Figma CDO Loredana Crisan on AI, taste, and keeping humans in the loop

In a conversation with It's Nice That, Loredana Crisan, Figma's chief design officer, shared insights on the company's stance towards AI, prioritisation, and fostering a creative environment. Having joined Figma in September after nearly ten years at Meta, Crisan spoke during the annual Config conference in San Francisco in late June, where new features like Figma Motion, Code Layers, and AI-enhanced custom plug-ins were unveiled. She asserted that AI should support human creativity rather than supplant it, emphasizing that authentic creativity stems from a perspective that AI cannot mimic. Crisan characterized prioritisation as "an art that we pretend is a science" and stressed the necessity of early prototyping to help ideas achieve "escape velocity." She also highlighted the need for designers to adapt to non-deterministic systems due to AI's unpredictability, discussing the last-minute planning of Config, the challenge of balancing feedback, and the importance of empathy and nurturing talent as vital skills.