Design is Entering its Most Strategic Chapter Yet
And no, it is not dead.
Edit – 24 April 2025
This article has been updated to reflect a long-standing collaboration that shaped much of its content and vision. The ideas explored here were developed over time through an ongoing dialogue with Giulio Frigieri, whose thinking has been instrumental in shaping this perspective. To acknowledge his contribution and strengthen the reach of this shared vision for design, the article now carries his co-signature. We've also added links to some of Giulio’s earlier work, where many of these concepts are further expanded and explored in depth. Happy reading!
Every few months, another obituary for design gets written.
A celebrated agency shuts its doors. Freelancers scramble as project budgets shrink. AI-generated wireframes, logos, and layouts flood inboxes and platforms—cheap, fast, and often devoid of taste or discernment. My LinkedIn feed has increasingly been filled with people declaring that design is dead.
Really? Dead?
Design is not dying. It is transforming fast and entering one of its most strategic chapters yet.
If you’re feeling disoriented, that’s understandable. The gravitational centre of design is shifting: away from artefacts and deliverables, and toward systems, strategies, and decision-making infrastructures. For those willing to pivot, this is not a time to despair. It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead and make a difference.
I usually do not write about AI, because the world is flooded with posts and articles on the topic, and frankly, I don’t think it needs another one. But I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by what I’ve read these past weeks and months.
On a much more positive note, I was truly inspired by a series of conversations with Giulio Frigieri, a member of the Design Mavericks community, about his plans to embark on a new PhD journey exploring the role of design in the operationalisation of AI governance. I was also equally challenged in a positively inspiring way by an exchange with my long-time mentor and friend, Melvin Brand Flu, and by a LinkedIn post shared by Don Norman referencing a list from Dylan Field, CEO and co-founder of Figma, on the future of design.
So today, you get my/our reflections on the topic as a prompt for exchange and dialogue.
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The Future of Design at a Time When People Can’t Stop Talking About AI
We need to be clear-eyed about what AI really represents.
AI isn’t a doomsday machine for design. Nor is it just another tool in the toolbox. It’s a new layer of interaction—one that transcends traditional interfaces and fundamentally changes how we interact with complexity, risk, and value creation. As Dylan Field noted in his list, AI currently enhances designers, it doesn’t replace them. It can produce layouts, icons, and entire websites from prompts—but it can’t choose what should be made, or why.
The designers who focused solely on execution—the churn of interfaces, screens, and hand-offs—are being automated out of relevance. That’s the tough truth. And quite frankly, in my opinion, probably better like that. But that’s not all of design. That’s not even the most important part.
Design is evolving into something much more critical.
Design as Governance: Making the Invisible Legible
In an AI-driven world, the most urgent design task is not polishing pixels—it’s structuring agency.
Modern organisations are being redefined by algorithmic systems they barely understand. Machine learning models make predictions; generative tools synthesise outputs; autonomous agents take actions. Yet within these opaque systems, intent is often buried or abstracted away.
This is where design must step in—not as decoration but as governance.
Design becomes the means by which organisations see what they’re building. It’s the craft of rendering systems legible, of aligning machine logic with human goals, of embedding accountability and ethics at the point of action.
Mapping complexity isn’t optional anymore. It’s fundamental.
There’s currently a white space—between technology, regulation, business, and the lived human experience—where design can lead. Not fill a gap. Lead.
From Artefacts to Ecosystems: Designing Adaptive Systems
The old model was simple: design the product, ship it, move on. The new model? Design the conditions for responsible autonomy.
We are moving from fixed outcomes to responsive systems. From interfaces to infrastructures. From design-as-output to design-as-orchestration.
Dylan Field describes this as “lowering the floor, raising the ceiling.” AI tools are making design more accessible to non-designers, while also enabling experts to push the boundaries of complexity. But to rise with that ceiling, we must grow into a new kind of leadership—one rooted in systems thinking, not screen thinking.
Designers must now understand not just user needs, but organisational dynamics, algorithmic accountability, and socio-technical systems. We are no longer designing things. We are designing the actors, rules, and environments that shape behaviour—human and machine alike.
Operationalising Responsible AI: A Design Imperative
Every organisation today is wrestling with how to adopt AI responsibly. Not just efficiently.
They’re asking:
How do we detect and mitigate bias?
How do we explain automated decisions?
How do we ensure alignment between AI outcomes and company values?
Here’s the real question: Who is equipped to bridge those gaps between function and ethics, between data and dignity?
Designers. But only if we redefine ourselves.
This doesn’t mean adding “ethics” to a design sprint. It means becoming embedded in product governance boards, risk and compliance teams, policy innovation labs. It means working side by side with data scientists, legal teams, and behavioural researchers—not as visual stylists, but as architects of responsible intelligence.
We must become the scaffolding of adaptive governance. Designers can now help organisations generate live models—across structure, data, experience, and regulation—all at once.
The Future Interface Is Collaborative and Multimodal
Future AI design tools will be dynamic, interactive, and multimodal. We won’t just ask AI to “make a dark mode.” We’ll collaborate with it, visually, spatially, and systemically.
That means today’s design education is alarmingly out of date.
We need a new curriculum.
Less emphasis on tools. More on systems. Less on product-market fit. More on product-market integrity. We need to teach designers to be co-creators of AI logic.
Imagine the design studio of the future: part ethical think tank, part data lab, part governance simulation, and—critically—a guardian of beauty. Someone ensuring that a sense of taste survives in this AI-saturated era. Because now, more than ever, we desperately need it.
That’s where the real work is going.
Design’s Real Value: Making Complexity Understandable
The uncomfortable truth is that design became commoditised because it stopped evolving. It became too focused on protecting “our process” and not enough on creating new value.
Now, value is moving to the interface between AI and society. And designers—if we’re willing to level up—can own that space.
How?
By making AI legible to non-technical stakeholders.
By embedding ethics into the systems that shape decisions.
By prototyping policy, not just products.
By designing rituals and infrastructures for organisational learning.
By telling compelling, systems-level stories that help people make sense of the future.
In short, by becoming indispensable to how decisions get made in an increasingly automated world.
This Is Not the End. It’s a Beginning.
We’re not here to save design. We’re here to reposition it.
Design is not dead. It’s not even dying. It’s maturing—into something far more valuable, strategic, and intertwined with the core of how organisations function.
Designers have always been great at asking the right questions. Now, we must ask even better ones, in new and urgent contexts:
How should this system work?
For whom?
What are the risks?
What’s invisible—and why?
What is the world we are designing into being?
This is a call to action.
Design is entering its most critical chapter yet. It will not be led by those clinging to old deliverables or familiar job titles. It will be led by those who can navigate the space between code, compliance, and conscience—and bring clarity where others see chaos.
If you’re a designer navigating this shift—embedded in AI teams, policy groups, or organisational change efforts—I’d love to connect. Because design isn’t finished. It’s just getting started.
Reading List
If you'd like to explore these ideas further, here are a few links to dive deeper into the topic and related conversations:
Are designers paving the way for their obsolescence? Giulio Frigieri
Design as Mapping. Leadership and Value Creation in Digital Governance. Giulio Frigieri
The Value of Design is Design. Jay Harlow
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for this. I've been pretty disheartened by the ways people and organizations are uncritically embracing AI. Your article frames this problem as an opportunity. Those who are attuned to the ways medium shapes message are well-positioned to step up and at least attempt to be "thought leaders" on this issue, steering decision-making in a direction that maintains some degree of taste and integrity.
This is so inspiring and energizing! Every designer should read this. Shifting to a more strategic perspective is also a way for endangered designer to stay relevant on the market.