The Value of Process and Artefact

• Oct 20, 2026
• Blog
• 4 minutes reading time

This isn’t a new argument. Coming from a design background, it’s one I’ve lived with throughout my career. A designer’s craft is in the process – the decisions made, the context understood, the nuances navigated. Clients, almost universally, want the artefact, getting them to value the process is a constant negotiation. AI has thrown this into sharp relief, because now the process can be almost entirely bypassed. Type a prompt, get an artefact. What’s missing is everything that went into knowing what designing the 'right thing' should be.

The hamburger problem

Two hamburger patties might look identical as artefacts. Same weight, same grade, same appearance. But the process that produced them – one through a factory farm, one through an organically raised, pasture-fed animal – couldn’t be more different. The entire experience of a life is embedded in that process, invisible in the artefact.

That said we still tend to place more value in the artefact over process. Our desire is sated by the thing, not in how it got here or the time that went into it. By doing this on societal level we’ve made entire species extinct, destroyed landscapes through overfishing and overfarming, and collapsed natural systems that took millions of years to evolve. Nothing sums this up more starkly than the near-total destruction of the American bison – and the cascading destruction of the peoples and landscapes that had evolved alongside them over millennia. The artefact (the hide, the meat) was valued. The process – the ecosystem, the relationship, the system of life – was not.

The Luddites understood this, and they’ve been misrepresented ever since. Their objection wasn’t to technology itself. It was to what the introduction of machinery did to the process – to the livelihoods, families, and communities that had grown up around the weaving towns. They saw that the process had value, and that destroying the process destroyed something real, even if the artefact kept being produced.

Where capitalism comes in

The reason so much design is AI slop right now is not simply that people are lazy or don’t care about craft. It’s that the means of production – the designer, the process – have become unaffordable in a context where every other cost has risen. The restaurant that needs a menu can’t pay for a designer, because the food costs more, the rent costs more, the staff costs more. So they get the artefact from a prompt. The process disappears not because it has no value, but because the monetary system we use to assign value can’t hold all the values at once.

This is the core problem: we’ve displaced a value system with a single value, a simple economic register. The dollar is the only measurement instrument we now use. Yet, a process that cares for the world – for the workers in it, the environment around it, the community it operates within – has value that the dollar doesn’t capture. It might cost more in monetary terms, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth less. The dollar doesn't capture anything beyond itself – it is a method of trade and exchange, not of value capture, and certainly not one that is multifaceted.

Not a binary, but a cycle

The answer isn't to simply prioritise process over artefact, or vice versa. We are fools for thinking this is a static choice. It’s a dynamic and genuinely conflicting tension that needs to move – a cycle where we shift emphasis between the two depending on context, consequence, and what’s actually at stake.

What goes wrong is when we get stuck, when the artefact becomes the only thing that matters, the process gets hollowed out, and with it the systems, relationships, and care that the process was sustaining. We’ve seen this play out at every scale – from individual design briefs to industrial agriculture to global supply chains. At the same time if we only consider the process, we can miss out on a fairer distribution of artefacts – incredibly important when those artefacts are food, shelter and sustenance. We need a more nuanced approach that takes into account the sacrifices of value across the system.

The solution isn’t a single correct weighting. It’s developing the capacity to hold multiple values at once – to see that a process can be valuable in ways that don’t reduce to cost, and that an artefact can be meaningful beyond its price. Getting away from the monopoly of monetary value as the only lens through which we judge things is probably one of the more important cultural shifts we could make.

AI makes this urgent. Not because it’s new, but because it accelerates the existing tendency to value the artefact and discard the process – faster, at greater scale, with less friction than anything before it.

• Tim Klapdor
• Adelaide, Australia
• posts