No Baker, Doctor, or Mathematician ever felt their profession was at risk because of a boxed cake mix, first aid kit, or a handheld calculator. Consumers want designs that engage and connect on an emotional level; they want designs that feel intuitive, personal, and that make them felt seen. The first university programs for Human Computer Interaction were established over 40 years ago. The science of ergonomics and human factors goes back to the 1940’s. Design should never be negotiated the way priorities are debated. Designers need to stand up for their own creditability if they expect others to do the same.

In the game of Battleship, knowing where your opponent’s ships are not is as important as knowing where they are.  The same is true with product development: knowing where not to invest gives you focus and dramatically increases your odds of winning the game. Knowing where the battleships are not is also true for companies pursuing strong lines of growth and market position. Knowing what the market is ready for, who’s investing to define the space, creating awareness, and priming the pump is critical. While first mover advantage is the dream of many entrepreneurs, second mover advantage reduces your risk, and allow you to invest in building a better moat: superior execution.

For over 20 years Adobe, Figma, MacroMedia, Sketch, Canva, etc. have shaped our design tools, indeed they have even shaped design education. More to the point, these companies have determined how design should be done, defining design in both the how and the what. Most importantly they have removed the tangible byproducts of the designer’s thinking; their sketches. Like a mathematician’s chalkboard, not only did this process sharpen the designer’s thinking it also improved their craft, immersing the designer in their own thinking, allowing other share in their thinking. With GenAI the time has come for designers to reclaim their tools, and shape the tools we need to be successful.

Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience outlined five UX planes. While foundational for design’s role, this model has always fallen short in the face of complex enterprise systems.

Now with the arrival of GenAI we need to challenge the primacy of the graphical interface with the introduction context-aware, multimodal, and adaptive experiences. It’s time to rethink UX as an emergent, AI-mediated systems. Like a building on a floating foundation, generative user experiences achieve balance—not by resisting change, but by responding to it. They rest not on fixed inputs, but on the dynamic equilibrium of evolving data, adjusting in real time to preserve coherence and relevance not a static hierarchy of layers.

With Generative AI promising intelligent agents in enterprise software there is a significant acceleration in the desire of businesses to automate processes and augment, or even replace, human decision-making. As companies race to implement agents with their promise of speed, scale, and efficiency, there's a risk of prioritizing problems based on their ability to be solved with this technology, rather than on their impact on the business.

Design pundits have been selling design short for years. Don’t take my word, a your favorite genAI tool to create a description for “Design Strategy”. I will wait. Keep in mind these generated descriptions are based on based on what is in the world puling from articles, papers, books and posts. Its no wonder design struggles; we are our own worst biographers.

"People don’t buy technology; they buy what it enables them to do." This simple truth highlights why GenAI, like many technologies before it, has such high failure rates. In fact, a Rand report estimates up to 80% of GenAI projects fail largely due companies focus on the latest tech rather than solving real problems for their users. I examine the five root causes of AI project failures and how design can mitigate these risks, accelerating adoption and long-term success.

As we begin what I am sure will be a very interesting year, one filled with socio-economic, environmental, geo-political, and cultural shifts, Generative AI continues to capture everyone’s attention. Given it will no doubt play a central role in many of those changes, design leaders need to navigate the complex interactions between people and AI, ensuring that the technology is useful, ethical, and intuitive.  To help gain some clarity, here are 14 critical questions I feel every design leader should be asking. I have broken them out into two buckets: People and Ethics.  

Too frequently designers create a solution based on what they think is the right thing to do. However, without a solid understand of the business/market context, who is to say what the right thing is? And worse by failing to understand the business their company is in, the designer and by proxy design as a profession appear as superficial.

I recently read a post—by a designer no less, that said performance reviews are bullshit. Its clear to me they’re doing them wrong. (Either that or they were just desperate for clicks.) My response was then you’re doing them wrong. What I should have said was “what kind of designer chooses not to design? Because everything—including performance reviews, are designed by someone. If you don’t like it, redesign it.

Cognitive architectures are simply computational models, described with familiar (albeit misapplied) human characteristics. How can design bridge the gap and bring humanity to these systems. Ensuring these architectures are aligned the desires, behaviors, needs, and emotions that come with being human? How can design ensure AI enhances our creativity, productivity, and decision-making rather than attempt to compete with it?

The need to include design leadership in the definition of company strategy is well understood, however design can play an even more significant role; defining the organizational culture. Design’s values and practices are the ideal cornerstones of a company’s culture.

The Agentic Enterprise is here: first there was the conversational UX now organizations using AI-driven agents to autonomously perform tasks, make decisions, managing heterogeneous processes with minimal employee involvement. Success requires understanding how work really gets done, is you company ready to invest in the user research necessary to ensure your agents have a chance?

For over 25 years browser based apps such email, calendars, docs, and spreadsheets, have been hiding a secret in plain sight: the user interface is actually content. And like all content that means it can be created, manipulated, and controlled through generative AI.

This post is the first in a five part series where I take a deep dive in aspects of GenAI that most design leaders are not thinking about. Rather than fixating on the threat of GenAI to designers, I am focusing on how designers can change the game for themselves, their business, and for their users.

For GenAI based learning what comes after chatbots? Not everyone learns the same way, or has the same questions. We all bring own experiences, knowledge and expectations to the tools we use, how will GenAI help to address diversity in helping everyone develop new skills and understanding?

A blast from the past: a prediction from 1999 that is surprisingly spot on. Nomadic traits are now common place in our society, providing freedom and the responsibility that brings "Indeed the movement of these people is perhaps the only stable factor in their experience; like a Micronesian sailor in his canoe, they stand still under the stars as the ocean and the world move around them."

As the CEO you define the company culture with the value you place on what people do; explicitly or implicitly, so do it well.

When I was a teenager when I saw Morely Safter do an interview with Raymond Loewy on 60 Minutes. They talked about all the things Loewy had designed, from pencil sharpeners to trains, refrigerators, boats, buses and automobiles—lots of automobiles. JFK called on Lowey to design the original Air Force One. Later NASA asked him to design the interior of Skylab to make it more human-centered. Watching that interview I found my purpose.

Not unlike the “many worlds" interpretation of Schrödinger's thought experiment, business strategies and technologies are both full of infinite possibilities, opening the box is an act of design. And yet all too often designers aren’t the ones to lift the lid.