As a design researcher, my job has always been to make thinking visible by closely listening to what people do, why they do it, and the systems and contexts that shape their decisions and behaviors. At YUX, that often means working across diverse African communities to understand deeply rooted behaviors and social dynamics while creating space for nuance and reflections.

But lately, I’ve found myself asking the question: In an age where generative AI can draft, decide, and even “reason” on our behalf, what happens to the human habit of thinking things through?

Over the past year, I’ve watched a vast majority of people (myself included) turn more often to generative AI for quick answers, faster synthesis, and creative shortcuts. It’s thrilling, convenient, and efficient. But it also makes me uneasy. Are we offloading not just the repetitive or rote parts of our work, but also the messy, reflective parts too? The parts where critical thinking actually happen

So I’ve been thinking about thinking, and about what it means to preserve critical thought in a time that constantly pushes us toward speed and quick results. More importantly, I’ve been thinking about how we might design systems and frameworks that teach critical thinking rather than bypass it.

That’s why I found a recent session at EPIC Learning Week presented by Michael Gerlich, Kirsten Bruckbauer, and Lindsey DeWitt Prat especially compelling. The session invited EPIC members to reflect on why and how we should preserve and value the rigor, discomfort, the time associated with critical thinking.

For me, the conversations we had during this session drove home the increasingly significant role design researchers must play in this age of generative AI. We’re not just insight gatherers or usability testers, we’re custodians of depth. While AI accelerates and automates many processes, it lacks the human instinct to pause, probe, and question assumptions. And this is precisely where our role becomes indispensable. We’re uniquely positioned to:

• Identify how and when cognitive offloading occurs in everyday tools and interactions – Design researchers notice what gets quietly outsourced when users rely on AI for tasks like drafting, summarizing, or ideating. By tracking these patterns, we can reveal where critical thinking is thinning out and use that insight to design tools, prompts, or experiences that re-engage users in deeper, more intentional thought.

• Embed cultural and contextual intelligence into AI – Ways of knowing are not universal. They’re shaped by culture, tradition, community consensus, spirituality, and intergenerational storytelling. Yet AI systems are trained primarily on Western worldviews, erasing these rich, context-specific logics. As researchers and ethnographers, especially those of us working across the Global South, we must be rooted in local realities and advocate for the inclusion of diverse epistemologies. Our role is to generate the data and insights that ensure AI reflects the full complexity of how people understand, decide, and act around the world.

• Design prompts, interfaces, and workflows that preserve ambiguity and encourage deliberate thought – In a world that is optimized for speed and clarity, ambiguity is often seen as a flaw. AI tools tend to offer quick, definitive answers which, in return, could discourage reflection. We can counter this by designing intentional pauses, open-ended prompts, or visual cues that invite users to sit with complexity rather than rush past it. By embedding these cues into AI systems, we help shift the experience from passive consumption to active reasoning.

• Push back against the cult of efficiency when needed, and instead design for complexity, discomfort, and depth – Speed can erase nuance and so as design researchers, we must know when to slow things down, when to dwell in complexity, invite discomfort, and make space for voices and insights that don’t fit neatly into fast workflows.

Ultimately, the value of design research doesn’t diminish in the AI era; it rather deepens. As more thinking is externalized to machines, our job is to guard and nurture the kind of human inquiry that machines can’t replicate: the careful, context-aware, often uncomfortable work of understanding. We need to make sure that in our pursuit of innovation, we don’t forget how to think.

EPIC Learning Week is our annual learning and career development event for EPIC Members. EPIC Members can participate in virtual EPIC events and watch premium video in the EPIC Library – including Learning Week, our annual conference, and selected Tutorials.

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