GenZedong

I've written some of my own here: https://criticalresist.substack.com/t/design

Otherwise much of it will be learned through practice and solving real problems. Design thinking is the fundamental basis of all design imo, it's really where people should start. Then in each step, you can use certain tools to help achieve results.

If you are ready to join ProleWiki, we could definitely let you get started on designing stuff for real problems we face. Though just to clear that up, I'm not the one that decides who gets an account haha.

AI can also help, but it's a crapshoot. Sometimes if you prime it correctly it can come up with amazing results, and sometimes it's barely coherent. Tell the AI to act like a designer you hired as an advisor to help with X problem (describe the problem) and, still in the initial prompt, ask it to first tell you about the design thinking method and send that. It will explain it just fine, but the real value afterwards is going into each step individually, taking as much time as you need for each, and basically get the AI to pull you through from start to finish. To do that you need to send something (in the 2nd prompt) like "you are now going to help me through each step of the design process. We will go through each step one by one, taking as much time as we need every time, and I will let you know when I am ready to move on to the next step so there's no need to ask or decide for yourself. I will decide when I'm ready to move on. Secondly, I don't know anything about design, so I'm counting on you to guide me through everything and speak to me as someone who wants to learn, but simply doesn't know"

In each step of the thinking process there are certain tools you can use, such as brainstorming sessions in the ideation step, or empathy mapping in the empathy/understanding phase. There's no trick to it, you have to use the tool to become comfortable with it and only then will you be able to say if it's prescribed for the problem you are solving or not. You can ask the AI to name these tools and methods and describe them to you too.

But like I said, solve real projects even with the AI. I've never liked fake projects because, well, you know they're fake. You're finished with them and they disappear. You can't measure impact, and usually the problem of the project is given to you (or conversely you don't have enough information to start with). To me, making things look pretty like you might see in visual or web design is secondary to the actual point, which is communicating something and solving a problem. The ribbon UI in the Office Suite for example is ubiquitous now, but the problem wasn't "we want to make our UI look different and pretty so that it looks good on screenshots", the problem was, "we've got too much shit to show the user and they have to look in sub-menus hidden in sub-menus hidden in sub-menus. How can we make that easier on them?"

The real skill of design tbh is twofold: verbalizing the problem, and then uncovering the solution.