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Should I design for humans or machines?
Future UX design systems will need to support both human interpretation and machine-readable specifications, as AI becomes a critical "user" requiring explicit structure and logic.
What: Design systems are evolving beyond human-centered documentation to accommodate AI and machine "users," necessitating two parallel layers: descriptive guidance for humans and precise, executable, machine-readable specifications defining design decisions and behaviors.
Why it matters: The increasing integration of AI into design and development workflows means that design artifacts and systems must become consumable by algorithms, pushing designers to think about explicit logic and structure in addition to aesthetics and usability for human users.
Takeaway: Consider how your design system documentation could be structured to be machine-readable, potentially by using more explicit component properties, tokens, and logic that AI tools could interpret and generate from.
Original article
UX and design systems are evolving from being built solely for human interpretation to also serving AI and machine “users,” exposing how traditional, flexible, human-centered documentation often fails when machines require explicit structure, logic, and rules. Future design systems will need two parallel layers: descriptive guidance for humans and machine-readable specifications that define decisions, constraints, and behaviors in precise, executable formats.
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