The Handwork Overcorrection: Why "Perfect" is About to Become Cheap

History proves that culture is a pendulum. The moment a technology perfects an aesthetic, we immediately reject it.

• When furniture manufacturing became factory-perfect (IKEA), the value of "Live Edge" wood skyrocketed.

• When music production became perfectly quantized (Auto-Tune), we started craving the crackle of vinyl and the drag of a live drummer.

We are about to see this exact overcorrection hit Product Design.

The Economics of "Flawless" Generative AI has democratized High Fidelity. Today, anyone can prompt a perfectly polished, mathematically correct interface in seconds. But Economics 101 teaches us that scarcity drives value.

When "Polished and Perfect" becomes abundant, it becomes cheap. When "Smooth" is the default, "Texture" becomes the luxury.

The Rise of "Digital Handwork" I believe the next wave of premium software won't differentiate on how sleek it is. It will differentiate on how human it feels. We will see a return to the Digital Handmade:

• Intentional Friction: Micro-interactions that feel heavy and mechanical, not just weightless and fast.

• Scuff Marks: Visual languages that embrace grain, noise, and asymmetry—proof that a human hand was involved.

• The "Un-Computed": Layouts that break the grid in ways an LLM would strictly classify as an "error."

The Principal's Role As Principal Designers, our job is usually to enforce the system. But in an AI world, the system is free. The new challenge for leadership is: Where do we intentionally break it?

How do we inject enough "human error" into the product to prove it wasn't made by a machine? Because in 2026, "Flawless" will just mean "Fake." And "Human" will be the ultimate premium feature.