This is not our last shift

Design keeps changing, and the skills that make designers valuable keep shifting. Why does this happen, and what can you do about it?

If you joined the field in the last decade, the current shift may be the first you have experienced directly. If you have a few such cycles under your belt, the unease may be familiar. For most of us, the change comes with a lot of unknowns. Is there a way to get through a shift like this in one piece, land on your feet and work on the thing you want? Perhaps, but going alone only gets you so far.

In this talk, which opened Nº 164, Fredrik Matheson makes three points:

1. We work in a field that regularly goes through shifts that shake its foundations. Expertise can suddenly be devalued, and new tasks and roles emerge that we do not yet have the skills to do well, often without a clear path to getting those skills. Fredrik offers an explanation for why this keeps happening.
2. It is entirely normal for designers to be anxious and excited about these changes at the same time. Some do nothing about it; others act vigorously against them. Being excited by what large language models make possible while skeptical of the impact of widespread AI use rhymes with what we have seen many times before.
3. From these two follows the third: how design works, as a job, is not set up to handle such shifts, which explains why so many are having such a hard time of it.

He closes with an earnest proposal: if our field is to stay relevant into the third century of industrialization, we need to start taking design much more seriously.

Related reading

• Henry Dreyfuss: Designing for People (1st edition, 1955), chapter 3, «How the designer works»

This talk was not streamed or recorded.