讓創作更有人性：從 Config India 帶走的 4 個啟示

Earlier this month, almost 5,000 product builders gathered in Bengaluru for Figma’s first-ever Config India

Build by design: New workflows for new ways of building

Here’s a look at everything we launched today to bring teams and agents, and the design, code, and context they work with, into Figma’s full-stack creative canvas.

. Design practitioners from all over the world joined us onstage to share what matters most in creative work now that AI’s part of the process. Here’s how four Config India speakers bring taste, care, and lived experience into everything they make.

Taste happens in the half pixels

For artist-turned-product designer Ashish Kashyap, design comes to life in the details. His work happens on a small scale, from his highly detailed NFTs he calls TinyRooms to Pikaicons, his expansive library of hand-drawn SVG icons for Figma and React.

Tiny details can make or break his work. When he’s working on a 24x24 pixel icon, a slight adjustment can change the whole design: Shift a corner radius or a line by just a hair and an edge becomes clearer, a shape becomes more recognizable. He gives an example: “I made this trash can icon, and customers thought it was a man wearing a hat—the lid became the hat and the details became the eyes.” So he returned to the tiny design. “Just a half pixel [can do] so many things,” he notes. “It started looking like a dust bin.” After years of refining his judgment, his surgical edits are critical to making the work feel coherent and complete.

“I call it sculpting,” he says. “You have to chip away a lot of details.”

Ashish sometimes uses AI for a v1 of a new icon, but each result still needs careful tweaking. He doesn’t want the work to be recognizably AI-generated, and needs everything to look and feel like a Pikaicon, down to the pixel. For Ashish, that attention to detail remains an essential part of creating: noticing what feels off, understanding why, and caring enough to change it. “I love to imagine there’s somebody zooming into my files, looking at those icons, and saying, ‘Oh, somebody took care [designing] this,’” says Ashish. “That means a lot to me, and that’s a huge part of what drives me.”

Evoking emotion takes a few bad ideas

Even a joke has to be carefully designed to be one that resonates. Soren Iverson, designer and founder of the creative studio IVERSON, encourages people to take their “dumb” seriously. Soren is known for his satirical takes on familiar products: a version of Spotify with an age limit for trendy music, a dating profile that uses augmented reality, a multiplayer alarm app that wakes up all your friends at once. What started with a few funny ideas turned into a design practice geared at making people laugh. At the same time, there’s a “thin line to dance between absurd and real utility,” he notes, and evoking an emotional response from someone requires precision. “The grounding principle throughout a lot of this work is that it's close enough to reality to feel plausible,” Soren says.

Now, AI prototyping tools have allowed Soren to carry his ideas from concepts into working products, like a competitive step-tracking game called Stompers. “Instead of having to stop with a static mock-up in Figma, I was able to actually build the prototype entirely,” he says. But for Soren, coming up with an idea—especially a playful one—has to come from makers, not AI. “Our job is to pull things into existence that didn't exist before, to really put forth new ideas, to fail, to ask why, to create clarity, to make space for the people around us to put forth ideas,” he says. “At times that looks like pursuing an idea that feels outlandish.”

Soren believes the best ideas come about through collaboration. “Bringing your coworkers or peers along for the ride really allows people to feel more comfortable…putting bad ideas on the table. Then we can reverse engineer those into good ideas.”

A strong brand tells its own story

Fashion designer Masaba Gupta built her clothing and accessories brand, House of Masaba, around bold prints and colors that blend traditional fabrics with modern sensibility. Above all, her goal for the brand is a clear identity. For a piece to be included in her collection, it needs to capture House of Masaba’s recognizable aesthetic. “The storytelling and the language [of the work] have to be the same,” Masaba says. “I call it a ‘body language.’ Every brand has a body language, and that body language cannot change.”

For Masaba, it’s never been more important to make her work distinct because AI makes it easier for competitors to borrow from the look and feel of an established brand. Her response is to lean into the specificity of her taste: “In this age that we’re living in, there’s too much of the same thing. And in a time like that, you have to protect your aesthetic even more.”

Those specifics often stem from personal experiences. “Our childhood, our surroundings, our challenges, our deepest fears, our vulnerabilities and how we react to them [are what] shape taste.” Those experiences become a basis for her decisions about color, form, and presentation. For example, Masaba shares that she prefers pink to yellow because of how she’s experienced those colors, whether that’s shaped by her culture, what she sees on a daily basis, or even how her parents would dress when she was growing up. Her point of view is uniquely hers, not something AI can replicate.

AI doesn’t always have the answer

For Daisuke Sakai, Co-founder at interdisciplinary art collective teamLab, AI is a powerful tool “as long as we know exactly what we want to make.” Daisuke studied robotics and AI, and now is exploring what it means to be a maker today—and where to use (or not use) AI. “AI makes this era an exciting moment to be a maker, to be a builder, to be a designer,” he says. “We can generate images and turn an idea into something tangible much faster than before.” At the same time, he explains, we first have to ask ourselves what’s worth making. “As long as we know the answer, we can ask AI to make it,” Daisuke says. “But at teamLab, [sometimes] we do not know the answer in advance.”

teamLab, The Infinite Crystal Universe, © teamLab

He uses teamLab’s immersive digital art installation, The Infinite Crystal Universe, as an example. The installation uses tens of thousands of LED light strips suspended from the ceiling inside a mirror-lined room. For Daisuke, this is an example of where the team couldn’t use AI. Prompting “Show a room filled with LED lights” would have produced a result fast, but one that lacked a clear intention—because the intention didn’t exist yet. How should the lights reflect depth? How should they move? And how should they make a visitor feel? These are the questions that actually bring art to life, and AI can’t always answer them for us.

“Making is an accumulation of these countless decisions,” Daisuke says. “The questions we ask can change everything about the result.”

Watch all of the Config India talks, and read about everything we launched.