BEIJING: ZCOOL, a leading Chinese design community, hosted the 2025 ZCOOL Design Week, where nearly a thousand designers shared their insights and engaged in discussions centered on the question: Will AI replace designers?

At the heart of the 2025 ZCOOL Design Week was the unveiling of the annual Top 100 Design List, with AI-driven projects emerging as the standout theme across a variety of fields, from AI short films and interactive installations to stage design concepts, consumer electronics, and transportation. Among the notable highlights were Dave Decides to Jump into the Sea, an AI-generated short film that received the Most Commercial Potential Award in the AIGC Film Unit of the 15th Beijing International Film Festival; the ”Shining Hat” Projection Mapping Show at the Osaka World Expo; the ”Dream Recorder”, an AI-integrated bedside device combining hardware and artistry; the Pixboom Spark, hailed as the world's first back-side illuminated high-speed cinema camera; and the inaugural one-touch takeoff flying car, backed by Elon Musk.

To further support designers in adapting to AI-augmented workflows, ZCOOL also launched a dedicated AI design agent, enabling creators to build and customize efficient workflows tailored to specific production needs.

The 2025 ZCOOL Design Week also unveiled a series of forward-looking industry predictions, suggesting a shift toward "anti-AI creation" as an emerging trend, the potential resurgence of “handcrafted design” as a new form of luxury, and designers should pivot from selling their “outputs” (design works and copyright materials) to commercializing their generative “inputs” (models and prompts).

Global industry leaders, including Adobe and Figma, are actively advancing the integration of AI into design. According to industry data, AI adoption within the design sector reached 85.8% in 2025, reflecting a significant increase of 23.7% from the previous year. The rate of AI deployment in actual production projects and the frequency of its daily use have both significantly increased.

Fonte: Business Wire