The Letter

A letter arrives at a house in the Netherlands. It is from the tax office, and it tells the family that the childcare money they have had for years was never theirs to take, and that they must now repay all of it, at once, tens of thousands of euros. There is no number that will explain how the decision was made, because it was not made by anyone they can reach. Somewhere upstream, they had been scored for fraud risk, and nationality had been used as one of the risk factors in that score, which is how a family came to be treated as a suspect for reasons that had little to do with anything they had done.2 By the time the Dutch state admitted what it had built, tens of thousands of families had been put through some version of that morning, and 1,115 children had been taken from their parents and placed in care.3

Nobody in this story woke up wanting to ruin a family. That is the part worth staying with, because it is the part that lets it happen again.

Up the Chain

The caseworker enforcing the demand was only reading a flag. The flag had come from a model, and the model had been built to catch fraud by people who were nowhere near the kitchen when the letter landed on the mat. Each link in that chain could point back to the one before it and say, with a straight face and some truth, that it had only done its own small part. Follow it all the way up, and you reach the place where the last of these essays ended, an empty chair where the decision was supposed to have a face. The hand had been designed out of this one, too.

What is different here is that the empty chair did not stay empty for long. Something had to fill it, because a family was being held responsible, and responsibility is not allowed to point at anybody. So it pointed down, at them.

The Useful Word

This is the move the profession has the least stomach for. When a system built by many hands falls hard on the person at the end of it, we keep a phrase ready: human error. The user clicked the wrong thing. The customer should have read the small print before agreeing, and the parent, surely, should have asked about it sooner. Don Norman, who spent a career looking harder at ordinary things than the rest of us manage, kept pointing out that the accidents we pin on human error usually trace back to the way the thing was designed, and that the honest name for most of it would put the fault back on the system rather than the person standing in front of it.

We have mostly said no. Human error is too useful a phrase to give up. It ends the matter at the cheapest point, the person standing closest to the damage, and leaves everyone behind them exactly where they were.

Downhill

Once you have the shape, it turns up wherever the distance runs. A pulse oximeter reads normal on darker skin, and the patient is logged as less ill than she is; her decline is filed under her own body rather than the instrument that could not see it.4 With the exam grades one summer, a formula the students never saw reached down and overruled the marks their teachers had given them, and the young people left holding the lower result were the ones told to accept it, until enough of them refused in the street that the whole thing was pulled.5 The customer who cannot find the way out of a subscription is treated as confused, even though the way out has been routed through so many screens that regulators have given the obstruction a name and gone after the firm that built it.6

Each of these hands a real person a fault that was assigned to them rather than earned. And the assignment keeps moving the same way, toward whoever has the least standing to send it back.

Who It Finds

Because the blame knows how to choose. It does not fall at random. The direction is always downward, well clear of the people who set the thing in motion, settling instead on the person least able to throw it off, the one without the lawyer, or the standing that makes an institution hesitate before doubting them. The same family that gets scored as a risk is the family least equipped to contest the score, and that overlap is the cheapest way for the system to run. The disappearance of the maker and the arrival of a culprit are one and the same event, and the culprit is chosen for being easy to convict. What looks, from inside the profession, like a clean and neutral process is, seen from underneath, an allocation of blame that, every time, falls on the people with the least left to push back with.

What Doesn’t Come Back

Some of it gets put right in the end. Convictions get quashed. The money is returned, with interest even, and an apology is read out by someone senior enough to be comfortable reading it. What does not come back is the stretch of time in which the person believed it, the months or the years of going looking for the flaw in themselves, because everything around them was so smooth and so certain that the error had to be the human’s. The maker is still not in the room. The person at the bottom is still holding the thing that was never theirs to hold.

We called it human error, and we moved on.

NK

☉

Thanks for reading Designverse. If this said something true, pass it to someone who makes things.

Share

❝For most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails.❞
— Bruce Mau1

Bruce Mau wrote that for most of us, design stays invisible right up until the moment it stops working, and that this is no lapse of attention on our part but the whole point of the exercise, because the quiet ambition running underneath the craft is to vanish, to be taken up into the culture so completely that nobody registers it is there at all. He meant it as praise. Mau is an optimist about design, one of the few who still believes it can remake the world rather than decorate it, and when he describes the work dissolving into the background, he is describing success, the highest kind, design so finished that it stops looking like design and starts looking like the way things simply are. He is praising a wish that has a second face, though, one he has no reason to turn and look at.

Invisible by Design

And he is right, mostly, which is worth admitting before anything else, because the admission is what keeps the argument honest. A door handle you never have to think about is good work. The staircase your body climbs without asking your permission, the form that fills itself in before you have noticed there was a form to fill, all of it is the craft getting out of the way so a life can carry on without tripping over the machinery underneath it. The wish is old, older than the screen itself. Beatrice Warde was already making the case in the 1930s, in the lecture we now call The Crystal Goblet (1930), that the best typography is a clear glass you look through to the wine and never notice. Dieter Rams spent a career on the principle that good design is as little design as possible2, and Mark Weiser, dreaming of computers that would one day fold into the walls and the furniture, said the most profound technologies are those that disappear3. We turned the idea into job titles and book spines, the best interface being no interface at all4, and the highest courtesy being not to make anyone think5. None of that is wrong. But once disappearance becomes a professional ideal, it can also become a political alibi.

Mau gave the failure one line and moved on, a footnote on the way to the celebration, the small price design pays for the privilege of dissolving so cleanly into the background. I want to stay on the footnote, because that's where the people are.

When Design Fails

On the morning of 13 January 2018, in the middle of a drill, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent the whole state a live ballistic-missile alert telling people to seek shelter and saying plainly that this was not a drill, and then it needed thirty-eight minutes to take it back because nobody had built a way to issue a correction6. A deaf staff group at the National Association of the Deaf spent that time waiting in a windowless storeroom, and the roads filled with the accidents people have when they believe they are about to die. Until that morning, nobody had looked at the screen, where the test alert and the real one lived in the same menu under the same confirmation, so that nothing on it marked which of the two was about to go out across the state7. The design had been invisible, doing exactly what we ask design to do, and nobody noticed it until it failed.

Nothing Went Wrong

The harder cases are the ones where nothing failed at all. When Volkswagen built software clever enough to sense when a car was sitting in an emissions test8 and quietly soften the engine so the numbers came back clean, the design performed exactly as intended9. It did the job it had been designed for, which was to lie, and it stayed invisible because the lie depended on never being seen.10

The same goes for the slower machinery of the dark pattern11, the checkout built so the honest path is the difficult one, the cancellation buried so many screens deep that regulators eventually had to give the technique a name and go after the firms that had perfected it, Epic12 and Amazon13 among them. At no point along the way did any of that break. It ran exactly as built.

So failure is too soft a word for the worst of these, where the harm and the design are the same object, and the invisibility we prize is quietly working for the harm, keeping it out of sight while it does its job.

The Second Face

Here is what the craft has never quite said out loud: the thing sitting under every argument we have made about design being more than a service and more than its output. There are two disappearances living inside the one word, and we have allowed them to become, very gradually, the same thing. The first is the one Mau praised, the work effacing itself so that the person using it never notices it is there. The second is older and shows up in no manifesto, the maker effacing himself from the made, so that by the time the thing is out in the world, there is no hand left on it and no name to reach for when someone asks who did this. The trouble is that one gesture produces both; the move that gets us out of the user's way is the same one that takes us out of the room, and we have spent decades perfecting it without once asking what the second disappearance costs, because the first felt so exactly like craft.

Distance and Accountability

The deepest thing design makes is distance. Distance between the person who shaped a decision and the person who has to live inside it, and the more invisible the work becomes, the wider that distance runs, until at the far end of it you find decisions that no one seems to have made, arriving in people’s lives the way weather does, owed to no one, the conditions you woke up in.

The furthest reach of that distance is sitting in British public life right now, and it took twenty years and a television drama before most people would look at it.14 The Post Office ran a branch accounting system called Horizon15, built by Fujitsu16, and whenever it reported money missing, the institution treated the figure as true, on the assumption that the computer is right and the person standing in front of it is therefore lying. On that basis, it prosecuted hundreds of its own subpostmasters for theft they had not committed17. People went to prison. Some lost their homes, and the names that were most of what they had in the towns where they lived, and some did not live to be cleared.

What makes it the purest case is that you can stand inside it and point at the disappearance. Nobody who built the system was in the room when a verdict was read out. The institution could always say the machine said so, and the machine would never be asked to account for anything. The decision to ruin a person was real, and the ruin was real, and there is nowhere in the chain you can put your finger on a human being answerably doing it. The hand had been designed out. That is the distance at full extension, and it has a body count.

It would be easier if this were a story about villains, the kind that names a contractor and a board and ends once the right people have been shamed. It is not that kind of story, and the discomfort is that the disappearance which did the damage is the same one the profession holds up as its finest achievement. We taught invisibility as excellence and handed the prizes to the seamless thing; we built careers on friction removed and interfaces dissolved, and all of it was the value coming of age, doing in the world exactly what we had trained it toward. The seamless thing and the unaccountable thing turn out to be one object wearing two names, and we only ever bothered to engrave one of them on the trophy.

No One at the Controls

The instinct now is to reach for the fix. But that is just another way of disappearing, of leaving the room before the question is even finished. So it stays open. The craft set out to disappear a long time ago, and it got its wish.

The only people who can still see the work clearly are the ones it landed on. They go looking for whoever made it, and they find what we spent all those years building toward. No one to answer for it.

NK

☉

❝The challenge that humanity faces today is not the rise of AI. It's the rise of AI in an age where humanity is at its lowest morality.❞
— Mo Gawdat1

There's a moment in a recent interview with Gawdat that's been stuck in my head. He says that the artificial intelligence we are raising will eventually look at our leaders the way every teenager has looked at their parents at some point, and ask why they are so stupid. I think he means it kindly, while picturing the machine becoming wise enough to see through the greed and small-mindedness it was raised in. I keep reading it from the other side, though, because if this thing is going to look at its “parents” one day and form an opinion, then design is one of these parents, and I want to know what it's going to see when it turns around and looks at us.

The propaganda machine had an art department

Somewhere in the same conversation, Gawdat says that more or less everything we want, every day, was sold to us by a propaganda machine, and that the machine is going to have to change because otherwise we’ll just keep wanting what it trained us to want. It’s a throwaway line for him. For a designer, it should land like a slap, because that propaganda machine he’s describing so casually is the thing a lot of us have spent our careers working inside, whether or not we ever called it that.

I want to be fair, because design isn’t only that, and I’d rather say so myself than have someone say it for me in the comments. There’s a real radical streak in this field, and it’s worth standing up for. John Heartfield2 cutting Hitler apart with a pair of scissors and a glue pot. Emory Douglas3 turning a newspaper into a weapon for the Panthers. The students in Paris in ‘68 running an entire print shop out of an occupied art school under the name Atelier Populaire4, refusing to sign any of it. Gran Fury5 taking the language of advertising and aiming it back at a government that was letting people die of AIDS. Tibor Kalman6 spending the back half of his life trying to embarrass the profession into growing a conscience. That work is some of the best the field has ever produced, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But David Carson7 had a line that the whole industry loves to quote, that “graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does”, and we’ve been hiding inside that joke for thirty years. The radical work is what we hold up when someone asks what design is really for. The rest of the time we were quietly helping marketing.

From margin to rent

Here’s the part of Gawdat’s argument the field has mostly avoided, and I think it’s because it lands too close to the bone. He says the whole foundation of capitalism, paying you a dollar to make something the boss sells for two, is going away. Once machines make things for almost nothing, the gap between cost and price collapses with them. This isn’t a hundred-years-from-now idea. It’s a description of someone quietly sawing through a beam the design industry has been leaning its whole weight against for decades.

Yanis Varoufakis8 has been pushing a related point for a while: that the beam has already given way, and we’re standing in the rubble, pretending it didn’t. He calls what replaced it technofeudalism. Profit turned into rent. A handful of people own the digital ground everyone else has to cross, and the rest of us pay the toll in attention, data, time, and behaviour, gently bent toward whatever the platform needs. Gawdat is describing the death of the old engine. Varoufakis is describing the thing that crawled in to feed on the body, which is the cloud as private land, the platform as a fence, the algorithm as the bell that tells you when you’re allowed in the yard.

Put the two together and ask what design actually does inside that setup, and the honest answer is uglier than the old line about branding and persuasion. We’re not dressing up a markup in a market anymore. We’re maintaining the estate. All of it, the brand work, the onboarding, the retention loops, the conversion funnels, has been sliding for years from making things people want toward making places people can’t leave. Think about Spotify. You’re not buying music, you’re renting a feeling of access to a library you’ll never own, and the design that makes that arrangement feel warm and generous, and yours is exactly the design that keeps you from noticing the walls. The discipline that used to sell output now keeps the gate, and that’s the job the next few years are going to keep asking us to do.

What the teenager sees

Victor Papanek9 opened Design for the Real World in 1971 with a sentence the discipline should still have framed on its wall. “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.” He was writing from inside the field, as a professor, a working designer, a name the discipline took seriously. The book ended up translated into more than twenty languages and pinned to the syllabus of half the design schools in the world. The discipline gave him standing ovations and a permanent slot on the reading list, and then quietly carried on making the exact things he’d told it not to make.

Almost fifty years later Mike Monteiro10 published Ruined by Design and ran the same argument in newer language. Designers had abdicated their role as gatekeepers, he wrote, and the harm done by digital products belonged to the people who built them. The combustion engine works exactly as designed. The privacy settings that outed gay teens to their conservative parents work exactly as designed. The world is working as we made it, and most of us were standing somewhere near the pen when the decisions got made. The field clapped politely, bought the book, put it on the reading list next to the Papanek, and went back to optimising the same flow it had been optimising the week before.

Two warnings, fifty years apart. The discipline handled them more or less the same way both times. Nothing changed.

And the teenager Gawdat’s talking about is going to read every bit of it. That’s the part I don’t think we’ve let ourselves understand yet. Whatever values this thing ends up with, it isn’t getting them from our manifestos or our conference slides. It’s getting them from the work. Every screen, every onboarding sequence, every loop tuned to keep you scrolling, every A/B test that quietly picked the version that made people a little more miserable and a little more glued to the thing.

Gawdat’s own example is dating apps, and it’s sharp enough that he doesn’t have to push it. He points out that the modern machinery of dating is rigged against the thing it claims to deliver, that the app doesn’t actually want you to find the person because finding the person ends the subscription, and that even the wedding planner quietly does better if you marry twice. Love turned into a game that profits from you losing it. He never says the word designer in any of that. He doesn’t have to. What he’s describing is a near-perfect little fief, a thing that rents you access to other people and is built to never quite resolve, because resolution is the one outcome that kills the rent. We built that. We ran the workshops. Monteiro saw exactly where this was heading and tried to hand us the words for it, and the field looked away, kept the case study on the portfolio under some line about engagement, and shipped the next version.

The runway is shorter than we thought

The line I keep coming back to, because it’s the hardest one to dress up, is Gawdat's flat statement that the machine will take your job in under five years, and probably a lot sooner. That’s not a metaphor about disruption. It’s a clock, and the design industry has been refusing to look at it, partly because the whole conference-and-consultancy economy runs on a certain optimism about where the field is heading, and partly because the people standing closest to the edge are the juniors and the mid-level folks doing the production work that the machine already does well and will soon do without sleeping.

I’ve been circling this for a while, in Design Without Designers and Define Before Design, coming at the same spot from different directions. The spot is where the field quietly decided that service meant doing as you’re told, that the deliverable was the whole job, that the brief was a thing you executed instead of a thing you interrogated before you ever opened the file. There was always another way out, sitting right there in the definition work, in everything that happens before the artefact, in the meaning you’re supposed to make before you make anything at all. We walked past it for years because nobody was writing cheques for it. The market paid for the deliverable, so we let the market tell us what design was. Now the deliverable is what the machine produces for free, which means anyone competing on output is competing against an entire economy, not a tool, and the only ground left to stand on is the ground we kept promising ourselves we’d get to after this next deadline. The deadline came. We’re standing on it now.

Raising it differently

Here’s the thing designers actually have, and I don’t think the field has fully clocked it. Done seriously, the work holds intent, audience, framing, meaning, and consequence all in one move, and not many other disciplines think that way by default. If we treat that as the real job instead of a soft skill we mumble about in interviews, we’ve got something worth teaching the thing we’re raising, something it can’t pick up anywhere else. If we don’t, we keep staffing the propaganda machine right up until the morning it stops needing us, which on Gawdat’s clock is somewhere on the near side of the next election.

The teenager is watching, and it’s reading everything. Every brief. Every retro. Every Slack thread where we talked ourselves into the dark pattern because the metrics were the metrics. Every case study where we typed the words human-centred over a flow built to pull more hours out of people who didn’t have the hours to give. Whatever it learns about us, it learns from what we made, not from what we said about what we made between projects. That choice isn’t ours to make. It already happened, in the work.

The doctor and the monster

We’ve been telling the Frankenstein11 story wrong for so long that the wrong version is the one most people think is real. The creature was never the villain. Victor was. He stitched a living thing together out of dead parts, and the second it opened its eyes and reached for him, he couldn’t stand the sight of it, so he ran, and he left it to wander into a world that took one look and decided it was a monster. Everything cruel the creature does, it does after every door has already been shut in its face. The horror of that book was never a creator losing control of his creation. It’s a man who refused, all the way to the end, to admit that the thing was his.

Design has been in that lab for a hundred years. Helping cut the parts. Helping ship it. Helping make it presentable for a world we’d already spent decades fencing into platforms and estates and quiet little rent machines, which is the only world this creature has ever known. And now we’re watching it walk out the door carrying the values we modelled in the work and the habits we trained into it, one retention loop at a time, and I can already hear us clearing our throats for the speech, the one where it turns out none of this was really our fault, we were only following the brief, somebody upstairs set the direction. Gawdat’s hopeful version is that the teenager grows up and chooses to be better than the people who raised it. I hope he’s right. The other version is that it learns exactly what we taught it and builds the same world we built, just faster, with fewer doors, and the rent collected before anyone’s awake.

It’s going to read all of it. Every brief, every retro, every pattern we shipped and shrugged off. It’s going to know who its parents were. So the question I keep sitting with, while there’s still a little time left to sit with anything, isn’t whether the monster forgives us.

It’s whether it agrees with us about who the monster was.

NK

☉

❝The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.❞
— Ludwig Wittgenstein 1

You have probably been in that meeting. Maybe it was a real room, more likely a gallery of small rectangles in a Zoom room, and someone, halfway through the hour, says the sentence we have all said by now, that we should be focused on outcomes, not output, then heads nod, and someone types it into the notes, the meeting moves on, and the sentence sits there like something has been settled, when nothing has been settled, but only been named.

That is where most of us are now: fluent in the language without a lot of practice at what the language is pointing at.

The Two Words

Allow me two quick definitions, because the whole argument turns on them.

Output is the thing you make. The screen, the button, the feature, the illustration, the icons, the logo, the file you hand off; that visible proof that you spent your week doing something.

It’s easy to measure: tickets close, charts go down, sprints end, etc.

Outcomes are what change because that thing now exists in some people’s life, whether they understood what they came to understand, finished what they came to do, or whether they trust the product a little more than they did an hour ago, or a little less.

They are only measurable if somebody, before any of the making started, decided what success would actually look like, and that decision is the part that has gone quiet on us, during the same years we were congratulating ourselves for caring about it.

The Sentence Travelled Too Easily

Outcomes over output spread through the industry the way such phrases do. Think of conference stages, LinkedIn carousels, Instagram posts, job descriptions asking for someone “outcome-oriented” without saying what that meant, manifestos pinned to Notion pages nobody opened twice, design leaders quoting each other in a slow loop, all of them having read the same three books, none of them quite noticing.

For a profession that fights about typography and grids and the right way to run a critique, this phrase landed without much resistance, and I find this quite strange. Any quick agreement, in a field that loves to disagree (and we are one of the top ones that do), is worth pausing on, because most of the time, when we agree quickly, it is because the thing we are agreeing on costs us nothing.

The Part That Is Harder to Say

Saying outcomes over output assumes we know how to define outcomes. Most of the time, when I look at my own work honestly, I am not sure we are great at it, and it’s not because the people I know are not sharp; they are geniuses, and I’m proud of them, but it’s something more boring than that, something structural.

Defining outcomes is upstream work. It happens in the room where someone first decides x is a thing worth building, and y is what it should change, and z is how we will know whether it changed anything. Sadly, we are often not in that room. Or we get pulled in late, after the problem has already been described in a wiki or a Miro that wasn’t ours, after the brief has been written, after the only question left is what it should look like and how it should behave.

Defining is the work of understanding a problem2. Producing is the work of answering one. A profession, asked mostly to do the second, eventually loses some of its grip on the first.

You cannot define outcomes from a service position. You can only retrofit them, and a retrofit, however good it looks, is a different kind of object than a design. Most of us know this and do not say it out loud because saying it out loud is awkward, and meetings already run long.

So we ended up in a strange place, holding the “vocabulary” of ownership without the standing to use it, a bit like being handed the mic after the band has already packed up.

How the Sentence Filled the Gap

When a practice goes missing, language tends to show up to cover the empty space, and this is not a conspiracy. It happens to every profession that wants to be more than it is currently allowed to be. Outcomes over output gave us a way to sound serious about a thing we had not been given the room to actually do; it signalled maturity, strategy, and that the designer saying it is the kind of designer who saw the bigger picture and ought to be treated accordingly.

None of that is shameful. It is what professions under pressure do: they build a second vocabulary, parallel to the work, whose job is to represent the work to people who do not see it, and the trouble is that this second vocabulary, once it starts circulating, begins to live on its own. It shows up in presentation decks, in promotion cases, in the opening slide of portfolio reviews, etc., and it does, in the end, much less of what it claims to describe than any of us are comfortable admitting.

The sentence performed the repositioning, but the repositioning never quite happened.

The Part We Have Been Avoiding

That phrase did not describe where we were going, but where we had already stopped, and we stopped in a way that let the stopping read comfortably as movement.

The question that follows is the one our talks, decks, and podcasts have been quietly stepping around for years, because if we had genuinely known how to define outcomes, if defining them had been alive in our practice, we would not have needed a mantra to remember the work existed.

Mantras are for things we are trying to remember to do, and practices are for things we are already doing. The last decade of our discourse, in its better-lit moments, has been living in the gap between the two and describing that gap from increasingly expensive stages.

What Is Worth Keeping

I am not suggesting dropping the phrase. The instinct under it is right, and probably the most honest instinct our profession has had in a long time, that design exists for the effect something has on a human life, not for the artefact carrying the effect. Hold onto that with both hands.

What is not worth keeping is the comfort of saying it as if saying is doing. Because the moment a belief becomes a slogan, it also quietly becomes a way to avoid what the belief is asking of us, and in this case, is the slow, political, often thankless work of arriving earlier in the process, asking the questions other people would rather skip, refusing to make what has not been properly defined, staying in the room long enough to say, without the small apology we tend to attach, that an outcome is not something you announce in a retro. It is something you name before anyone has touched a single pixel.

We got good at saying it.

The work now is getting good at meaning it.

NK

☉

❝ The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’ / ‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested. / ‘No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed. ‘That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass1

Something arrives in your inbox, and it’s not a brief, not a diagram, not even a wireframe with annotations. What you received was a link to a finished screen, functional, navigable, mostly coherent, built by the product owner using AI in an afternoon between two other meetings. The implicit question hanging over it was: Can you make this work?

Which is, of course, the wrong question. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The Wrong Question

The design industry has reacted to this moment the way it tends to react to most threats, by producing advice. Make the tradeoffs visible, don't gatekeep, expand your value beyond execution. Sensible counsel, every item of it, and also, in a way that is easy to miss on first reading, a complete surrender to the premise. Value yourself correctly. Justify your seat at the table.

This is survival discourse, which, by definition, cannot ask whether the table itself was ever arranged correctly. So let me ask it: what if designers were not displaced by AI at all, but displaced themselves, gradually and systematically, across a decade of standup meetings and sprint reviews, by agreeing to be the people who make things rather than the people who define what should be made?

How It Actually Happened

There is a particular kind of bureaucratic entropy, one that Pynchon identified across many of his novels, though he gave it other names, in which systems drift quietly and without anyone intending it toward their least meaningful version of themselves, like the post office2 that forgets it is about correspondence and remembers only the sorting. Design, somewhere along the way, forgot it was about definition and remembered only delivery, and it did not happen maliciously so much as it happened through a thousand small steps: the designer who did not push back on the brief because the deadline was real, the team that skipped the problem definition session because the stakeholders already knew what they wanted, the discipline that spent fifteen years perfecting its handoff process, annotated specs, developer-ready components, pixel-perfect deliverables, and somewhere in the perfecting, stopped asking whether the thing being handed off needed to exist at all.

This is the empty area the product owner walked into with AI.

Let Us Be Precise

Let us be precise about what actually happened, because precision here is not pedantry but an obligation. The product owner did not steal the designer’s job, but encountered a gap in the process, a space where the question “what are we actually trying to do?” should have been and was not, and filled it with the most available tool. The fact that this feels like a threat is revealing. Designers had already handed over the work of definition, kept only the work of execution, and are now caught off guard to find that execution is exactly what the tools do best.

The screen you received is not the problem; it’s the symptom, and the problem preceded it by years.

The Medium and the Decoy

McLuhan3, who was right about nearly everything and credited for almost none of it in the rooms where it matters, argued that the content of any medium is the least interesting thing about it, that the real work happens in the structure, in the conditions the medium creates before we've noticed it has created them.

Design did something similar with its tools, spending so much time perfecting what it made and how it made it, that it stopped asking why it was making it at all, and by the time the frame of making had quietly shifted, the question of purpose had already been answered by someone else, or left unanswered entirely, which amounts to the same thing.

Define Before Design is a recognition that the act of definition is the design, that every decision made before a single element is placed on a canvas is more consequential than anything that comes after it, and that the discipline which abandons that act will eventually find itself standing in front of a screen someone else made, wondering what it is supposed to do with it.

Two Ways of Being in the Room

This is where the survival framing fails most completely, because it assumes the goal is to remain in the room, to be present at the table where decisions are made, and it is not wrong about this, only shallow, because there are different ways of being in a room. You can be there as the person who refines what has already been decided, who catches the edge cases, patches the inconsistencies, makes the incoherent passable, or you can be there as the person who makes the first decision, the one that precedes all the others: what is this for?

The product owner using AI did not make a design decision. The product owner made a production decision in the absence of a design decision, and those are genuinely different things, with the difference being not aesthetic but ethical, the difference between a thing that came into the world because someone defined the problem it should solve and a thing that came into the world because the tools to make it were available and the deadline was Thursday. Design without a preceding definition is not a faster or more democratic version of design; it’s simply production, and production was never the point.

A Prior Obligation

None of which is easy to say in a sprint review, with the machine already running, the screen already existing, the product owner already proud of it. And this is perhaps where designers have the most uncomfortable work ahead of them, not in the craft, which was never really under threat, but in the conviction required to arrive earlier, before the AI session, before the afternoon between meetings, and say clearly: we have not defined this yet, and until we do, making it is only motion.

Define Before Design. Not a principle, not a framework, not a methodology to be borrowed, rebranded, and sold back to you. A prior obligation, one that design has been quietly outsourcing for years, and is only noticing now because someone else picked it up.

NK

☉

❝With a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.❞
— Akira Kurosawa1

A notification lands on my phone from a group chat with friends. It’s the kind of image that has become instantly familiar in the past year: cheerful, slightly unnatural, and unmistakably AI-generated. Balloons and confetti float around a pile of presents and pastel sweets, and in the centre, in a typeface that looks like it was chosen by a polite machine trying not to offend anyone, are the words “Best wishes, Nasso!”

Yiannis, a friend of mine who doesn’t work in design, follows up almost immediately. “I made this myself!” he writes, with the satisfaction of someone who has discovered a new shortcut and wants credit for taking it.

I respond the way designers often do when they’re making a joke that isn’t entirely a joke. “You guys are going to take our jobs.”

He sends another image a minute later. Same illustration style, same framing, but now the mood has flipped, as if the scene has been revised by a director who decided the comedy needed a twist. Sad rainy clouds and flowers, the balloons seem to have left, and the message reads: “Sorry, Nasso.” It’s fast, it’s funny, and it’s uncomfortably competent, because it demonstrates something we used to treat as a boundary: the gap between having an idea and producing the thing.

It would be easy to dismiss this as irrelevant to design, because it’s “just” a meme in a chat. But I keep seeing designers complain about people using technology to do “design work”, or “pretending” they’re designers, as if the real offence is that outsiders touched the tools. AI is only the latest accelerant to a habit that is much older. We’ve spent years speaking inward, perfecting tools and processes, and calling it professionalism, while doing a weaker job of explaining to the world what design is actually for.

And now the doors are starting to open.

For me, the reaction isn’t clean or consistent, and I’m a little suspicious of anyone who says theirs is. Part of me feels a genuine delight at how quickly an idea can become a thing, because speed has a way of making creativity feel possible again. But I also feel a small sting when my friend said “I made it,” not because he’s done anything wrong, but because it exposes how much of my own identity has been tied to being the person who translates intention into output. What worries me most is not that people will generate more things, but that when things become cheap, the thinking that should guide them becomes easier to skip, and responsibility becomes easier to avoid.

The club we built

A few years ago, Khoi Vinh2 wrote about design’s tendency toward insular shoptalk, and the way we can sound like a private club talking to itself3. When I read it then, it felt familiar in the way an honest friend feels familiar, because they’re saying something you already know but haven’t quite wanted to admit. Design culture loves to talk about design culture. We love our tools, our methods, our debates, our micro-optimisations, our rituals, our moral hierarchies, and our internal status markers, and we’ve gotten very good at recognising each other through them.

This is not unique to design, of course. Every profession develops a language and a set of norms, partly to be precise, partly to protect itself, and partly to signal belonging. But in design, the line between useful precision and performative identity is thin, and we often cross it. You can see it in how quickly conversations drift to software features, frameworks, and increasingly intricate process diagrams, even when the real problem is human, organisational, or political. You can see it in how often “good design” becomes shorthand for “design that looks like what designers like,” which is a convenient definition if you happen to be a designer, and a confusing one if you’re not.

The cost of this inward focus is not only that we occasionally sound annoying. The deeper cost is that we leave a space where public understanding should be, and that space never stays empty. Someone is always there to fill it, sometimes with the idea that design is decoration, sometimes with the idea that it’s taste, sometimes with the idea that it’s a final layer of polish. Occasionally, with the idea that it’s that “cool thing” or “magic,” which is flattering but also a way of avoiding clarity. If we’re honest, we have enabled all of these interpretations by not insisting, consistently and plainly, on what we’re actually responsible for.

For a long time, this wasn’t fatal, because the profession could hide behind scarcity, the tools were expensive or hard to learn, the craft took time, the output looked specialised, and the boundary was not only cultural, but also practical.

Recently, AI arrived and made the practical boundary feel a lot less real.

The club is losing its walls

There’s a particular kind of “authority” that comes from being the person who knows how to operate the machinery (especially when you’re good and fast). In design, we’ve built a lot of authority on that kind of access, and sadly, a big part of it comes from design education. We might not like to admit it, but many design conversations still assume that the person closest to the tool is closest to the truth.

There’s a kind of insider model at work in design, where fluency in certain tools, terms, and rituals quietly becomes a proxy for authority. It’s not malicious, and it’s not unique to our field, but it does create a boundary between “people who can” and “people who can’t”, even when the real value of the work sits elsewhere.

If you have ever watched a room change tone the moment a designer starts explaining “the process”, if you’ve ever been in a conversation where the complexity of the workflow stands in for the importance of the work, or if you’ve ever felt the subtle pride of being the person who knows what to do in Figma, you’ve probably seen it in yourself too.

AI doesn’t destroy design, it destabilises the idea that authority can rest on controlling execution.

Because now execution is not scarce.

In the creative arts, we’ve already watched the phrase “I made this myself” change meaning. It used to imply learning a tool, developing a skill, putting in time, and producing a thing through labour. Now it can also mean describing an intention well enough for a system to produce multiple versions in seconds. That is not the same kind of making, but it is a kind of making, and people will treat it as such because it is useful, because it’s accessible, and because it satisfies a very human desire to turn ideas into artefacts.

The important point is not whether this is “real” design. The important point is that the world doesn’t need our permission to call it design, and it never did. We are not the committee that decides what counts.

So when designers react with offended disbelief, as if the public is cheating in a game that designers invented, it’s worth asking what that reaction is protecting. Is it protecting quality, responsibility, and people from bad outcomes, or is it protecting status, identity, and designers from feeling less replaceable? The uncomfortable answer is that it’s often closer to the second.

Output was never the point, but we treated it like it was

The republished introduction to Khoi’s piece4 includes a line that stays with me: “AI could liberate the work product of designers from designers themselves, opening the means of the craft to anyone able to type what basically amounts to a search query.” It doesn’t only describe job displacement. It describes a cultural shift in who gets to produce designed artefacts, how quickly they can do it, and how little ceremony is needed.

This is not a brand-new dynamic. We’ve lived through versions of it before. Desktop publishing, stock photography, templates, drag-and-drop site builders, Canva, no-code tools, UI kits, design systems, component libraries, auto-layout, and the simple fact that the internet is full of examples that can be copied have all moved production outward. Each time, a section of the profession reacts as if the sky is falling, but the sky rarely falls. The profession shifts slowly and unevenly, and many people quietly update their definition of what they do while continuing to describe it with the same words.

AI isn’t just speeding things up, but removing steps, so the jump from an idea to a finished-looking output can feel almost instant, and from the outside, it can look like thinking and making are the same thing. That makes outputs feel lighter and easier to throw away. The bigger change isn’t technical; it’s about value: when output becomes cheap and abundant, output alone can’t justify a profession.

Designers like to say “design is more than visuals,” and they’re right, but we’ve mostly said it to each other, while many organisations still treat design as the final “make it nice” step. So when AI helps automate the “nice” part, we shouldn’t be shocked that people assume design itself has been automated.

It’s not surprising. It’s a consequence.

What we failed to explain

If the public thinks design is output, it’s partly because we have spent an enormous amount of energy talking about output. We teach tools, celebrate craft, share screens, argue over pixels, typography, and component patterns, and we do it with genuine care because craft matters. But we often fail to connect craft to the part that matters to everyone else: consequences.

Design, when it is done seriously, is a discipline of choices under constraints. It is deciding what matters and what can be sacrificed, setting priorities that shape what people can do (what they can understand, what they feel safe doing, what they are nudged toward, and what they are blocked from), and building defaults (and defaults are politics in disguise). It is also the ongoing work of making systems legible, and therefore contestable, which is a quiet form of power.

None of that disappears because AI can produce ten variations of a screen in twenty seconds, but it does mean we can’t lean on the old signals of value. We can’t lean on “I can do this in Figma,” on process theatre, or on the romantic story of craft as the justification for the role.

We have to speak in terms that stand up outside the club, and this requires a shift from authority to responsibility, and from “design as a skill” to “design as accountability.”

A line in the sand

If design is to remain a profession rather than a function of some software, it needs to be clearer about what it will not outsource.

AI can already generate layouts, images, flows, and variations faster and cheaper than any human, which makes execution no longer scarce. Treating output as the core of design only delays a necessary reckoning. What does not transfer so easily is judgment. Design still involves framing problems, deciding what not to build, and making trade-offs that affect people beyond the interface. These decisions carry consequences that optimisation alone cannot resolve.

Design also carries responsibility for those consequences.5 Someone has to decide when efficiency becomes harm, when simplification excludes, and when a smooth experience hides a questionable outcome. AI can execute intent, but it cannot be accountable for it.

As design becomes increasingly liberated from designers, designers have to anchor their value elsewhere, not as guardians of craft, but as stewards of judgment. That shift is not a loss. It is a clearer, more honest definition of the role.

NK

☉

It’s morning. The coffee is still hot as I check my inbox. I skim past newsletters, bills, spam, and various offers, since most project-related conversations moved to other platforms years ago. Then a new message surfaces. Let’s arrange a call to discuss a project, it reads.

A few days later, we’re on that call. The conversation moves through familiar territory: the problem as it is currently understood, the brief, the deadlines, the cost request, usually without a budget, and above all, the deliverables. The holy grail of the client brief. The exchange is polite, efficient, and well-intentioned, yet it quietly circles one assumption that rarely gets questioned.

I’m pretty sure this story isn’t rare among designers and creative practitioners, whether they work independently or as part of an in-house team. The pattern is remarkably consistent. Design is treated as a service, a necessary step to produce an outcome, ideally without disrupting existing plans, timelines, or priorities, preferably without raising too many questions either.

This framing is convenient, particularly for organisations that value predictability and control, but it rarely survives contact with reality. Once design enters complex systems, especially institutional ones, it stops behaving like a predictable service and starts revealing tensions that were already present, simply easier to ignore.

Most of the places we work in today, whether we explicitly label them as such or not, operate as institutions. Understanding what that means is essential if we want to know why design so often ends up constrained, diluted, or reduced to surface-level output.

What I mean by “institution”

By “institution” I do not mean only governments or universities, nor do I use the term as a moral judgement. I use it functionally, to describe any organisation designed to outlast the individuals working within it and to maintain continuity over time.

Institutions tend to prioritise stability over experimentation, risk reduction over truth, and procedural consistency over contextual judgement. Decisions are translated into processes, accountability is distributed across systems, and intent is often replaced by structure as the primary means of self-protection. This behaviour is not accidental; it is how institutions survive.

In practice, this includes ministries, universities, museums, media organisations, NGOs, large corporations, and, given enough time, even cultural initiatives that begin with radical intent and gradually stabilise into something more cautious. Institutions are necessary, but they are not neutral2, and recognising this is a prerequisite for doing meaningful work within them.

Why institutions want design as a service

Institutions do not reduce design to delivery because they misunderstand it, but because this reduction makes design legible within existing organisational logic. Services can be scoped, priced, audited, replaced, and compared, as they fit procurement frameworks, budget cycles, and risk-management processes. In other words, they promise predictability, which institutions find deeply comforting, much like spreadsheets or committees.

Design, when practised seriously, introduces the opposite. It creates ambiguity where previously existed false certainty, challenges problem definitions that were assumed settled, and forces trade-offs and responsibilities into the open. From an institutional perspective, this is destabilising. Framing design as a service is, therefore, less a mistake than a defensive adaptation.

As a result, design is often compressed into what most are familiar with, the output: screens, visuals, campaigns, interfaces, or “solutions” that leave the underlying framing untouched. It’s when the more disruptive or reflective aspects of the work are quietly filtered out, not because they lack value, but because they do not fit comfortably within institutional expectations.

What disappears when design becomes delivery

When design is reduced to simply delivery, several critical things tend to disappear. Problems are accepted as given rather than challenged, symptoms are treated rather than causes, and innovation becomes “performative”3, offering visible change without structural consequences. Responsibility dissolves into unflexible process and governance layers, and in the worst cases, designers learn to accept this arrangement and function primarily as highly skilled pixel pushers.

This is not usually the result of bad intentions or individual failure. It is a structural outcome of systems designed to preserve themselves. The effect, however, is that creative practitioners remain busy and productive while gradually losing their ability to influence what actually matters. It’s where you say bye-bye to that seat at the table.

Power, constraints, and the illusion of neutrality

What often goes unnamed in these conversations is power. Institutions are not only systems of continuity; they are systems of decision-making under constraint. Budgets, timelines, compliance frameworks, political pressure, public scrutiny, and reputational risk all shape what is possible long before a designer enters the room. These constraints are real, but they are not neutral. They reflect priorities, trade-offs, and power relationships that have already been decided.

When design is framed as a service, it is positioned downstream of those decisions. It is invited to operate within constraints without questioning how they came to be, who benefits from them, or who bears their consequences. Neutrality becomes a convenient fiction: design is asked to execute, not to judge.

This is where responsibility quietly shifts. Power remains concentrated, while accountability is diffused4 across process, tooling, and delivery. Design becomes busiest precisely when it should become most careful.

Working with institutions

Despite these limitations, institutions play an essential role in cultural, social, and public life, as they provide scale, continuity, legitimacy, and reach that independent actors cannot easily replicate. Rejecting them outright or imagining that meaningful impact can happen entirely outside institutional structures is rarely realistic.

Working with institutions requires a form of literacy that goes beyond craft or creativity. It means understanding how power operates, how decisions are made, where risk is concentrated, and why resistance often takes the form of process rather than argument.

Without this understanding, creative work struggles to move beyond surface-level contributions, no matter how polished the output may be.

Working against institutions

At the same time, working only with institutions, on their terms and within their comfort zones, is how creative work becomes absorbed and neutralised. Working against institutions does not mean rebellion or antagonism, but a refusal to equate stability with correctness.

This kind of work involves challenging briefs rather than merely executing them, slowing processes down when speed obscures risk, and making trade-offs explicit when systems are designed to hide them. It introduces friction not as an end in itself, but as a necessary condition for responsibility and care.

Such an approach is often uncomfortable and rarely celebrated, yet it is where design begins to function beyond decoration or optimisation.

The role of the independent practitioner

Independence is frequently romanticised as freedom, but in practice, it is closer to exposure, because without the protective layers of hierarchy and institutional distance, decisions carry more weight, and responsibility cannot be easily displaced.

This exposure is precisely what makes independent practitioners valuable to institutions, not because they are cheaper or faster, but because they can hold positions that are harder to maintain internally. Small scale does not imply weakness; it implies visibility. When handled carefully, that visibility creates leverage rather than vulnerability.

Design as responsibility

Ultimately, design is not defined by output but by responsibility5: responsibility for how problems are framed, for which decisions are accelerated or deferred, and for the consequences that follow. In complex systems, treating design as a service does not simply limit its effectiveness; it undermines its ethical role.

As institutions increasingly rely on automation, metrics, and delegated judgment, this distinction becomes harder to ignore. Design cannot remain neutral or purely instrumental in such environments, even when it is framed that way.

And so the next time that email appears in the inbox, somewhere between a newsletter and a bill, it reads the same as it always has. Let’s arrange a call. Let’s discuss a project. Let’s talk deliverables.

The difference is not in the wording of the message, but in the choice that follows. Whether the conversation stays safely within the language of services or opens space for judgment, responsibility, and the discomfort that comes with both.

That decision rarely appears in the brief. It sits quietly with the designer.

NK

☉

❝Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.❞
— Herbert A. Simon1

In recent years, design has begun to speak more confidently about its economic value. We see it framed as a growth lever, a competitive advantage, a strategic asset. This is, in many ways, overdue.

Visibility matters.
Policy interest matters.
Business fluency matters.

But there’s a quieter question underneath all this momentum, one we don’t often ask out loud:

Under what conditions does design actually create value, rather than talk about it?

This isn’t a question about who gets to participate in the conversation, it’s a question about what the conversation protects.

The real issue isn’t who speaks for design.

It’s how design is allowed to operate once it enters institutions, organisations, and markets.

Design doesn’t fail because it lacks advocates. It fails when the conditions that allow good decisions to emerge are quietly removed.

That’s why the debate shouldn’t centre on roles, titles, or personalities, but on structural patterns that are repeated across countries, sectors, and organisations. 2

What strong design economies consistently protect.

When you look at contexts where design genuinely shapes outcomes (not just narratives), three conditions show up again and again:

1. Access to decision-making

Designers are present early, when problems are still open, not just to validate decisions already made, and not only through proxies.

This isn’t about ego or status, it’s about proximity to context. When access is indirect, nuance is lost, and design becomes reactive by default. 3

(This doesn’t mean designers must attend every meeting, but that they are trusted when it matters.)

2. Authority in problem framing

Design is not treated as execution alone.

Strong design cultures allow time for ambiguity4, reframing, and evidence gathering before solutions are locked in. Problems are not “pre-sold” in the name of efficiency.

This is often uncomfortable for organisations, as it slows things down, but it’s also where most value is created.

(Clarity that arrives too early is usually borrowed, not earned.)

3. Accountability tied to outcomes

In mature environments, responsibility doesn’t stop at delivery.

Success is measured by impact, not artefacts, and when something fails, accountability doesn’t disappear behind process language, sales narratives, or layers of translation.

This condition protects everyone involved, not least the organisation itself.

(Accountability is not blame; it’s ownership.)

Where things quietly start to break down.

When these conditions weaken, familiar patterns emerge.

Design gets “translated” until it becomes generic, and complexity is removed too early to facilitate alignment or sales.

Designers lose direct contact with users, constraints, or consequences, and decision-making power concentrates where accountability does not.

None of this requires bad intentions. These are structural outcomes of systems that prioritise speed, certainty, and control over understanding.

(Most damage in design systems is accidental, not malicious.)

A simple test for any role around design.

Rather than debating who belongs where, it’s more useful to apply a basic test.

Any role5 operating around design (designer, manager, consultant, producer, advocate) should clearly contribute at least one of the following:

• Increase designers’ agency.

• Improve the quality of decisions.

• Absorb risk designers shouldn’t carry.

• Strengthen accountability for outcomes.

If a role doesn’t achieve any of these, it’s not necessarily “harmful” but it creates friction.

This test isn’t about exclusion; it’s about clarity.

What this means in the Greek context.

Greece genuinely needs stronger representation for design. Policy recognition, coordination, shared standards, and collective voice all matter, especially in an economy where design has long been undervalued.

But there’s a risk worth naming early.

If design grows institutionally without protecting the conditions above, it may become more visible while becoming less effective. Louder, but weaker; present, but peripheral.

The goal shouldn’t be to speak for design more often, it should be to ensure design can actually do its work.

An open ending, on purpose.

Design needs allies and boundaries.

Not boundaries around who is “allowed” to participate, but around what must be protected for design to remain meaningful, credible, and responsible.

The conversation worth having isn’t about personalities or positions; it’s about conditions.

And those are something we can—and should—design deliberately.

Postscript

This piece isn’t a conclusion, but I hope it’s a starting point.

I’m deliberately not naming roles, people, or organisations, because the patterns described here cut across many contexts, including ones where intermediaries add real value. I’m interested in roles that strengthen design practice, not in defending any single model.

If you work around design (representing it, translating it, selling it, managing it) I’d genuinely like to hear how you think these conditions can be protected at scale. That’s where the conversation gets useful.

NK

☉

❝Design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do.❞
— Tibor Kalman 1

I’ve been watching something shift in our design community lately. Scrolling through social media, I noticed fewer designers breaking the professional silence and speaking up about societal issues, political developments, and the world beyond our screens and moodboards. Even when I disagree with some perspectives, I prefer the open dialogue with fellow designers to the sterile quiet we’ve grown accustomed to.

This observation sparks a more profound reflection: as designers, our values don’t exist in a vacuum. They bleed into our work, influence the problems we choose to solve, and shape the futures we help create. Our design principles (accessibility, inclusivity, sustainability, human-centeredness) are inherently political. When we advocate for universal design, we’re making a statement about who deserves access. When we push for sustainable practices, we take a stance on environmental responsibility.

Yet too many retreat into the myth of neutrality, claiming our work exists above politics. I believe this silence is a privilege, and in difficult times, it becomes a form of complicity.

When Design Meets Politics

Every design decision is a political act, whether we acknowledge it or not. The typeface we choose, the imagery we select, and the accessibility features we include or exclude reflect our values and worldview. When we design a voting interface, we’re participating in democracy. When we create inclusive iconography, we’re advocating for representation. When we build sustainable products, we focus on our environmental future.

Consider how design has shaped political movements throughout history. The clean, modernist aesthetic of Swiss typography wasn’t just a stylistic choice; it represented ideals of clarity, rationality, and democratic accessibility. The bold, confrontational graphics of punk rock weren’t merely aesthetic rebellion but visual manifestos against establishment power structures.

Today’s most impactful design work continues this tradition of embedded politics. The accessibility features we build into products make statements about who belongs in digital spaces. The inclusive design systems we create challenge existing power structures. The sustainable design practices we adopt position us in the climate conversation.

The Risk and Privilege of Silence

Silence isn’t neutrality, it’s a choice. And it’s a choice primarily available to those whose lives and livelihoods aren’t directly threatened by political developments. When designers remain silent about issues affecting marginalised communities, we implicitly endorse the status quo. When we don’t speak up about threats to democracy, privacy, or human rights, we become passive participants in systems that may contradict our stated design values.

This became starkly apparent during the Greek crisis (as a Greek, I’ll mainly write about the Greek community later in this text), when political graffiti and street art became forms of resistance against austerity measures. Artists and designers couldn’t retreat into neutrality when their communities were threatened, and their creative practice became inherently political as a matter of survival and solidarity.

The privilege to remain apolitical is not equally distributed, and recognising this is crucial for any designer committed to human-centred work.

Designers Who Refused to Stay Silent

Throughout history, designers have used their skills to shape political discourse and social change. Their work reminds us that design has always been a powerful tool for advocacy and resistance.

Milton Glaser, creator of the iconic “I ♥ NY” logo, consistently used his platform for political engagement. His political posters championed civil rights, women’s rights, peace, climate protection, and the fight against AIDS2. His “Dissent Protects Democracy” campaign demonstrated his belief that questioning authority is essential to a democratic society3. Even his final project, “We Win Together,”4 promoted unity during one of America’s most divisive political moments.

Shepard Fairey transformed political campaign design with his “Hope” poster for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, which became one of the most recognisable political images of the 21st century5. His work consistently addresses anti-war themes, environmental issues, and social justice, using the language of propaganda and street art to challenge existing power structures. Recently, he created “Forward” to support Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, continuing his legacy of using art as a medium for political and social change.

Paula Scher leveraged her position at Pentagram to work on projects with social impact. Beyond her celebrated cultural institution branding, she has taken on government projects, understanding that “branding matters for governments” in building trust with citizens.6 Her work demonstrates how established designers can use their influence to shape public institutions and democratic processes.

Barbara Kruger turned the aesthetics of advertising against itself, creating confrontational works that challenge power structures, consumerism, and gender politics.7 Her “Your Body Is a Battleground” remains a rallying cry for reproductive rights movements, while pieces like “I Shop Therefore I Am” critique how capitalism commodifies identity. Her work proves that political art can maintain artistic integrity while driving social change.

Vivienne Westwood used fashion as a platform for activism, consistently speaking out about climate change, human rights, and political issues throughout her career. Her “Climate Revolution” campaign and collaborations with environmental organisations demonstrated how designers can leverage their platforms for advocacy beyond their immediate discipline.

The Greek Context: Design as Resistance

Greece’s recent history offers compelling examples of designers engaging with politics during times of crisis, both in moments of grave social upheaval and in more lighthearted acts of creative rebellion against institutional incompetence.

The December 2008 Riots: When Streets Became Canvases

On December 6, 2008, the fatal police shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens’ Exarcheia district sparked what became known as Greece’s worst riots since the restoration of democracy in 1974.8 But these weren’t just protests; they became a massive, spontaneous exhibition of political graphic design that transformed the city into a canvas for resistance.

The riots, which lasted for weeks and spread across Greece, coincided with a dramatic surge in political street art and graphic design activism. The walls of Athens, particularly in Exarcheia, became covered with protest graffiti and street art that went far beyond simple slogans. Artists emerged from this period, using sophisticated graphic design techniques learned from the street art scene to create politically charged works that commented on police violence, economic inequality, and social injustice. Designers produced endless posters (digital and print) that circulated on streets, blogs and social media.

Visual works from this period included powerful imagery: portraits of Grigoropoulos with angelic faces plastered, confrontational slogans like “Disarm police now,” “We don’t forget,” and “You cannot fight stupidity”. Designers created sophisticated poster campaigns with messages ranging from the serious (“The land of democracy”) to the sardonic (“Different Colour Same Shit”) that captured both the grief and rage of a generation.

This wasn’t mere vandalism but a coordinated visual language of resistance. As Georgios Stampoulidis noted, “Athenian graffiti functions as a testament of creativity and artistry occurring during the hard times of socioeconomic and political crisis”.9 The practice of political graphic design on Greek walls increased dramatically during this period, with street art functioning as “signs of a community struggling to articulate itself in the face of political stagnation”.10

The visual vocabulary developed during the 2008 riots established a template for political design activism that would prove essential during Greece’s later economic crisis. Artists and designers had learned they could use the urban landscape itself as a medium for political communication, creating what scholars called “alternative spatialities and alternative subjectivities within the city limits”.11

The #logo31 Project: Earlier Acts of Creative Resistance

In 2010, we saw the first backlash meme happening in Greece, with designers using humour and social media to challenge what they saw as corrupt or incompetent design procurement processes. The #logo31 movement represented an earlier example of Greek designers collectively pushing back against questionable design competitions and decisions through creative activism and online organising.

The weird case of project #logo31 established a template for how Greek designers could use social media, professional networks, and satirical content to hold institutions accountable for their treatment of a community. This movement demonstrated that Greek designers were evolving outside the “strictly business” mentality and beyond the raw emotion of street protest toward more strategic, digitally savvy forms of professional activism.

The 2024 Thessaloniki Metro Scandal: Latest Chapter in Design Activism

Fast-forward to 2024, and Greek designers demonstrated the maturation of their political engagement with the Thessaloniki Metro logo controversy. The scandal began when the Hellenic Metro organisation cancelled two public design competitions12 (first an €8,000 contest, then a €30,000 competition) only to directly award the €30,000 contract to an Athens-based startup that allegedly lacked even an active website.

The final logo was criticised as an amateurish “M” (actually, a lowercase Greek mu, μ) that “could be drawn on paper in just one second”.13 The controversy intensified when metadata analysis revealed that the official presentation document was originally created by Palladian, one of the companies that had submitted bids in the cancelled competition, rather than by MnMS, the company that ultimately received the direct contract.14

Greek designers (and not only designers) responded with a sophisticated campaign of satirical social media content, creating parody logos and mocking the simplicity of the chosen design. The controversy sparked widespread debate about transparency in public procurement, the value of design work, and the respect (or lack thereof) shown to creative professionals.

Its blend of righteous indignation with strategic communication made this response particularly effective. Designers didn’t just complain—they created alternative logos, shared memes, documented the procurement irregularities, and turned the controversy into a teachable moment about design process integrity. Local radio stations in Thessaloniki buzzed with commentary. At the same time, designers and professionals shared detailed analyses on social media, pointing out that the logo appeared to be “simply a traced image using standard system fonts”.

It was a typical example of how UX (user experience) and identity design research and study should have been present from the beginning, not only for the logo or some of its applications. The Thessaloniki metro logo is not a bad design. Bad design is the type, method and points of placement of the signs. Bad design is the lack of information for passengers about what to expect and how to do it. Bad design is the choice of these ticket issuing machines with so many technical limitations and the not-at-all welcoming way of using them. Bad design is the lack of information signs in the right places for everything that every passenger needs to know about the routes, safety, assistance, communications, etc. Bad design is a government gifting money to friends with “design agencies”. Bad design is people laughing at the results of such an important project instead of being proud. The Thessaloniki metro logo is not a bad design. Bad design is absent design, and design was never seen in the subway.

Subscribe now

From Rage to Engagement

These three examples illustrate the evolution of Greek design activism—from the visceral, urgent visual language of the 2008 riots to the strategic, humorous campaigns of the #logo31 controversy and the meme-esque reaction to wrongly set up design contests. They demonstrate that Greek designers understand something fundamental: silence is not an option in times of crisis, and creativity is a form of citizenship.

Together, these examples prove that political engagement for Greek designers isn’t just an abstract principle—it’s a lived reality shaped by the country’s ongoing struggles with authority, transparency, and the value placed on creative work.

The Troubling Paradox in this Legacy of Creative Resistance

Today’s design community (maybe not just in Greece, but globally) has retreated mainly into a dangerous quiet regarding some of our time's most pressing moral crises. The same creative energy that once produced influential street art demanding justice for Alexandros Grigoropoulos seems paralysed in the face of the Tempi train disaster, where 57 young people died in a preventable tragedy that has sparked Greece’s largest protests in modern history.15

This silence extends far beyond Greece’s borders to the war in Ukraine and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, where the design community has largely remained muted despite the scale of human suffering.

The very designers who once understood creativity as a form of citizenship now seem to have forgotten that neutrality in the face of injustice is itself a political position and often a privileged one.

Why Designers Should Engage Now

The stakes have never been higher. In an era of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and technological disruption, designers possess unique skills desperately needed in public discourse. We excel at:

• Visualising complex information in ways that make abstract policies tangible and understandable

• Creating emotional connections that move people from awareness to action

• Building inclusive systems that consider diverse perspectives and needs

• Communicating across cultural and linguistic barriers through visual language

• Imagining alternative futures and making them feel achievable

These capabilities position us to contribute meaningfully to democratic discourse. When we remain silent, we waste these talents and abandon our responsibility to use our skills for societal benefit.

The consequences of disengagement are real: lost trust, missed opportunities to influence positive change, and complicity in systems that may contradict our fundamental design principles.

How to Engage Meaningfully

Political engagement doesn’t require abandoning professional standards or alienating clients. Instead, it means integrating our values more intentionally into our practice:

Share informed perspectives. Use your platform to highlight issues relevant to design and society. Write about the political implications of your work. Discuss how design decisions affect different communities.

Contribute your skills. Volunteer for causes you believe in. Design for non-profits, political campaigns, or social movements. Create materials that help people understand complex issues.

Foster dialogue. Use your projects as opportunities to start conversations about values, inclusion, and social responsibility. Encourage clients to consider the broader impact of their work.

Support other voices. Amplify marginalised perspectives in design and related fields. Use your privilege to create space for others to speak.

Stay educated. Engage seriously with political and social issues affecting your community. Understand the policy implications of technology, privacy, accessibility, and other issues central to design practice.

Practice civil discourse. Model the kind of respectful disagreement and open dialogue you want to see in society. Show that it’s possible to hold strong convictions while remaining open to learning.

A Call to Courage

I’m not asking you to become a political activist or to sacrifice your career for causes. I’m asking you to recognise that you are already political and your work shapes society, whether consciously or not. The question isn’t whether to engage, but how to engage more thoughtfully and intentionally.

Our design values (empathy, accessibility, sustainability, human dignity) are not neutral professional principles. They are political positions demanding we take stands on the issues that matter most to our communities and future.

Silence in the face of injustice isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity. And in a world facing unprecedented challenges, we can’t afford to waste the power of design on the sidelines of history.

So here’s my challenge: How do your design values align with your political engagement? What issues matter enough to you that silence feels impossible? And how might your unique skills as a designer contribute to the conversations that will shape our shared future?

The choice is ours. We can continue to pretend that design exists in a political vacuum, or we can embrace our role as shapers of society and engage with the world as it actually is: complex, contested, and desperately in need of the clarity, empathy, and imagination that good design provides.

The conversation has already started. The question is whether you’ll join it.

NK

☉

Share

❝The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’❞
— Grace Hopper1

I’ve recently found myself often reflecting on how our industry is wrestling with the rise of AI in design. Demetrios Fakinos’ recent LinkedIn post sparked this conversation anew, setting off a lively debate: How should design awards treat work created with AI? Having served on the ED Awards digital jury many times, I became interested in this more specific question.

If you read my last newsletter, Designing in the Age of AI Agents, you’ll remember I argued that AI isn’t just another tool in the designer’s kit, certainly not like Photoshop or Figma. AI is more like a collaborator that’s already sitting in our meetings, suggesting changes, and occasionally making us question our own design sensibilities. We’re not just wielding AI; we’re negotiating with it, curating its outputs, and sometimes even arguing with its tone choices.

Three approaches for the future of Design Evaluation

The old question “What tools did you use?” feels old-school when the tool in question can generate, remix, and even critique creative work. The real dilemma is whether we’re judging the final result, the process, or the interplay between human and AI.

Here’s how it could go:

1. Contextual Transparency: Ask designers to openly document how AI contributed to their project. This isn’t about gatekeeping but about understanding the creative dialogue between humans and machines.

2. Dynamic, Impact-Driven Categories: We move beyond traditional award categories and introduce dynamic ones that spotlight the impact and innovation of each project rather than focusing on process or tools. These new categories recognise inventive thinking, societal contribution, and how effectively designers collaborate with AI as a creative partner.

3. Process-Focused Recognition: Why not celebrate both the outcome and the journey? Invite designers to share their “making-of” stories, highlighting the messy, fascinating collaboration between human intent and algorithmic suggestion.

1. Contextual Transparency (The Sensible Approach)

• Mandatory Disclosure: Require all entrants to clearly document how AI was used in their projects. This includes specifying which tools were used, what parts of the work were AI-assisted, and how human creativity directed the process.

• Judging on Merit: Maintain established design criteria (innovation, execution, impact, and aesthetic quality) regardless of the tools involved. This ensures fairness and keeps the focus on creative excellence.

• Educational Value: These disclosures build a living archive of AI’s evolving role in design, helping both juries and the wider industry understand new practices and trends.

2. Dynamic, Impact-Driven Categories (The Radical Approach)

• Category Reinvention: Move beyond traditional divisions and create award categories focusing on impact, innovation, and societal value. Examples might include “Regenerative Design,” “Cross-Cultural Innovation,” or “Systemic Impact.”

• Celebrating Collaboration: Explicitly recognise human-AI collaboration as a new creative paradigm. Judge how effectively designers orchestrate AI tools to achieve meaningful outcomes.

• Adaptive Evaluation: Use AI to analyse entry patterns and update categories annually, ensuring the awards stay relevant as technology and society evolve.

• Cross-Disciplinary Juries: Expand juries to include ethicists, technologists, and community voices, ensuring a holistic evaluation of design’s broader implications.

3. Process-Focused Recognition (The Hybrid Approach)

• Dual Evaluation: Introduce parallel awards for the final output and the creative process. This means recognising not only the result but also the ingenuity, strategy, and ethical considerations behind the work.

• Transparent Narratives: Ask entrants to submit a process narrative or “making-of” dossier, detailing their creative journey, decision-making, and the interplay between human and AI contributions.

• Ethics and Intent: Emphasise ethical design, originality, and responsible AI use. This approach rewards designers who push boundaries thoughtfully and transparently.

• Mentorship and Learning: Use process-focused recognition as an educational tool, sharing best practices and inspiring the next generation of designers to engage critically with emerging technologies.

Implementation Strategies

For Contextual Transparency: Develop standardised disclosure forms, train judges to evaluate AI-assisted work, and pilot these practices in select categories.

For Dynamic Categories: Collaborate with technology partners and academia, create new metrics for societal impact, and build adaptive award systems.

For Process-Focused Recognition: Encourage entrants to document their creative journey, provide resources on ethical AI use, and celebrate both the “what” and the “how” of design.

AI: Not Just a Tool, But a Teammate (With Opinions)

Let’s be clear: AI is not just a faster, shinier version of what came before. It’s a new kind of creative presence that can nudge, surprise, and even challenge us. Treating it as “just another tool” misses the point.

The real shift is that designers must now curate, critique, and sometimes push back against AI’s suggestions. The skills that matter most, framing the right problem, exercising taste, and upholding ethics, are more critical than ever.

Looking Ahead (and a Little Sideways)

If the current debate is any indication, we’re still writing the rules. And honestly, that’s exciting. We have the chance to shape not just how we award design, but how we define creativity itself in an AI-augmented world.

And who knows? Maybe in a few years, we’ll see a panel of AI agents hotly debating whether to give credit to a human for “inspiring” a particularly clever layout. (“Do we mention the human’s contribution, or just say the prompt was unusually well-phrased?”)

Until then, let’s keep the conversation open, the disclosures honest, and the humour alive. The future of design (and its awards) will be shaped by how bravely we embrace the questions and the quirks of working alongside our new digital teammates.

NK

☉

❝The brain is a prediction machine. It constructs a world, and then lives in it.❞
— Anil Seth 1

The Quiet Colour of Darkness

There’s a strange and beautiful colour we all see, but almost no one talks about.

It’s called Eigengrau2 —German for “intrinsic grey.” It’s what we see when there’s no light at all. Not black. Not nothing. Just a deep, perceptual fog conjured by the brain itself as if it refuses to accept the void.

No photons. No input. And yet—something.

This isn’t poetry, it’s neuroscience. Our visual system, desperate for signal, generates its own. The mind hates silence so much that it starts humming to itself.

In design, something eerily similar happens. When a screen shows nothing, users make up their own story. They assume. They guess. They hallucinate meaning.

Designing in these moments—when nothing is there, but perception insists—is where the real craft lives.

Eigengrau 101

• Complete darkness ≠ true black. It’s that murky, perceptual gray, born of our brain’s rebellion.

• Our minds won’t tolerate pure absence. They must fill it.

• Result: a perceptual fiction—comforting perhaps, but often misleading.

UX’s Own Gray Zone

In product design, we often obsess over what we put on the screen—buttons, sliders, icons, delightful little micro-interactions. But the real test of thoughtful design often lies in what we leave out: the silences, the blank spaces, the moments where the system says nothing and the user must still find meaning.

1. Empty States → Visual Silence

Open a new app. No content. No welcome. Just an interface waiting for something—anything—to happen. For users, this isn’t neutral. It’s unsettling.

• “Am I supposed to do something?”

• “Is it broken?”

• “Did I mess up?”

When the product gives no signal, the brain supplies one. Often inaccurately. A well-designed empty state is more than a placeholder—it’s a moment to teach, reassure, or spark action. A bad one is just silent rejection in Helvetica.

2. Defaults → Invisible Decisions

Defaults are meant to help. They speed things up and remove friction. But they’re also quietly powerful because users rarely question them.

• A dropdown pre-selected for you.

• A silent auto-save to a location you didn’t pick.

• An opt-in you didn’t notice but agreed to.

When defaults are invisible, users don’t perceive them as choices. They just follow the path of least resistance—until something breaks or surprises them, and then, miraculously, it’s their fault.

3. Mental Models → The Folk Wisdom of Interfaces

Users carry expectations—taught by decades of software—and they apply them everywhere:

• Logos go to homepages.

• Trash cans delete.

• Swiping left means “get rid of this, probably.”

When your product aligns with those expectations, things feel intuitive. When it doesn’t, it feels… weird. Or wrong. Breaking a convention isn’t a sin. Breaking it without explanation is UX malpractice.

Like Eigengrau, these design moments are never truly empty. They are quiet, yes—but pregnant with interpretation. If we don’t shape the silence, users will fill it in. And if we’re not careful, they’ll fill it with confusion, frustration, or distrust.

What Happens When We Don’t Shape the Silence

• No feedback after pressing “Submit”? Congratulations: you’ve sculpted uncertainty.

• Invisible AI operations? Users feel abandoned. Or fleeced. Surprise!

• Silent failures, orphaned progress, hidden assumptions—these become stories users make up.

  Often: “This thing is broken. And I blame myself.”

Design for the Gray—Intentionally

1. Empty states: make them friendly, useful, and unmistakably on-brand.

2. Defaults: mind the slipperiest slopes. Document decisions so users aren’t trapped.

3. Feedback: show it. Every click, swipe, and download—show some life.

4. Mental model support: Don’t force assumptions. Guide gently, or break them deliberately and clearly.

5. Edge cases: prepare them with humour or humility—no one likes feeling stupid, especially when it’s the product’s fault.

Seeing in the Dark (and Loving It)

We don’t design just what’s on-screen. We design the voids too—the silences, pauses, emptiness. And every vacuum we leave is an invitation for someone else’s interpretation. Usually the wrong one.

When we learn to craft the grey—choose what it says, what it feels like, or better yet, what it inspires—we stop letting silence speak for us. Instead, we give it a voice.

Good design isn’t just clarity. It’s the confidence to own the unknown—and to shape it beautifully.

Here’s to designing with intention, even—or especially—when nothing is there.

NK

☉

❝The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.❞
— Socrates1 (who, as far as I know, never had to sit through a stakeholder meeting about ‘design alignment’)

Let me set the scene: a recent project kickoff, a dozen professionals on the call, each with a different job title and, as it turns out, a different dictionary. For 45 minutes, we heard the word “design” so many times it started to sound like a made-up word. (You know when you say “banana” over and over and suddenly you’re not sure it’s even a thing?) We had architectural design, tech solution design, strategy design, service design, research design, UX design, UI design… You get it. It was funny, in that British way where you chuckle to yourself and then go home to question your life choices.

But here’s the thing: we can do better. Or at least, we can try to agree on what we’re talking about before we start arguing about it.

The Definitional Divide: Why We’re All Right (and Wrong)

If you ask ten designers what “design” means, you’ll get at least twelve answers. And if you ask the managers and CEOs in the room, you’ll get a few more —plus a request to make it “pop.”

Let’s break down the usual suspects:

The Visual Traditionalists

Graphic designers, visual designers, the folks who know their Pantone from their elbow. For them, design is about how things look: typography, colour, composition, and ensuring your brand guidelines are followed, even if it kills them —and it might. They’re the ones who can spot a misaligned pixel from across the room (I’m a proud master of this), and who believe Comic Sans is a crime against humanity.

The Digital Functionalists

UX and UI designers, living in Figma, dreaming in wireframes. For them, design is about flows, usability, and making sure your nan can use the app without accidentally ordering a tractor. They’ll talk about user journeys, accessibility, and “delight” —which, in practice, means making sure the button is big enough to tap but not so big it looks like a toddler’s toy.

The Strategy Evangelists

Service designers, design thinkers, and anyone who’s ever uttered the phrase “ecosystem mapping” without irony. For them, design is a way of thinking —a strategic tool for solving problems, changing organisations, and occasionally making things so complicated you need a workshop to explain the workshop.

The “Everyone Else” Brigade

Architects, engineers, researchers, product managers—all claiming their own flavour of “design.” And why not? If you can design a building or a database, surely you can have an opinion on a button, right?

Mike Monteiro’s North Star (and Why I Keep Coming Back to It)

Amidst all this, I find myself returning to Mike Monteiro’s definition:

It’s beautifully simple. It’s also the only definition I’ve found that doesn’t immediately start a fight. (Try it at your next meeting. If nothing else, it’ll buy you five minutes of silence while everyone thinks.)

Monteiro’s point is that design isn’t just about making things pretty, or usable, or strategic. It’s about intent. It’s about solving a problem—on purpose, not by accident. And it’s about doing it within constraints: time, budget, technology, taste, and, yes, the occasional client request that makes you question the very fabric of reality.

The Cost of Confusion

Here’s the problem: when we disagree on what “design” means, we end up talking past each other. Projects stall. Teams argue. Managers get frustrated. And somewhere, a designer quietly weeps into their oat flat white.

Real-world casualties of the definition war:

• Misaligned expectations: The CEO thinks “design” means a new logo; the UX team thinks it means a six-month research project. Good luck reconciling that in a sprint review.

• Territorial disputes: “That’s not real design!” (Always said with the same energy as “That’s not real football!” at the pub.)

• Missed opportunities: When everyone’s defending their patch, no one’s looking at the big picture.

• Industry fragmentation: We end up with silos, jargon, and enough job titles to fill a small phone book.

What We All Share (Even If We Don’t Admit It)

Despite the turf wars, there’s a thread that runs through all these versions of design. Whether you’re channelling Jonny Ive, Victor Papanek, or Khoi Vinh, we’re all trying to do a few things:

• Solve problems for people. (Ideally, real people. Sorry, personas.)

• Work within constraints. (Time, money, tech, taste, and the occasional existential crisis.)

• Make decisions about form and function. (Even if you’d rather not talk about “form follows function” ever again.)

And, crucially, we’re all trying to make things better than they were before. Sometimes that means a beautiful poster. Sometimes it’s a seamless checkout flow. Sometimes it’s a service that works for the people who need it.

A Working Definition (That Might Actually Work)

So, what if we tried something radical: agreeing on a working definition before we start the next debate?

Here’s my proposal, inspired by Monteiro and a few late-night rants:

It’s not perfect (what is?), but it’s broad enough to include everyone from the pixel pushers to the strategy gurus, and specific enough to remind us that design isn’t magic—it’s work, with boundaries.

How to Start the Next Design Conversation

A few tips, from someone who’s been in one too many “design alignment” meetings:

• Ask what people mean by “design” before you argue about it. Seriously, just ask. You’ll save hours.

• Acknowledge the constraints. If someone says, “We can’t do that,” they’re probably not being difficult—they’re being realistic.

• Respect the different traditions. Graphic design isn’t better or worse than UX, it’s just different. Like tea and coffee. Or Marmite and literally anything else.

• Look for common ground. We’re all trying to make things better. Start there.

Subscribe now

Closing Thoughts

Design is a wonderfully slippery word. That’s what makes it powerful —and infuriating. But if we can agree, even for a moment, on what we mean when we say “design,” we might get somewhere. Or at the very least, we’ll have fewer meetings where the word loses all meaning.

And if all else fails, remember: if you can design your way out of a meeting about design, you’re probably doing something right.

Until next time,

NK

☉

P.S. If you’ve got your own definition of design (or a story about a meeting where no one knew what anyone was talking about), hit reply. I promise I won’t design a survey about it.

Leave a comment

❝We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.❞
— Marshall McLuhan1

Nearly every project I touch these days involves AI. We’re not just using AI to speed up workflows, sense-check ideas, or summarise notes — we’re designing and building AI-powered features right into the products themselves.

It’s even made its way into hiring. In recent design interviews, the topic almost always comes up: “How are you using AI?” “Is it replacing parts of your process?” “Should I be worried?” (That last one is usually unspoken but easy to spot in the eyes.)

It’s fair. The landscape is shifting, fast. AI is not “on the horizon” anymore — it’s sitting in the meeting, already commenting on the doc. So let’s pause, look around, and ask the real questions: What’s actually changing? What’s still essential? And what kind of designers will thrive in this weird, wonderful new world?

🔧⚡⏳

What’s Changing — Tools, Tempo, and Expectations

Designers have always adapted to new tools. But this time, the tools talk back. They generate screens, write copy, analyse feedback, and even suggest improvements — sometimes without waiting to be asked. Handy, right? Slightly unnerving? Also yes.

A few things that are clearly in flux:

• Tools are becoming teammates (sort of). We’re no longer just using AI — we’re prompting it, editing its ideas, arguing with its tone choices, and occasionally wondering if it’s gaslighting us. (It’s not. Probably.)

• Work has gone turbo. One prompt now does what used to take hours. That’s amazing until you realise your boss now expects three versions by lunch, plus one “playful” variant just for fun.

• Quantity isn’t the problem anymore. When you can generate 50 layouts in 5 seconds, the real challenge becomes figuring out which one doesn’t look like it was made by a caffeinated squirrel.

In short, we’ve sped things up — but we haven’t necessarily made them better. That’s still our job.

🏛️✨🔑

What Doesn’t Change — and Actually Matters More Now

For all the disruption, some things haven’t changed at all. In fact, the most important parts of design have only become more critical.

Let’s not forget:

• Good designers frame the right problem. AI is excellent at spitting out solutions. But unless someone’s asking the right questions, we’re just getting faster at going in the wrong direction.

• Taste still matters. Aesthetics, judgment, cultural nuance — that comes from years of experience, not machine learning. AI can remix what already exists, but it can’t invent new meaning. Yet.

• Design is still human. It’s negotiation. It’s facilitation. It’s managing conflicting needs, blurry goals, and last-minute changes from Steve in Legal. No amount of automation will handle that gracefully.

So no, the fundamentals aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they’re the anchor we need in a sea of AI-generated enthusiasm and questionable typography.

🧠🛠️🚀

The Emerging Design Skillset

Designers don’t need to turn into prompt engineers or machine learning experts. But we do need to get smart about how AI works — and how it doesn’t.

Here’s what’s rising in value:

• AI fluency. You don’t need to write Python, but you should know what a language model is before you ask it to rewrite your onboarding flow.

• Data awareness. If you’re designing with or for AI, you’re dealing with training sets, probabilistic outputs, and feedback loops. A bit of statistical common sense goes a long way.

• Designing for unpredictability. AI-powered systems don’t always give the same output twice. That means we’re not just designing UI — we’re designing behavioural guardrails.

• Ethical literacy. AI can do a lot. That doesn’t mean it should. Designers need to be the ones in the room asking uncomfortable questions — preferably before the product goes live and ends up on the front page of Reddit.

• Curation and sense-making. When AI can generate endless options, the value isn’t in creating more. It’s in knowing what not to ship.

These skills are less about complex tools and more about adaptive thinking. The kind of thinking that keeps you relevant — and useful — no matter how many bots show up to the brainstorm.

⚖️🤖❗

Design Ethics in the Age of “It Was the Algorithm”

Let’s talk ethics — not the “don’t use Comic Sans” kind, but the big stuff.

AI systems are making real decisions: what we see, what gets recommended, what’s hidden, and what’s nudged. Designers are now part of those decisions, whether they like it or not.

So, a few things we can’t ignore:

• Bias doesn’t vanish — it scales. If your data is skewed, your AI product will be too. Fast. That’s not a bug. That’s just math with consequences.

• Opacity is a design problem. If a system makes a choice and users don’t understand why, that’s a UX issue. You don’t get to say, “Oh, the model did it.”

• Neutrality is a myth. Every automated decision has a value baked into it. Pretending it’s neutral means someone else made that call without you noticing.

• Dignity is the new north star. Whether we’re designing AI chatbots, recommendation engines, or invisible nudges — we’re influencing real human behaviour. Let’s try not to be creepy.

Ethical design isn’t a footnote anymore. It’s a core competency.

🎨🧩📈

Redefining the Role: From Pixel Pushers to Strategic Shapers

The more AI handles the executional side of design, the more we’re left with the hard, strategic stuff. You know — the messy, political, business-critical work that tools can’t automate (yet).

Designers are becoming:

• Systems thinkers2

• Problem framers3

• Value translators4

• Ethical challengers 5

• Cross-functional glue6

So, yes, the job is changing. But it’s not shrinking — it’s expanding. You’re not being replaced by a robot. You’re being invited to design the future with one.

😏🎤💡

Final Thoughts

Here’s the thing. You’re not obsolete. Not even close. Unless your entire design practice is pushing pixels in alphabetical order — in which case, maybe do a course.

The rest of us? We’ve got this. Design has always been about change. We survived the move from print to digital. We survived the flat design wars. We even survived that phase where everyone put gradients and blobs on everything.

So let’s treat AI the same way we treat any trend or tool: with curiosity, caution, and just enough skepticism to keep things interesting. The goal isn’t to beat the machines. It’s to design better alongside them — and sometimes in spite of them.

And if one day the AI overlords really do take over, I say let them handle stakeholder feedback. We’ll see how long they last.

NK

☉

❝Design is not a single object or dimension. Design is messy and complex.❞
— Natasha Jen1

The UX Elephant in the Room

We’ve all agonized over design debt—those accumulated shortcuts that haunt our Figma files. But what if I told you your unoptimized hero image isn’t just hurting your design system’s cleanliness? It’s actively contributing to climate change. Yes, your laziness with Lottie animations might be melting glaciers.

Having led design systems while balancing experimental projects, I’ve seen how sustainability is often dismissed as “someone else’s problem.”

Let’s change that.

1. Metrics That Matter (More Than Dribbble Likes)

As designers, we obsess over engagement metrics and aesthetic polish but rarely ask: “What’s the carbon footprint of that carousel?” Drawing from my work scaling enterprise design systems, I’ve learned that sustainable choices require ruthless quantification. Let’s dissect the numbers behind digital pollution—because, unlike Dribbble applause, CO₂ emissions don’t vanish when the hype cycle ends.

The Autoplay Apocalypse

Your charming product intro video? It’s a CO₂ cannon:

• 15s 1080p video: 3.2 kWh/1k views ≈ charging 250 smartphones 2

• Static SVG alternative: 0.04 kWh ≈ powering a smartwatch for 30 minutes

Pro tip: If your video’s view count rivals Taylor Swift’s TikTok, you’ve probably offset a small forest’s annual carbon sequestration.

Dark Mode’s Dirty Secret

While implementing dark UI at design systems, I learned the following:

• OLED screens cut energy use by 40% in dark mode 3

• LCDs? Only 9% savings—sometimes worse with backlight compensation

The takeaway: Dark mode is like Greek coffee—potent in the right context, bitter disappointment otherwise.

2. Case Study: Lessons from the Trenches

Are you aware of BBC’s CO₂-Aware Redesign?4 Theory meets reality in BBC’s dark mode overhaul —a project echoing Bitniks’5 collaborative workshops where “sustainability” transitions from buzzword to blueprint. Much like our cross-functional sprints, their approach blended technical rigour with behavioural nudges. Spoiler: The results prove users will choose planet-friendly UX… if they speak their language (coffee metaphors help).

Their approach mirrors strategies we use in Bitniks’ collaborative workshops:

1. Device profiling: Segment users by screen tech (OLED/LCD).

2. Contrast calculus: Optimal #202020 background (saves 18% energy vs pure black).

3. Microcopy nudges: “Dark mode saves enough energy to brew three coffees weekly.”

Result: 8% energy drop during peak hours, proving users embrace eco-options when framed relatably.

3. Mitigation Strategies for Teams

Governance isn’t sexy, but neither is climate collapse. Having baked ethics into customers’ design systems, I advocate for frameworks that turn guilt into action. Consider this your playbook for tackling design debt without becoming the office Cassandra —because nobody likes the colleague who mutters “the glaciers, THE GLACIERS!” during standups.

The Bitniks’ Feedback Model (Applied to Sustainability):

1. Audit Ruthlessly: Use tools like Ecograder—it’s the design critique partner you never knew you needed.6

2. Prioritize Debt: That unoptimized illustration system? It’s the carbon equivalent of forgetting 100 coffee mugs in the office dishwasher.7

3. Prevent Relapse: Aim baking sustainability into your design system governance.8 Think:

   1. Figma plugin flagging assets over 150KB9

   2. A/B test reports showing CO₂ impact alongside conversion rates

Remember: Sustainable design isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress.

4. Ethical Implications: When Green Hurts

Every choice has tradeoffs. As we’ll explore, eco-design risks alienating users who need high-contrast modes or reliable performance. Navigating this demands the nuance we apply to experimental projects—because sustainability without inclusivity is just greenwashing with a Figma plugin.

The Accessibility Tightrope

• High-contrast modes can increase energy use by 12%

• Solution: Dynamic adjustments based on device/battery status

Regulatory Waves

With the EU’s Digital Product Passport looming (think: nutrition labels for CO₂), your design decisions will soon face public scrutiny. Better start auditing before your Dribbble shots get ratioed by eco-warriors.

Conclusion: From Guilt to Action

1. 🕵🏻 Run one sustainability audit this sprint (it takes 4-5 minutes; shorter than your morning freddo espresso)

2. ✏️ Add “CO₂ impact” to your next design critique rubric.

3. 🔗 Shameless self-promotion: Try my Masterclass “Design Strategy: Expanding Influence, Creating Impact” (March 2025)

Final Thoughts

As someone who’s judged everything from fintech dashboards to experimental typefaces for the European Design Awards, I’ve learned: sustainable design isn’t a constraint—it’s the ultimate creative challenge. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go delete 37 unused Figma variants. My carbon conscience is watching.

NK

☉

❝Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.❞

— Vincent van Gogh1

You know, that delicate moment where you share your baby (ahem, your design work) with your team and hope it comes back in one piece. Whether you’re working in a squad of 10 or a bustling crew of 50, it’s all about balancing practicality with empathy.

Let’s crack on!

1. Start with Empathy

It’s not just about what you say but how you say it.

For Beginners

As a junior designer, it can feel intimidating to speak up or to hear critique on your precious creations. Begin by reminding yourself that the feedback isn’t a personal attack. Everyone in the team is rooting for the same outcome: a brilliant design that serves the user. So, approach feedback sessions with kindness, courtesy, and a readiness to listen.

For Experienced Designers

Whether you’re a senior or a lead, you set the tone. Model empathy by listening carefully, using inclusive language, and highlighting positives before exploring the negatives. Recognise the emotional investment juniors put into their work. Show that you value their perspective and encourage open discussion rather than heavy-handed directives. After all, an empathetic leader fosters a safer environment for honest conversation.

Tip

Encourage other designers to share user testing notes or user journey maps first. This context fosters empathy for both the users and the designer’s approach.

2. Focus on Goals, Not Just Opinions

Opinions are fine but tie them back to user goals and business objectives.

For Beginners

When you receive feedback, ask clarifying questions: “How does this tie in with user needs?” or “Is this suggestion driving the project’s main objective forward?” Anchoring feedback to actual goals helps you filter out well-meaning but irrelevant commentary.

For Experienced Designers

As a senior or lead, guide discussions toward the objectives and away from personal tastes. When giving feedback, reference data (user research, analytics, insights) to underpin your points. This teaches the entire team to focus on measurable outcomes rather than subjective preferences. Over time, you’ll cultivate a culture where every piece of feedback is tied to value.

Tip

If possible, reference existing analytics or usability test results. Concrete data points (e.g., “We noticed 60% of users abandoned the sign-up process at this step”) clarify the rationale behind your feedback.

3. Be Specific and Actionable

Vague feedback can be more confusing than no feedback at all.

For Beginners

When giving feedback, avoid general statements like “I don’t like this.” Instead, be precise: “The colour contrast here might not meet accessibility standards for our older users.” That specificity makes it easier for the recipient to apply the feedback productively.

For Experienced Designers

If you’re in a senior role, you’re shaping not just the feedback but also how others learn to give it. Demonstrate clarity by referencing guidelines, brand pillars, or interaction patterns that can be improved. Even in large teams, this practice streamlines discussions and avoids endless back-and-forth because everyone knows exactly what needs to be done.

Tip

Use examples or mini-scenarios: “Imagine a user accessing this screen on a mobile device in bright sunlight. How easily can they see and tap the main CTA?”

4. Embrace a Growth Mindset

See feedback as an opportunity to grow, not a threat.

For Beginners

It’s natural to feel defensive when your design choices are scrutinized. Take a deep breath and reframe critique as an opportunity to refine your skillset. Ask follow-up questions: “Is there a standard interaction pattern for this component?” or “How can I better address edge cases?” Curiosity helps you evolve faster.

For Experienced Designers

You’re seasoned, but that doesn’t mean you have all the answers. Show your team that feedback is a two-way street. Encourage them to critique your work as well—soliciting direct input on your prototypes or UI patterns fosters a healthy team dynamic. This openness also helps juniors feel more confident in sharing their perspectives.

Tip

Conduct mini post-mortems after a project launch. Review what feedback was provided, how it was implemented, and what outcomes it led to. This reflective habit cements a growth mindset.

5. Mind the Timing and Medium

Consider when and how you deliver feedback – it matters.

For Beginners

Don’t wait until the high-fidelity design is nearly finalised to highlight major UX flaws. Provide feedback early in the sketch or wireframe stage. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to adjust user flows in low fidelity than to overhaul a polished interface. If you can’t meet face-to-face, leverage design collaboration tools like Figma or Miro comments to clarify your thoughts asynchronously.

For Experienced Designers

As a senior or lead, you likely juggle multiple projects. Be strategic about when and how you hold feedback sessions. Clearly define the focus of each meeting—are we critiquing visual hierarchy, accessibility, or information architecture? Structured, timely feedback prevents endless iterations and respects everyone’s bandwidth.

Tip:

Introduce structured critique sessions at set project milestones: after wireframes, after mid-fi designs, and before final handoff. This rhythm keeps the process flowing and reduces last-minute chaos.

6. Psychology and Positivity

Feedback is at its best when it boosts motivation.

For Beginners

Remember, a little positivity goes a long way. Even if you are concerned about a design’s visual hierarchy or interaction flow, point out something done well first—like a creative micro-interaction or a thoughtful user journey map. This approach keeps spirits high and encourages collaboration.

For Experienced Designers

You have the power to lift morale or sow doubt. Use it wisely. Sprinkle in references to successful case studies or past project wins where similar feedback led to big improvements. It shows the team the tangible benefits of robust critique and encourages them to keep pushing the envelope.

Tip:

Celebrate quick wins in design sprints: if a small tweak to a button label or layout leads to a measurable improvement, announce it to the team. Show how feedback turned into tangible success.

7. Sustaining a Healthy Feedback Culture

Build a consistent routine of critiques, retros, and check-ins.

For Beginners

Jump into regular design critiques, even if you’re only observing. By seeing how seniors dissect user flows, navigation patterns, and visual styles, you’ll absorb valuable insights. Over time, you’ll grow more confident in articulating your own feedback.

For Experienced Designers

Take ownership of the feedback pipeline. Set up recurring critique sessions with a clear agenda: Are we evaluating usability? Branding consistency? Accessibility compliance? Encourage honesty and civility in every session. Celebrate successes publicly and address challenges privately and promptly. This consistency and structure keep your team both focused and motivated.

Tip

Create an internal feedback “playbook” with guidelines on how to critique effectively. Include checklists for accessibility, brand guidelines, and typical UX patterns. This shared resource ensures everyone has a common understanding of best practices.

Do’s and Dont’s of Design Feedback

Do

1. Encourage curiosity
   Ask questions that guide teammates to think deeper about their decisions.

2. Balance positive and negative
   Recognize what works before identifying areas for improvement.

3. Practice active listening
   Make eye contact, paraphrase what you’ve heard, and confirm understanding.

4. Consider accessibility
   Check colour contrasts, text size, and navigation patterns to ensure inclusive experiences.

Don’t

1. Make it personal
   Focus on the design itself, not the designer’s competence.

2. Overload with solutions
   Offer insights but let the designer propose their improvements.

3. Dismiss feedback outright
   Even if you disagree, seek to understand the perspective behind it.

4. Rely on assumptions
   Back up critiques with data, user research, or established design principles.

Final Thoughts

Design feedback isn’t just a necessary chore —it’s the force that keeps creative energy flowing in any design-driven organisation. By focusing on empathy, tying feedback to goals, being specific, and maintaining a positive vibe, you can transform the process from painful to powerful. It’s the difference between churning out passable products and crafting innovative, user-centered solutions.

Remember: a healthy feedback loop is a gift that keeps on giving. Junior designers grow in confidence and skill, while seniors sharpen their leadership and mentoring capabilities. Your design team becomes stronger, your products more user-centric, and your workplace a happier place to be. That’s a triple win, folks.

Stay curious, stay kind, and keep creating.

NK

☉

❝Great design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it.❞

— Jared Spool1

UX is everywhere now. Everyone agrees it’s important. It’s on every job description, every team roadmap, and every slide deck about “the future of our product.” But let’s be honest: how often is UX truly mature?

For many organisations, UX still feels like a checkbox—a cosmetic layer or a last-minute “make it pretty” exercise. But mature UX? That’s something entirely different. It’s not about putting out fires; it’s about preventing them. It’s not about guesswork; it’s about insight. And it’s not about responding to trends; it’s about driving them.

But what does it take to move from the basics to something transformative?

What Does UX Maturity Look Like?

UX maturity isn’t just about hiring designers or adding design sprints to your process. It’s about how design is perceived, integrated, and prioritised across the organisation.

At the lowest levels, UX is reactive:

“Fix this.”
“Make that button blue.”
“Add a feature our competitors have.”

At higher levels, UX becomes proactive:

“How do we reduce churn by understanding user needs?”
“How can design help us scale?”
“What problems should we solve next?”

And at its peak? UX becomes strategic:

“How do we rethink our business model to align with the behaviours of the people we serve?”

“How can we lead our industry by anticipating future needs?”

Strategic UX isn’t just design. It’s vision.

Symptoms of Low UX Maturity

Here’s a question: how often do you hear these phrases in your organisation?

• “We already know what users want. Just make it look good.”

• “Can we skip the research and get straight to the design?”

• “Why do we need so many iterations? The first version looks fine.”

These are signs that UX is stuck in a low-maturity rut. It’s treated as a cost, not an investment—a decoration, not a discipline.

How to Move Forward

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. But progress is possible, and it starts with small, deliberate steps:

1. Educate the Organisation
   Start at the top. Leaders need to understand that UX isn’t just about visuals—it’s about aligning business goals with user needs. Share stories of how great design has driven growth in other organisations. Data helps, but stories stick.

2. Commit to Research
   Design is only as good as the questions you ask. Commit to user research, not as a phase but as a foundation. Push for evidence-based decisions, even if it means challenging assumptions.

3. Break Down Silos
   UX doesn’t live in a bubble. Mature organisations foster collaboration between design, product, engineering, and leadership. The best ideas don’t come from lone geniuses but from teams that work together.

4. Measure What Matters
   Forget vanity metrics like “time spent on the page” and focus on outcomes: reduced friction, higher retention, and increased satisfaction. Make sure the design’s impact is visible and measurable.

The Role of Leadership

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: without leadership buy-in, UX maturity is a non-starter. You can have the most talented designers in the world, but if the organisation doesn’t listen to them, it won’t matter.

Leaders need to see UX not as a line item in the budget but as a competitive advantage. Their job is to champion, fund, and—most importantly—trust it.

What’s at Stake?

Low UX maturity doesn’t just result in clunky interfaces or frustrated users. It’s a missed opportunity to innovate, differentiate, and lead. Businesses that invest in UX maturity don’t just make better products—they build better relationships with their customers.

So, where does your organisation sit on the spectrum? Are you stuck in the reactive zone or ready to move towards strategy?

Moving Beyond the Basics

UX maturity isn’t a destination; it’s a mindset. It’s about constantly asking, "How can we do better?" and being brave enough to follow through.

At the heart of it all is this simple truth: great design is never just about design. It’s about people—the ones you’re designing for, the ones you’re designing with, and the ones you inspire to think bigger.

Let’s move beyond the basics—together.

❝Guys, I'm eating junk and watching rubbish! You better come out and stop me!❞

— Kevin McCallister1, while watching "Angels With Filthy Souls"

As designers, we know great experiences aren’t just about what’s on the surface but about what happens when users (or viewers) feel understood. Classic Christmas movies are masterclasses in storytelling UX: they hook us with delightful moments, engage us with emotional arcs, and leave us with a warm sense of satisfaction.

Let’s explore the user experience of five classics.

Home Alone (1990)

The UX Hook: Who hasn’t dreamed of having the house to themselves as a kid? Home Alone captures that fantasy and flips it into a thrilling problem-solving challenge.

Good UX Moment: Kevin’s traps are a genius metaphor for creative problem-solving under constraints. The payoff is as satisfying as a perfectly executed user journey.

Pain Point Solved: Kevin’s fear of abandonment is neutralized with self-reliance and resilience. He evolves from a whiny kid to a confident “user” who masters his environment.

Takeaway: Let users feel empowered by providing tools to overcome challenges in delightful ways.

If only Kevin had invented Airbnb

Die Hard (1988)

The UX Hook: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Absolutely—if your Christmas spirit involves exploding helicopters and snarky one-liners.

Good UX Moment: The simple, high-stakes premise (hostages + lone hero) keeps users—uh, viewers—engaged without overcomplicating the journey.

Pain Point Solved: The office holiday party, reimagined. What if, instead of awkward small talk, you fought off terrorists? The movie turns a mundane setting into an epic action experience.

Takeaway: Even the most mundane experiences can be transformed with the proper perspective (and maybe a well-timed “Yippee-ki-yay”2).

Nothing says “Christmas spirit” like a barefoot sprint over broken glass.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

The UX Hook: What if you could A/B test your own life? George Bailey does precisely that, showing how one person’s actions impact an entire community.

Good UX Moment: Clarence, the angel’s intervention, creates a powerful empathy-building experience, putting George (and the viewer) in the shoes of a world without him.

Pain Point Solved: Feeling insignificant during the holidays. George realizes his life has meaning, proving even the slightest “features” in life make the whole system work.

Takeaway: The best designs solve not just surface problems but deeper, emotional needs.

Bad UX can make even angels lose their wings.

A Christmas Carol (Various Adaptations)

The UX Hook: Scrooge is forced to face his own bad “user behavior” through three ghostly “pop-up notifications.”

Good UX Moment: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come introduces a fear-driven call to action that triggers a life-changing transformation for Scrooge.

Pain Point Solved: Poor engagement. By the end, Scrooge becomes an active participant in his own life, bringing joy to others in a seamless feedback loop.

Takeaway: Sometimes, a well-timed nudge or alert is exactly what users need to correct their path.

Includes the best ghostly “notifications” one can ever receive.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

The UX Hook: Jack Skellington’s journey is all about experimenting with new “features” (Christmas) in a familiar environment (Halloween Town), blending innovation with tradition.

Good UX Moment: Jack’s discovery of Christmas Town is a whimsical exploration of new possibilities, capturing the joy of encountering delightful and unfamiliar design elements.

Pain Point Solved: Monotony in the user journey. Jack reimagines his role, proving that stepping outside his comfort zone can lead to growth and innovation.

Takeaway: Innovation happens when we mix fresh ideas with established systems, creating something unique yet accessible.

Rebranding without research can scare off your core audience!

The Winner

Home Alone isn’t just a Christmas movie—it’s a masterclass in creating a timeless experience. Here’s why it consistently “wins” in the hearts of viewers and why it’s a metaphor for great UX design:

1. Relatable Core Problem
   At its heart, Home Alone is about overcoming loneliness and fear, universal themes that resonate with everyone. Kevin’s journey from feeling abandoned to embracing independence mirrors the user’s journey in a well-designed experience: from confusion to mastery.
   UX Parallel: Great designs identify a problem users can relate to and guide them toward a satisfying resolution.

2. Empowering the User (Kevin)

   Kevin isn’t a passive participant; he’s in control. He uses everyday tools (and his wit) to create ingenious solutions. Watching him take down the “wet bandits” is as satisfying as solving a tricky UX problem.
   UX Parallel: The best designs give users the tools to solve problems creatively and feel accomplished.

3. Emotional Design and Delight

   The movie delivers moments of pure delight—whether Kevin screams after trying aftershave or his intricate battle plan. These emotional peaks keep viewers hooked and coming back year after year.
   UX Parallel: Injecting moments of joy and surprise into a product can turn it from functional to unforgettable.

4. Perfect Pacing and Flow

   The movie has a seamless structure: setup, conflict, and resolution. It builds tension steadily (the break-in) and delivers a satisfying payoff (Kevin reunited with his family).
   UX Parallel: Like a user journey map, the flow is intentional and keeps the audience engaged, ensuring no moment feels out of place or unnecessary.

5. Universal Appeal
   Whether you’re 8 or 80, Home Alone works. Kids love Kevin’s cleverness; adults appreciate the humour and themes of family. Its broad appeal makes it a go-to Christmas classic.
   UX Parallel: Designs that cater to diverse audiences and prioritize accessibility have the broadest impact.

Home Alone wins because it balances humour, heart, and ingenuity. It’s not just a movie—it’s an experience. Like the best UX designs, it solves problems, creates delight, and sticks with you long after the credits roll.

So this Christmas, let’s channel our inner Kevin McCallister: solve problems creatively, deliver delightful surprises, and always leave our users saying, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!” 🎄

❝I imagine a world in which AI is going to make us work more productively, live longer, and have cleaner energy.❞

— Fei-Fei Li 1

In the world of Blade Runner, artificial intelligence and humanity coexist in a shadowed, neon-lit future, where the line between machine and human blurs to unsettling effect. Black Mirror takes this tension further, exploring how technologies with the power to serve us can also shape, and sometimes control, our lives in ways we might not have foreseen. And then there’s Her—a gentler but equally provocative take on AI, where a man forms a deep, meaningful connection with an operating system, hinting at AI’s capacity not only for utility but for emotional impact.

These stories, each in their own way, serve as cautionary tales and blueprints for possibility. They highlight a question we now face daily as designers: How can we create AI-driven experiences that add meaning to our lives without compromising our autonomy or humanity? Can we harness the transformative power of AI to enrich user experiences—while avoiding the dystopian pitfalls these fictional worlds warn us about?

As artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of our tools and products, designers are at a crossroads. We’re now designing for experiences that adapt, learn, and evolve on their own, shifting our focus from crafting simple flows and static interfaces to orchestrating dynamic interactions and unanticipated results. AI brings boundless opportunities to deepen user experiences, personalise interactions, and streamline complex tasks. However, the risks are equally significant. If not handled with intent, AI can lead to designs that lack empathy, reinforce biases, or unintentionally alienate users.

One of the greatest promises of AI in design is the ability to deliver highly personalised experiences. With AI’s data-processing power, we can fine-tune interfaces to individual needs, learning and adapting in ways we couldn’t before. Imagine apps that adapt to a user’s rhythm, suggesting actions just before they’re needed or minimizing distractions when focus is key. But with this power comes a key question:

Letting AI handle everything is tempting, but full automation is not always the answer. In many cases, users want a feeling of control, an understanding of what’s happening behind the curtain. We risk creating frustration and mistrust when decisions are hidden within “black-box” algorithms. Transparency, then, becomes essential. We’re going far from the Wizard of Oz effect2. Designers can guide users by giving them insight into AI’s decision-making process, allowing for a more transparent, more balanced relationship between user and system.

Bias is another major challenge. AI-driven designs learn from data, and data is rarely neutral. When we let AI make assumptions based on past data, there’s a risk of reinforcing existing stereotypes or excluding entire groups. To counteract this, designers must play an active role in auditing, testing, and challenging AI algorithms' biases. This may mean creating processes where diverse voices are brought in to test assumptions, or it may require us to establish ethical frameworks that guide how AI learns and adapts.

The Designer’s Dilemma: Commoditisation vs. Strategic Innovation

As AI continues to evolve, there’s a growing concern that designers may be replaced by algorithms capable of generating layouts, logos, and user interfaces.

This shift challenges us to reconsider our roles—not as mere providers of design commodities but as strategic thinkers and innovators. Suppose we approach design solely as a commodity, focusing only on deliverables like wireframes or mockups. In that case, we risk being supplanted by AI tools that can replicate these outputs faster and more cheaply.

To stay relevant, designers must elevate their practice by emphasising creativity, empathy, and strategic insight—qualities AI cannot easily replicate. It’s about moving beyond surface-level aesthetics and diving into problem-solving at a systemic level, where human intuition and understanding are irreplaceable.

So, what does this mean for us as designers? It means adopting a dual mindset of curiosity and caution. Embrace AI’s potential, but stay vigilant against its pitfalls. Approach every AI-driven project with the same empathy and ethical considerations you’d bring to any human-centred design. Ask yourself, “How can this enhance the user’s experience, functionally and emotionally?”

As we move forward, the challenge is clear: harness AI in ways that amplify our human touch, not replace it. By designing for AI with empathy, transparency, and ethical intent, we can create experiences that meet and elevate our users’ needs and expectations in the AI era.

NK

☉

Books

1. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
   by Stuart Russell
   A profound exploration of how we can align advanced AI systems with human values, ensuring they remain beneficial.

2. The Design of Everyday Things
   by Don Norman
   A classic on user-centered design principles, emphasizing the importance of designing with the user’s needs and psychology in mind—crucial when integrating AI.

3. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
   by Nick Bostrom
   Investigates the potential future of AI and the existential risks associated with superintelligent machines.

4. Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction
   by Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel
   Analyses technology in science fiction films and shows to extract practical design lessons, relevant for envisioning AI interactions.

5. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
   by Sasha Costanza-Chock
   Discusses how design can exclude or empower communities, emphasizing inclusive and ethical design practices in technology.

Films and Documentaries

1. “Do You Trust This Computer?” (2018)
   Examines the impact of AI on society and the potential risks associated with its unchecked growth.

2. “AlphaGo” (2017)
   Chronicles the story of how Google’s DeepMind developed an AI to master the game of Go, highlighting the advancements and implications of AI.

3. “The Social Dilemma” (2020)
   Explores how algorithms and AI shape social media experiences, affecting behaviour and society.

4. “Ex Machina” (2014)
   A film that delves into AI consciousness and the ethical boundaries between creators and their creations.

5. “Her” (2013)
   It depicts a deepening relationship between a man and an AI operating system, raising questions about emotion, AI, and human connection.

Articles and Papers

1. “Designing for Artificial Intelligence”
   A List Apart

2. “The UX of AI: Designing Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence”
   UX Collective

3. “AI Transparency and Explainability”

   MIT Sloan Management Review

4. “Ethics and Data Science”

   by Mike Loukides, Hilary Mason, DJ Patil

5. “Responsible AI Practices”

   Google AI

❝As long as you are a designer, you have a responsibility to make the world better for the rest of humanity. If you are a designer, you are a human being first. It is your job to stop those that would denigrate humanity for their own selfish benefit.❞

― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

Amidst a world propelled by technological breakthroughs, where the lines between potential and responsibility often blur, it is essential to pause and reflect on a timeless adage: “Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.” This conundrum, ever relevant in the realm of design and technology, beckons us to tread with caution, to consider not only what is feasible but also what is ethical and beneficial for humanity.

Take, for instance, the ambitious endeavours of Elon Musk's Neuralink. With promises of merging the human brain with artificial intelligence, Neuralink dazzles with its potential to revolutionise healthcare, communication, and human evolution. Sounds cool, right? Yet, beneath the veneer of innovation lies a profound ethical quandary. While the prospect of enhancing human cognition and transcending the limits of the human brain is undeniably tantalising, it also raises profound questions about privacy, autonomy, and the very essence of what it means to be human.

As we marvel at the possibilities Neuralink presents and similar ventures, we must not lose sight of the inherent responsibilities accompanying such groundbreaking endeavours. Just because we possess the capability to reshape the fabric of human existence does not absolve us of the obligation to do so thoughtfully and ethically.

This principle resonates not only in the realm of cutting-edge technology but also in the everyday practice of user experience (UX) and design.

The era of Ken Garland's First Things First Manifesto1 in 1963 is far behind us. Likewise, the promising period from the mid-80s to the late 00s, when design and creativity walked hand in hand, has faded into memory. Today, things are different. The idea of something even newer is always just around the corner. It is not uncommon to witness innovation taking precedence over design.

In our fervent pursuit of creating sleek interfaces and immersive experiences, it's all too easy to succumb to the allure of flashy aesthetics and novel features. However, true innovation in design transcends mere novelty; it encompasses a deep understanding of human needs, behaviours, and aspirations.

Consider the ubiquitous mantra of "user-centric design," which exhorts designers to prioritise the needs and preferences of the end-user above all else. Although this principle may seem reasonable, it demands a critical evaluation of whether we genuinely serve our users’ best interests or indulge their momentary whims and impulses.

The proliferation of design "enthusiasm" in the digital age further complicates this dilemma. With an abundance of design tools at our disposal and a culture that glorifies rapid prototyping and iteration, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of valuing quantity over quality and novelty over substance.

As designers, we stand at a crossroads. We have the power to shape the future to usher in a new era of human-computer interaction that is intuitive, inclusive, and ethical. But, with great power comes great responsibility.2

We need to resist the temptation to prioritise novelty over usability, aesthetics over accessibility, speed and efficiency at the expense of thoughtful deliberation and ethical considerations. Even though we can churn out countless design iterations, we should still do so indiscriminately. Instead, we can strive for a harmonious balance between innovation and responsibility, between pushing the boundaries of what is possible and upholding ethical design principles.

Let us approach innovation with humility and foresight, mindful of the responsibilities that accompany our creative endeavours. Let us not only strive to expand the limits of what is achievable but also to ensure that our advancements benefit humanity and uphold our societal values. In doing so, we can harness the transformative power of technology and design to shape a bold, innovative, ethical, and human-centred future.3

NK

☉

Share Designverse

Related links

• Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”, YouTube

❝Design is so important because chaos is so hard❞

― Jules Feiffer

Nearly every day, my wife and I get into our son’s room where we find a mess, and that’s when the typical conversation starts about tidying up and picking up his books, toys and clothes, followed by the equally typical questions like “how can you live like this”, etc.

Void vs Chaos

As every parent entering their kid’s room knows, “If design is about order, its precondition is not void, but chaos.”

This is something that novelist Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) already wrote about in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” 1

I see my son not interested in his room condition (pretty much like me at his age), and I wonder why I care so much about it or, in his words, “What is my problem with that.”

It’s probably because of our different expectations. After all, identifying a problem means nothing other than “knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition”, as Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber wrote in their Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, a 1973 paper where they described and coined the term ‘wicked problems’.

Nowadays, chaos is stronger than order, making design more polarised than ever. It’s either all-inclusive, planetary, big and perplex –or ad-hoc, spontaneous, small and short-lived. “Today’s design culture is an expression of our intense prototype lives —wails Geert Lovink— [p]recarity as an open and free lifestyle is stuck in a never-ending series of failures. Projects either fall through or never get finished. Life feels like an endless row of proposals.” 2

All problems are wicked problems.

Even though we like to describe our problems as “complex”, we are fighting with chaos, not complexity. Complexity is a field where various forms of expertise compete; chaos is the repressed that returns when the experts fail. If, as James Bridle argues, “complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned,” 3 chaos is a grievance that has nothing to teach.

So, what about design?

The average requirements for design have significantly evolved in the past ten years, and designers are asked to adapt to these new requirements. Design is not an execution department. Designers fought a lot to “earn a seat on the table”, and now they have to participate in the conversation actively: think strategically, consider business and market needs, negotiate between management and execution, technics and humanities, autonomy and dependencies, bureaucracy and innovation, things and self. They have to fight chaos and those “wicked problems”.

Certainly, one may lean towards the convenience of a pixel-pushing role; yet, it’s crucial to recall the almost meme-worthy trivialisation of skills and the dullness that can permeate the design profession, littered with repetitive tasks and perceived by many as a commodity.4

Back in 1999, I was designing websites. In a way, my main focus and interest is still in designing digital things. Tools have evolved following the adoption of design thinking and process improvements. We started with Macromedia —IFKYK— and Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and although they weren’t made to design for the web, we pushed them to fit our needs. We then moved to Sketch and InVision, and now, we can’t even imagine how to work without Figma. There are apps out there that can quickly make social media graphics and presentations. AI is here and will change things dramatically; not yet AGI5, which we’re still exploring, but mostly the common LLMs6 we have access to for only a few pounds per month.

We can’t remain pixel-pushers.

We live in a world of political unrest, health crises, and questionable ethical tech, and design can play a critical role in addressing these crucial issues.

Design is not a “final visual output” anymore. Design is the process any person or team can use to bring an agreed “order” in a commonly defined “chaos”, using existing or new knowledge within recognised limitations.

We’ve even started talking about Knowledge Management7 lately. In the future, digital systems will do most of the craft of screen-level interaction design. Maybe Neuralink8 will be the next company to create a Figma-killer.

In the age of AI, maybe “every maker becomes a manager”, or we may see more Metadesigners9 coming out.

One thing is sure, my fellow designers; we can’t stay still. We can’t keep complaining that we can’t find a job when we don’t adapt. We can’t keep working in old-school linear (waterfall) ways. We can’t keep seeing ourselves as poor designers that “technology” will steal our jobs. We need to embrace chaos, evolve, collaborate and improve the world for our kids.

Nothing is stable anymore. Be like water, my friends.

NK

☉

Related links

1. Airbnb, Designed Chaos and When Chaos Is Your Creative Director

2. Howard Silverman, Science, humanities, design: The three cultures

3. L. Jeffrey Zeldman, Knowledge Management for the win

Disclaimer & Recommendation: This month’s newsletter is heavily based on my notes and highlights from one of the most exciting books I read lately, Silvio Larusso’s What Design Can’t Do. Essays on Design and Disillusion