Figma co-founder Dylan Field seems to be a big fan of Enron — or rather, the cryptocurrency-fueled semi-parody reboot of the company that hit the web earlier this week.
Sporting an oversized Enron sweatshirt during his conversation with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Stephen Levy at The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Field said he’s always been a fan of the Enron logo, which is the last crafted by the legendary American graphic designer Paul Rand of ABC, IBM, UPS and Westinghouse logo fame. But he said he also “got a real kick out of” Enron’s potential relaunch, which is linked to “The Birds Are Not Real” creator Connor Gaydos. As someone who was just 9 years old when Enron collapsed in 2001, Field says he wonders (optimistically, it seems) whether it’s possible to build a new company on the back of the tarnished brand, given that his generation may not carry the kind of baggage associated with the company’s stumbles that others do.
Either way, it seems to be a matter of the power of design, something Field and Levy focused on more broadly as their conversation continued, talking not only about the creation and evolution of the Figma platform, but also where the co-founder sees the company will in the near future.
Currently, Field says, the company has “millions” of users, with a third coming from the design world, a third coming from the programming space, and a third coming from various other backgrounds. With Figma, he believes, brands and companies can express themselves visually much better than ever before by working together to understand faster what is graphically possible, what the best user experience is and how they can best stand out in the market.
But in an age when AI has the potential to make most things look at least reasonably good, Levy asked, how can companies using Figma hope to stand out? Field says the answer is not simply lowering the threshold to meet novice designers and programmers, something that has already been done with AI work, but “raising the ceiling” to help the pretty good designers and programmers to work beyond the previous limits of their skill sets.
The best designers, Field says, have the unique ability to manipulate interactivity, dynamics, movement and UX to create work that few others can encounter. With AI tools like the ones Figma has or will integrate, he hopes more people will be “limited more by their ideas than the tools in front of them,” ideally giving them a chance to match the work of some of the best designers in the world.
Although Field acknowledged the possibility of good design helping bad actors, citing a particularly well-designed magazine that ISIS released around 2014 or 2015. as an extreme use case, he says that all tools have the power to uplift people if done right.
“Most of the AI tools right now are about lowering the floor,” Field reiterated. “They aim to make it democratize and that’s great in a lot of ways, like talking to people who are generating diffusion pattern images and some of them are doing art therapy, which was never possible before .” Still, he added, it’s important to raise the ceiling. “That’s where a lot of our thinking is right now, and that’s where I hope we get to.”
