Critiques are the lifeblood of design. Anyone who went to design school has participated in and has been the focus of a crit. It’s “the intentional application of adversarial thought to something that isn’t finished yet,” as Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, the editors of DOC put it.

A lot of solo designers—whether they’re a design team of one or if they’re a freelancer—don’t have the luxury of critiques. In my view, they’re handicapped. There are workarounds, of course. Such as critiques with cross-functional peers, but it’s not the same. I had one designer on my team—who used to be a design team of one in her previous company—come up to me and say she’s learned more in a month than a year at her former job.

Further down, Teixeira and Braga say:

In the age of AI, the human critique session becomes even more important. LLMs can generate ideas in 5 seconds, but stress-testing them with contextual knowledge, taste, and vision, is something that you should be better at. As AI accelerates the production of “technically correct” and “aesthetically optimized” work, relying on just AI creates the risks of mediocrity. AI is trained to be predictable; crits are all about friction: political, organizational, or strategic.