Design isn’t what you do, it’s where you stand.

What junior designers can do in an AI-infused world.

Artwork by Tim Burton. Picture taken at the Design Museum, London (UK)

In our last post, we argued that design is entering its most strategic chapter yet, a transformation driven by AI, systemic complexity, and the shifting role of design in shaping decision-making itself.

It struck a nerve.

Among the responses, one stood out with a kind of fierce honesty we need more of:

“Everything you have mentioned can only be achieved by someone who is part of decision-making and strategy building. For someone who is a junior designer working mostly on execution, how can they leverage this shift?” - Akansha

That’s the question, isn’t it?

It’s tempting to believe that strategy belongs to people with titles. That shaping direction is something you earn after years of playing by the rules. But here’s the radical truth: strategy isn’t granted, it’s practised. And often, it’s born in the cracks between official roles, not handed down from above.

So, to every junior designer out there wondering, “Where do I fit in?” This is for you.

Execution is not the opposite of strategy

Let’s dismantle the false binary up front.

Too often, design is split into “thinkers” and “doers.” Strategists and executors. The reality? The best strategists make. The best makers think.

Craft is strategic when it’s aware of context. Every time you design a flow, simplify complexity, or communicate something ambiguous with clarity, you are shaping how others understand the system. That is strategy.

If you’ve ever made something better not just because it “looked good” but because it changed how someone behaved or decided, you were doing strategy.

The goal, then, isn’t to escape execution. It’s to elevate it. Execution without awareness is labour. Execution with intention is leadership.

The relationship between strategy and craft is not binary; it is better understood as a continuum. Designers occupy hybrid positions along this spectrum, with varying intensities of both strategic and craft-oriented capabilities. This dynamic defines the main perimeter of design as a practice. Some designers excel at high-fidelity execution informed by deep user empathy, while others thrive in systems framing or in aligning business, data, and ethics. In the messy reality of design, there is neither pure craft nor pure strategy.

What matters is understanding where you are on this continuum — and where you want to grow. Designers are not merely pulling interchangeable parts and tools from a box; rather, they nurture unique constellations of skills over time, both drawing from and contributing to multiple disciplines and applications.

Recognising and cultivating this richness and variability should be the cornerstone of a new design curriculum — one that helps emerging designers build adaptive competencies, especially for the still largely uncharted and ambiguous territory of AI enablement. This spectrum of craft and strategy empowers designers to contribute meaningfully to the complex organisational shifts required to embed AI — particularly generative AI — into products, services, experiences, and transformations.

It’s not just about designing with AI, but about helping shape the conditions in which AI becomes meaningfully embedded.

Strategic awareness is a design skill

Here’s the shift: strategic designers don’t just design things—they design their position within the system.

You may not control your company’s roadmap. You may not have a seat in the boardroom. But you do control how you observe, frame, and act on the dynamics around you: this is what we call your ‘design posture.’ Strategic awareness means:

• Asking why this problem matters now

• Spotting patterns beyond the project at hand

• Seeing how decisions get made and who holds influence

• Understanding what’s invisible, and who benefits from that invisibility

And then? Using your craft to surface it.

This is where junior designers have more power than they realise. Because you’re close to the seams of real work. You see friction up close. You often sense misalignments long before they show up in OKRs or postmortems.

Leverage that.

Design isn’t just about designing for users. It’s about designing into power. Even when you don’t hold it.

Design as mapping, in particular, offers a valuable lens through which to operate along the strategy–craft continuum. Mapping is not only about diagrams; it’s about framing, surfacing, and shaping relationships — between systems, users, power, inputs, outputs, and outcomes. When done well, it enables better decision-making at the intersection of technology and human values. This is sensing, sense-making, and governance work, where design can make a significant contribution.

When technology and data act as materials, design as mapping can uncover how general-purpose AI models alter decision paths, where bias seeps into workflows, or how human agency is reconfigured by automation. It can render complex systems legible and accelerate understanding by translating information into visual form.

Design can map and reveal what a reasonably extended stakeholder ecosystem looks like. It can enable product roadmapping, dynamically represent front-end, back-end, and algorithmic processes or transactions. It can outline human–machine journeys, as well as map user data and needs to multimodal interactions.

At a different altitude, design as mapping can also plot an organisation’s power and decision dynamics to facilitate change management, or outline new business strategies that account for externalities and reveal the often submerged economic value of values.

Choose your environment like a designer

Let’s be honest: not every team will allow you to do so.

We’ve seen too many smart, thoughtful designers burn out not because they weren’t good enough, but because they were stuck in environments that treated them as stylists, not sense-makers.

So here’s a thought: design the context that designs you.

That might mean joining teams that sit closer to data, compliance, or emerging tech. It might mean embedding yourself in AI research groups or operations teams where ambiguity is high and your systems mind is most needed. Or it might mean staying in product - but working in a way that constantly zooms out, connects dots, and brings others along.

Don’t wait for an invitation to explore new edges. Make it your craft to infiltrate adjacent domains. The designers of the future won’t just work on interfaces - they’ll move between disciplines like translators, negotiators, and architects of possibility.

Learn what’s not being taught

Most design education is still rooted in tools and methods. But the real leverage now lies elsewhere:

• Governance thinking: how systems are structured and held accountable

• Sensemaking skills: turning complexity into insight

• Cross-functional fluency: collaborating with legal, policy, data, and ops

• Storytelling: telling stories that move organisations

These aren’t soft skills. They’re future-core.

Don’t wait for permission. Learn horizontally. Read across disciplines. Join AI ethics groups. Shadow a data scientist. Learn how decisions scale. Practice systems mapping. Contribute to internal docs that nobody asked you to write. Share your thinking, even if it’s unfinished.

That’s how designers shift from executors to co-shapers of meaning and impact.

The real move is internal

You don’t become strategic when someone gives you a title.

You become strategic the moment you start acting as if your work has consequences.

Even if you're not in the room where decisions are made, you can help others see differently. That’s what design has always done best. And right now, with AI reshaping how decisions are made at every level, that ability is more powerful than ever.

Your job isn’t just to follow instructions.

It’s to reveal assumptions.

To reframe the question.

To show — through your design choices — that we can make systems more humane, more legible, and more just.

This is a threshold moment. For everyone

We said it before: design isn’t dead. It’s maturing.

And just like people, when disciplines mature, they ask harder questions.

Where do we stand?

Who benefits?

What future are we enabling?

You don’t need a title to ask these questions. You just need to care. To observe. To act with integrity. And to believe that the work you do, no matter how junior the title, can be a lever for bigger change.

Design’s role in AI leadership is not decorative or epidermic, it’s rather foundational and visceral. It provides the means to translate between organisational intent and ethical implementation, to reveal contradictions and shape governance. And this role only grows in significance as organisations face new tensions between value and values, speed and risk, innovation and alignment, hype and harm.

This is why a new generation of designers must be equipped to operate beyond design sprints in shaping AI roadmaps, assurance processes, and governance architectures.

That’s how you leverage the shift.

You step into it, deliberately, courageously, and with your eyes wide open.

If you’re a designer asking these questions, especially early in your career, know this: you’re not alone. And your instincts are right. The future of design will be shaped by those who see possibility where others see limitation.