A Year of Relearning What Design Is For
As the year comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the ideas I kept returning to in my writing, and what they reveal about the moment design finds itself in now.
I didn’t set out to write a “theme” for the year. But looking back across these pieces, a clear through-line has emerged.
Design is being asked to grow up.
Not in the sense of becoming more rigid or bureaucratic, but in becoming more responsible, more human, and more aware of its impact in a world shaped by intelligent systems.
This year was less about answers and more about reframing the questions.
Below are the core themes and lessons that surfaced again and again—and that I’m carrying forward.
1. Design is now about agency, not interfaces.
One of the strongest through-lines this year was the shift from designing things to designing behavior.
As AI, automation, and intelligent agents become embedded in our products and services, design is no longer focused on a single screen, user flow, or moment in time. We are now designing systems that act, learn, and decide alongside people. Experiences are adaptive, contextual, and ongoing, shaped as much by intent and ethics as by usability.
The core question has shifted from “Is this usable?” to “What kind of agency does this system give or take from the people who rely on it?”
Insight:
Design now sets the boundaries of possibility, or the rules of engagement. The decisions we make shape how people participate, how much they trust the system, and how responsibly that system evolves.
2. Creativity doesn’t fail. Cultures do.
I spent a lot of time this year examining why creativity feels so fragile inside organizations, even when it is praised as a core value.
Most companies genuinely need creativity and design to stay relevant, competitive, and resilient. At the same time, many are still structured around predictability, efficiency, and repeatability. Innovation, however, rarely follows a clean or linear path. It introduces ambiguity, disagreement, false starts, and learning that does not immediately map to quarterly metrics.
When creativity struggles in these environments, it is rarely because people lack ideas or skills. It is because organizations have not yet designed themselves to support the uncertainty that meaningful innovation requires. Design is often invited in for solutions, but not for exploration. For outcomes, but not for sensemaking.
This creates a quiet but persistent contradiction: companies ask for creativity while maintaining systems that actively constrain it.
Insight:
Creativity reveals the gap between what organizations say they value and what their structures actually support. Until that gap is addressed, innovation will remain constrained, no matter how urgently it is requested.
3. Today’s leadership champions holding space.
Another pattern that became impossible to ignore this year is that leadership today is less about setting direction from the top and more about creating the conditions for collective intelligence to emerge.
The challenges teams are facing are too complex, interconnected, and fast-moving to be solved by a single perspective. Leadership is no longer about defining a vision and cascading it through an organization. It is about holding space for diverse skills, disciplines, and lived experiences to do their best work together, in real time.
This kind of leadership requires emotional intelligence. It requires the ability to listen deeply, stay present through uncertainty, and acknowledge what is not yet clear without rushing to closure. It also requires vulnerability. Leaders must be willing to say, “I don’t know yet,” to invite tension and disagreement, and to trust the process of collective shaping rather than relying on predetermined answers.
In emotionally charged times, people do not need manufactured certainty. They need steadiness, empathy, and permission to think, feel, and build together.
Insight:
Effective leadership today is about holding space while guiding toward outcomes. It means creating the conditions for diverse expertise to collaborate, sense what matters together, and move forward with clarity, even as the solution takes shape in real time.
4. Craft and differentiation are human work.
One of the clearest lessons from this year is that craft is not becoming less important in the age of AI. It is becoming more central.
AI creates by working from what is already known. It draws from existing patterns, historical data, and learned correlations. This makes it powerful at recombination and acceleration, but it also sets a boundary. AI cannot originate something genuinely new in a human sense. It cannot feel what resonates emotionally, sense cultural nuance, or intuit when an idea carries meaning beyond its form.
Craft is how humans bridge that gap. It is the process of sensemaking that turns complexity into coherence and possibility into intention. Through craft, we make judgment calls that cannot be reduced to data: when to simplify and when to preserve complexity, when to speak and when to remain quiet, when something feels complete and when it does not.
This is also where differentiation lives. AI tends toward convergence because it is trained on what already exists. Differentiation requires a point of view. It requires choosing what to stand for, what to value, and what to make feel distinct in ways that matter to people, not just markets.
Design brings these responsibilities together. Through craft, designers decide what to include, what to remove, and what to elevate. These decisions shape not only the quality of outcomes but the emotional and cultural identity of what is being built.
Insight:
AI can accelerate creation, but only human craft can create meaning, resonance, and differentiation that people actually feel.
5. Aesthetics are becoming ethical.
As the systems we design become more complex and more influential in people’s lives, aesthetics are no longer just about how something looks. They shape how a system behaves, how it feels to interact with, and what it signals about the people behind it.
The tone of an experience, its pacing, hierarchy, and moments of restraint all communicate values. They tell people whether a system is thoughtful, respectful, and empathetic, or whether it feels indifferent, overwhelming, or purely transactional. In this way, aesthetics become part of the ethical relationship between humans and the systems they rely on.
Ethical design is not shaped by internal intentions alone. It requires sensitivity to the cultural, economic, social, and political contexts in which systems operate. What feels supportive in one setting may feel exclusionary in another. What feels efficient to an organization may feel dismissive to someone navigating stress, vulnerability, or imbalance of power. Good design accounts for these differences and adapts accordingly.
This is especially critical in domains like healthcare, enterprise, and AI-driven experiences, where trust and dignity are foundational. Design defines the rules of engagement. It shapes whether people feel seen and supported within the realities of their lives, or whether systems feel disconnected from the human consequences of their decisions.
Insight:
In complex systems, aesthetics are not decoration. They are how ethics and values become tangible in everyday interactions.
6. From doing to directing: how meaning gets made now.
AI was present in nearly everything I wrote this year, not as novelty, but as a force that is changing both how people participate in experiences and how we create them.
As intelligence becomes embedded in our tools, users are no longer primarily doing every step themselves. Increasingly, they are directing outcomes, setting intent, providing guidance, and shaping results in collaboration with intelligent systems. In parallel, the act of creation itself is shifting. Designers and teams are moving from manually producing fixed artifacts to guiding systems, shaping parameters, and making judgment calls as experiences unfold.
This evolution is reshaping design methods. Traditional approaches built around single users, linear journeys, and static interfaces are no longer sufficient. We now need to design for relationships expressed through countless moments, rather than a small set of predefined interactions.
Design expands from isolated touchpoints to service ecosystems, and from one-way interactions to ongoing collaboration between humans and machines. Personas stretch beyond individuals to include groups of people, organizations, and intelligent agents, all interacting with one another in dynamic, interdependent ways.
This shift also pushes design from build-time to run-time. Instead of designing a finite set of screens or flows, we are designing systems that adapt continuously, generating interfaces and interactions in response to context, intent, and change. The space of possible experiences is no longer fixed. It is effectively infinite, shaped in real time by data, behavior, and collaboration.
AI can generate options and take action, but it cannot decide what matters. That responsibility remains human. Design’s role is to shape how intent is expressed, how systems interpret it, and how meaning emerges across these complex, living systems.
Insight:
As users and creators move from doing to directing, design must evolve to orchestrate relationships, collaboration, and real-time adaptation across people, organizations, and intelligent systems.
7. The lines between disciplines are blurring.
Another theme that surfaced repeatedly this year is how quickly the boundaries between roles are dissolving.
The familiar model of neatly defined functions such as design, product management, engineering, research, data, and business no longer reflects how meaningful work actually happens. Complex problems do not arrive pre-sorted by discipline, and intelligent systems require collaboration that is continuous rather than sequential.
This shift challenges the idea of the T-shaped individual as someone with depth in one area and surface-level exposure to others. Instead, we are moving toward a more Renaissance-like model. A modern polymath does not know everything, but can develop depth in multiple domains, connect ideas across fields, and move fluidly between perspectives as problems evolve.
Teams are evolving alongside this shift. They are becoming less about assembling a fixed set of roles and more about bringing together the specific aptitudes needed to solve a given problem. Those aptitudes might include sensemaking, systems thinking, technical fluency, facilitation, storytelling, ethical judgment, or the ability to work effectively with intelligent systems. Because teams are organized around capability rather than title, they tend to be smaller, more adaptable, and better equipped to respond to change.
Designers are engaging more deeply in product strategy, systems thinking, and business outcomes, while their partners in engineering and product are engaging more deeply in experience design, ethics, and human impact. The work is less about handing off between roles and more about shaping solutions together.
Insight:
As disciplines blur, the future belongs to smaller, multi-dimensional teams composed of modern polymaths, organized around the aptitudes required to solve complex problems rather than traditional roles.
8. Design is moving upstream to shape strategy.
Another shift that became clear this year is how early design now needs to enter the work.
Design is no longer most effective when it arrives after strategy has been defined, tasked with executing against decisions that are already made. In complex, fast-changing environments, that approach limits impact and often leads to solutions that feel disconnected from real human needs.
Instead, design is increasingly involved in shaping the strategy itself. This means working alongside business leaders, product, and technology partners to frame the problem, surface assumptions, explore trade-offs, and make sense of uncertainty before directions are locked in. Design contributes not just ideas, but clarity. It helps teams understand what is worth pursuing, what risks are acceptable, and where opportunity truly lies.
When design shifts left, strategy becomes more grounded in human context and lived experience. It becomes more adaptive, informed by exploration rather than certainty, and better equipped to evolve as conditions change. This is especially important in the age of AI, where decisions made early about intent, values, and boundaries shape everything that follows.
Insight:
When design helps shape strategy from the start, it moves from executing plans to defining what plans are worth making.
What this moment demands of design.
Looking across these themes together, a larger pattern comes into focus. Design is expanding in scope, influence, and responsibility at the same time.
We are designing systems, not just interfaces, and shaping agency rather than prescribing behavior. Creativity and innovation are no longer individual acts, but outcomes of cultures that are designed to support uncertainty and learning. Leadership has shifted from directing answers to holding space and guiding toward outcomes.
Craft and differentiation remain deeply human work, even as AI accelerates creation. Aesthetics now carry ethical weight, reflecting how systems behave and how they show care within real cultural, social, and economic contexts.
At the same time, the way we work is changing.
Users and creators are moving from doing to directing. Design methods are evolving to account for relationships, collaboration between humans and machines, and experiences that unfold at run-time rather than build-time. Roles are blurring, teams are becoming smaller and more adaptive, and value is increasingly created by multi-dimensional people working together around shared intent rather than fixed titles.
Finally, design is moving upstream. It is no longer most powerful when it executes a strategy, but when it helps shape it. By entering earlier, design brings human context, sensemaking, and ethical consideration into the decisions that set everything else in motion.
Taken together, these shifts signal a maturation of the discipline and a widening of its responsibility.
Design is not becoming less defined. It is becoming more essential. The work ahead asks us to be thoughtful, collaborative, and deeply human in how we shape the systems that increasingly shape us.