The quiet dissolution of design wisdom
An attempt to articulate the melancholy
Over the past couple years it seems there’s been a particular kind of quiet in design spaces these days — not that productive quiet of deep work, but a melancholy ghost of questions no longer being asked. We’ve become so expert — so fluent — in the language of velocity, while forgetting the rhetoric & argument of thoughtful restraint. A diligent designer shows PM or Eng their latest prototype, generated in minutes, polished to perfection. “Look how fast,” they’ll say. Ship it. But speedy shipping towards what? 🤔
No one seems to remember.
This is how fields don’t die—they dissolve. 😶🌫️ Not in some crazy spectacular collapse, but in the gradual replacement of thinking with generating, of wrestling with rendering. We’ve mistaken the ability to produce for the capacity to discern, to question, to wonder. Every tool promises to make us faster, but none ask if we’re heading in the right direction. Where are we going with all this?
The human compass has been traded for quick blueprints to drive speedy execution.
We see now junior designers pressured to learn AI prompting before they learn to problem-frame, to tackle indeterminate messiness — the heart of most problems! Senior designers, with their repertoire of hard-won pattern recognition + systems thinking, find themselves “optimized out”— their deft ability at stakeholder management & workshop facilitation reframed as resistance to delivery. The middle is hollowing out, leaving only those who execute, and those who approve, with no one left to question. 😬 What’s the benefit, and for whom?
The real fracture or divide isn’t between human & AI creativity. It’s between design as an act of care versus design as an act of production. We’ve confused Autolayout components with the deeper work of human understanding — a kind of slow archaeology of revealing what real people need, not just what they’ll click faster. That patient cultivation of taste, judgment, and ethical reasoning. The loss of courage to say “no” in a fearful culture that only rewards “ship it now.” 😔
What haunts me isn’t that AI can generate interfaces faster — that was kinda inevitable anyway! 😆 It’s that we’ve so thoroughly relegated or regressed design that generation feels sufficient. It’s “okay”. Everyone moves quicker toward nowhere in particular. The dissolution accelerates because it feels like progress. We’ve built a delivery machine that runs smoothlyl while forgetting what it’s supposed to produce and for what purpose. We’ve reduced the designer’s role to mechanical tasks that of course a machine can do them. We likely did this to ourselves: one sprint at a time, one “good enough, ship it” at a time, one unquestioned requirement at a time. One compromise at a time, while seeking that elusive “seat at the table.” 😒
Everyone moves quicker toward nowhere in particular. It’s like a weird echo of Godot — not waiting for someone to arrive but waiting for a destination to define the goal.
But here’s what the efficiency folks miss: the inefficient parts — those tough conversations about what we’re really trying to achieve, the debates about ethics masquerading as arguments about aesthetics, the slow gestation of ideas that need time to mature (as Jony Ive said, “ideas are fragile” and need time to incubate) — these aren’t bugs in the design process. That is the design process.
That’s where design wisdom lives, not in the heroic designer’s mad skills or DS repository, but in the collective wrestling with complexity. It’s a team sport.
Design wisdom — borne of lived experience, judgment, taste, and intent — was never about knowing which button color converts better or how to structure a navigation system. Conversion, retention, upsell — that was never the point. It was about holding multiple probable & preferable futures in tension, about understanding the second-order effects of our collective decisions, about seeing the system, a socio-information ecology, beyond a clickbait screen. It was about asking not “can we?” but “should we?” — while having the vocabulary & authority to articulate why not. 🔥
That’s the seat the table.
So here we are, watching this wisdom atrophy in real-time. Not because LLMs and AI are replacing designers, but because we’ve forgotten what we’re here for. We’ve internalized the logic of efficient rapid scale so completely that we can no longer imagine a practice organized around anything else. Growth designer? Gimme a fucking break. We’ve become so focused on removing friction that we’ve forgotten friction is often wisdom in disguise. 🤨
So the question isn’t whether design will survive…of course it will! Products still need interfaces, brands still need expression, problems still need solving (even if we’re solving solved problems all over again 😅). The question is whether what survives will be recognizable as design, or merely PM-driven production wearing design’s old clothes.
But some folks are already choosing differently! Building practices that prize thinking over throughput. Creating space for the slow development of judgment. Insisting on the difference between making things right and making the right things. They’re not fighting the tools — they’re simply, bravely refusing the false logic that says tools are all we need. 🙌🏽
This rebuilding of design wisdom will come from remembering that design is, at its core, an act of cultural creation. 👣 It’s about encoding values into systems, about choosing what kind of world we want to live in, one interaction, one interface, one map or diagram at a time. We don’t need faster ways to generate solutions. We need better ways to sit with problems. We don’t need more efficiency. We need more careful forethought. And wisdom, as lived experience & informed intuition, inherently resists automation. 🙃 Funny how that works!
That collective design wisdom took decades to build — from multiple schools of thought (rhetoric, human factors/HCI, anthropology, sociology, etc.). But it can be cultivated again, if we remember what it was for: not to make things faster, but to make things that matter. Not to reduce friction for more clicks, but to create meaning. Not to optimize metrics, but to serve humanity.
To humanize technological culture.
The choice is still ours. But every day we don’t make it, we drift further from what design could be for the UX/Tech industry. The cliff is fast approaching. 😬