Why I design
Shaping shared systems in service of human meaning and experience
In this piece, I reflect on the uncertainty I’ve been feeling as a designer watching AI reshape how work gets done.
By zooming out from task-level application, I explore how Design itself is not disappearing, even though its delivery is drastically changing.
The role of Design matters now more than ever.
A threat and personal loss of orientation
Like many of you, along with your family, your friends, and your colleagues, 2025 left me with a lot of unprocessed doubt around the future of my field.
I’ve been grappling with a skepticism bordering on fear around AI. That fear has been quite existential.
I have found myself wondering — is there a future for me in the field of Design? Is Design itself becoming obsolete? Are knowledge workers no longer necessary? If we commoditize and automate thinking and making, and put AI increasingly in the center of our personal interactions, what becomes of human meaning and experience?
On the other side of that, I’ve made an honest effort to maintain hope and optimism. The emergent possibilities are nothing short of inspiring. And I strongly believe we must be ready, willing, and able to double down in the right places.
That belief was the fuel behind my “Talking to Machines” series in the fall. I wanted to prove to my ever-skeptical-yet-generally-optimistic self that there were paths forward. What if we made ourselves more AI literate, identified transferrable skills, and became better aware of how we might collaborate right now with machines?
Many of you have mentioned the importance of craft and taste as a persistent human differentiator, that this is what we can protect. That sounds wonderful, but even those statements have left me skeptical (though I’d genuinely like to believe them).
I must admit too that my doubts about my field were a seed planted far before now. I do think a lot.
Over ten years ago my colleagues thought I was speaking in tongues as I tried to explain what I saw as the inevitably increasing overlap between UX Design and Product Management. Something that at the time I thought we should prepare for. I was admittedly a bit early.
At this point, I see the technology sector slowly but surely claiming ownership over design to help drive needless consumption. Design is used as a tool to influence behavior, reshape systems, and extract value from people by absorbing more attention, reshaping desires, and aiming them towards outcomes that benefit the bottom line, often at the expense of the individual and our planet.
This is not why I design. And this is not why I fell in love with design.
Even Dieter Rams, the one who influenced Jony Ive and the entire Apple aesthetic, has lamented how design is being used, and said he would likely not choose the same path today. That was 2015.
Today, many observations have been unsettling — from the massive consumption of electricity, to the usage of AI far more for high volume “slop” than promises like solving cancer, to the displacement of entry level jobs in areas that just a few years ago were considered top career paths, to the short-sighted capitalist incentive to automate entire roles and departments despite the fact that employed people are the bedrock of a consumer-driven economy.
I could write for days on this topic, but in this writing, I’m thinking about Design as a field. This is the direction I’ve passionately dedicated my last 30 years to, and it feels under threat.
Design, for me, is a culmination of years of curiosity, education, and experience.
For my own well-being, I’ve needed to step back and revisit my reasoning and purpose for being a designer, to figure out if it’s something I still want to dedicate my time to.
And I’m guessing many of you are in similar positions in your own fields. So, maybe this writing will help you in the same way it helped me. I can only hope.
Zooming out and reconnecting with Design
Over the last few weeks, after taking some time to step away and relax after a year filled with a ton of transition, I came to a personal conclusion: I desperately need to zoom out on Design.
What do I mean by “zoom out on Design”? I mean not restricting it to digital technology. I mean reconnecting with it as a cross-industry, cross-problem functional area. It’s a problem-solving approach. It’s a craft to be applied within diverse scenarios. And it’s core to who I am.
At five, I juggled the ideas of either being an inventor or an archaeologist. There was no ideological bend to it (I was five, after all), but these options were deep down an extension of my insatiable desire to understand the intricacies of the world around me, and create new things that added positively to the mix.
My three favorite books were “How Things Work”, a massive encyclopedia of the bugs you can find in the Los Angeles basin, and another about the dragons that have existed in different regions throughout history. Those base instincts haven’t left me. If anything, they’ve expanded.
I’ve realized 99% of my fear of Design disappearing came from two things that were largely misguided and fairly myopic.
First, I had forgotten the essence at the center that had drawn me to Design in the first place. The personal meaning behind what I do had been disconnected and obfuscated. And ironically, my own expertise tells me this is a vital variable that behaviorally helps people ride storms of change. I needed to take my own medicine.
Second, I had married my entire discipline to task-specific responsibilities within the technology sector (things like designing a UI). This is not what Design is. Big mistake.
And here’s where I zoomed out.
Why do I design?
Design solves for something I deeply care about — supporting and enabling people.
I’ve spent years gradually connecting that intent to understanding how ecosystems of systems, when intentionally structured and tuned to grow, can evolve and adapt intelligently over time, while continuously supporting people.
Design is an unlock. It’s problem-solving. It creates the subtlety of care in the environments, systems, tools, and objects we interact with every day. It shapes how we engage with each other, how we share information, and how we evolve as a species.
Design is something that gets applied as an approach to a problem space, paired with mechanisms of delivery (like technology).
Design is not “of technology” by nature. And technology surely does not “own” design.
It exists with or without technology. It needs an ideology to be effective. It must be opinionated. And it must be shared.
For me, Design is a human endeavor to support human endeavors. It’s inherently driven by humanist ideals. If we didn’t believe in people, we wouldn’t care to understand how we tick, what drives us, what impedes us, what delights us or brings us negativity, and what that suggests for how we might shape our environments, systems, tools, and objects we live with and within every day.
Design intermediates our experiences, for better or worse. And so, as long as there are people, we will need designers.
Thoughts on the Future of Design
Within technology especially, much of the “craft” side of design production is being automated. The “deep work” flow states that we have held so dear are looking much different.
Yes, the work up front can be similar, with gathering context, defining problems, and narrowing around specific needs to define solution paths. At each step though, work has been removed while Generative AI has become increasingly proficient.
In this scenario, designers naturally become more akin to how we describe conductors and orchestrators. Designers must lean more on design strategy, theory, technical understanding, and business savviness. Our roles become fuzzier, less contained, more abstracted, and less secure.
What emerges is the know-how of navigating ambiguity and creating structure to guide both work and people as clarity forms, and as execution and operating procedures become more subdivided, refined, repeatable, and scalable.
Designers that can guide this thinking will be at a huge advantage. Before Generative AI, these skill-sets were reserved for more senior designers equipped to lead work. It was a privilege being invited to do it. This skill division decided who was leading and who was following, who was the mentor and mentee, the coach and coachee.
Now, this is becoming the new bar for providing value. Many may unfortunately be left behind in this narrowing shift, while the training pipelines bi-directionally atrophy and hurt the field as a whole. We must remember that leaders and thinkers learn and grow through guiding and teaching others, a point often pushed by Feynman. This is something we must address.
The career path is rapidly becoming less about the polish you can create out-of-the-box, and the heuristics you can follow based on established design principles. The AI can do that. It’s well-established knowledge. Now, merging theory seamlessly with intuitive process, and guiding others through it, is even more at the center. The previous backbone of the work is the work.
And this thinking has led me to a conclusion. Design itself isn’t going anywhere, but how it is delivered is going to change drastically. I don’t know exactly what that means or what to do with it yet, but I can tell you that we will need to think together. The answer may simply be emergent and require careful reactivity.
What I can say right now, is the future of design will be led by those who are process-oriented curators, and can be the connective tissue of disciplines. The bar to execute has been lowered and distributed with higher accessibility, while the differentiator of “great” lies more and more in who can be the best steward.
The reality is this — in the AI era, Design is more important than ever. Our foundational systems and ways of connecting with each other are in a state of rapid tech-enabled change.
Especially in times of change, well-intentioned care-driven Design is the silent support that allows us all to grow and adapt together. Design can create a balance between the needs of an ecosystem and the meaning and experience of each individual human being. Call me an idealist, but I genuinely believe this.
We need Design right now, and we need it more than ever.
Thank you so much for your time reading this.
With that, I want to leave you with these four questions to ponder. They emerged from this writing, and are generalized to be more widely useful.
Please pick one that resonates with you, and tell me about it in the comments:
What part of your work feels essential to the value you provide, and what part might simply be a delivery mechanism you have mistaken for the value itself?
If your discipline had to justify its existence without relying on technology, status, or job titles, what would remain?
As execution becomes increasingly commoditized, what does “good” actually mean in your field?
What responsibilities do experienced practitioners have when traditional paths for learning and mentorship begin to break down?
Keep on thinking and making, and be well.
Your friendly designer and innovator,
Peter
For further reading, I recommend you start here.
Proud of you for sharing ❤️
Thanks so much for this insightful essay. I run a regional art museum and our field continues to value and rely on human design.
My adult sons are both in design related fields-and are integrating AI into their process.
My late husband was a composer who embraced sampling and digital engineering in his field.
However he continued to work with acoustic instruments and at the end of his life treasured his connection to the embodied experience of playing his fiddle, etc.