I’m teaching this pilot coding course for designers, and I’ve been surprised by something I wasn’t expecting when I planned the course.

The students in the class are making stuff that is really playful and fun, and it seems like they’re having a ball doing it. They’re trying out wacky animations, stretching toward different aesthetics from retro to casual game to Rams, putting sound effects to their interactions, building things with full interactive states.

They’re responding to simple project prompts in an environment where they’re wrangling code with some of the most playful work I’ve ever seen come out of a design class. Less of the bleak sameness that tends to be the center of gravity for professional product design, and more exploration.

Why am I surprised by this? I think this is challenging some of my assumptions. In my experience, when working with code, especially as beginners, designers tend to play it safe. Poking and learning the limits of the system. I’ve read nearly two decades’ worth of hand-wringing criticism about how working directly in code limits creativity and blinds you to possibilities that only a design canvas might open up.

What do I think might be going on? Well I don’t know but I have a few guesses.

For one thing, these designers are building something real, but they’re not doing everything by hand—they have an LLM tool at their side, which has deep training data and pattern recognition for syntax and code structures, which which they can express ideas in natural language and reasonably expect some pattern matching to translate between their ideas and code. I can’t imagine completely what that feels like for a designer right now, but I’m fascinated to see it in action.

I also think that because they’re pushed outside of the normal comfort zone of designers—tools like Figma—and are aware that they’re learning without the expectation of knowing everything, they’re giving themselves more permission to play. Forget about design, as a teacher, if I get to see learners feel like the “work” part is slipping away, and they have permission to really play—that’s a great day. For any teacher.

Anyway, I’m excited to check out what they’re sharing in Discord every day, and just so curious to see how their work and thinking develops. It’s time for some new blood, energy, and thinking out there, and I enjoy my role the most when I simply get to sit back and appreciate the exploration.