shipping a website required a really complex process, maybe a team of people involved, and a launch could take weeks. But Framer changed all that math for me. Framer's a pro website builder with AI agents built right into the canvas. They draft pages, manage CMS content, handle all the SEO for you. You inspect it all, review it, edit, and decide what goes live. Agents bring the speed. You bring your own personal taste. That's why teams at Miro and Perplexity build on Framer. It's an incredible platform, builds production-ready sites, published in minutes, not days.

20:22Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building a site for free today at framer.com slash designbetter for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash designbetter for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. Design Better is supported by dupe.com. I was shopping for a couch a few weeks ago, and I found one. It had a beautiful shape, a perfect color, and then I saw the price, and I nearly closed my laptop. As a designer, I am super picky about form and materials, so, you know, cheap just isn't really an option for me. And that's the problem that dupe.com solves.

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21:42Elizabeth Lin:This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.