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.

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.

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.

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.  

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

How do you identify the type of future you want to have? How do your best, worthily and well, no matter how great or small, to make that future manifest? And what of others who resonate with your work or who’s resonates with you? How can you can bring the future a little closer?

Grapevines grown in the harshest of conditions produce the most vibrant terroir. Ideas like grapes, need to be constrained under the right conditions if they are expected to flourish.

Design recognizes that one person’s passion is another’s infrastructure. Passions capture our attention and drive us to learn, infrastructure is generally invisible and, until it fails, it is that very characteristic that enables us to focus on our passions. It is also wha allows designers to focus on create good design.

It takes 2-3 years for a design team to achieve a stable operational model. As the person accountable for design in your organization its a bad idea to delegate building and running your team to someone less qualified than yourself.

Designers, don’t think this is an open invitation to the board room; you still need to be a business leader first and a design leader second. Know your investment strategies. Understand your company’s business model. And demonstrate your ability to prioritize value ahead of design.

Unfortunately, in its effort to fit in, design has devolved. Transforming into little more than a collaging exercise—whether its post-it notes on the conference room windows, or making assemblages from design systems that are little more than a box of color forms. While allowing anyone who can sort and arrange prefabricated elements on a screen to now call themselves a designer, the detrimental effect on design’s foundation is reaching irreversible proportions.