CONCEPT
Showing in Design
The Ludwig Wittgenstein — On AI volume's Chapter 9 argument that the quality dimensions of design — spaciousness, responsiveness, rightness — belong to the domain of showing, not saying, and that the AI language interface creates the first channel through which showing enters the computational process.
Every design review contains a moment where someone says something that cannot be converted into a specification. It doesn't feel right. The flow is off. The hierarchy is aggressive. These are pointings at qualities of experience. They do not describe properties of code. The code might be entirely correct and the design might still not feel right, because feeling right is not a formal property. It is a quality recognizable to practitioners who have trained their perception. For fifty years, the formal interface was structurally deaf to what was shown. The language interface begins to close this gap — not by making the unsayable sayable, but by allowing the showing to enter the communicative channel between human and machine.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The designer who tells Claude I want this to feel spacious but not empty; the text should breathe, the hierarchy should be obvious without