I spent the afternoon with AI design leaders

I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Design Futures Assembly this week, and it was truly eye-opening. As designers, we have a lot to do, learn, and absorb…but this makes things exciting, doesn’t it?


Changing tools

An as-yet-unreleased survey from a source I can't name, and its accompanying presentation, suggests that the number of tools being used by designers has increased quite a bit. Rather than 2-3 tools, including Figma, etc., that Designers had been using, this number has risen to upwards of a dozen or more, including tools like Claude Code, Codex, Lovable, etc. As Jesse James Garrett pointed out, this (and other disruptions) challenge the work we as Design Leaders have done to help establish Design Operations. Managing growing toolsets is a part of what DesignOps does to help manage teams and processes.

A rising proliferation of tools was predicted based on the idea that tools are now virtually free to build. So, if this year, the survey cited dozens, this speaker suggested that the number of tools doubles next year. This discounts the likely consolidation that the industry will go through. We looked at a tool called Impeccable, and I can easily see it being bought by Anthropic. With any new technology set, a million startups build a million tools, and many of them go out of business or are crushed by a competitor.

But perhaps designers' tools will increase in the short term. This just means that we’ll have a lot more to learn. Another presenter pointed out that the tools being used weren’t uniform from one organization to another. The stack is no longer common between Design teams. This will present a challenge for the Designers who want to move between organizations.

Further, I spoke with another Designer who's organization is stuck with a stack that their team doesn't love...given corporate relationships. On top of this, it's not a design-specific problem. The ease with which we can create new tools isn't specific to Designers. This reminds me of the irritating problem of trying to watch TV at someone else's house. Their AV setup, although not unique, may be very different from your own, so good luck watching TV there. :)

Changing roles 


Designers can (easily) code now, but what’s new is that they can also ship that code by merging it directly into production. So can PM's. And PMs can more easily represent designs, etc. So one brave invitee asked, "What do Designers call ourselves now?" - an age-old question. He's going with Web Master, I'm sticking with Designer.

Over my career, I've had several titles and in the first 10 years of the Web I was a Web Designer, a User Interface Engineer, and a Design Analyst. I learned not to care...or rather, to care only as far as the value I brought to the team, meeting, and organization. The question of my value was either supported or dismissed as soon as I started to speak. But the fact is that AI has further democratized Design. I agree with Victor Papanek:

All men, women,and children (people) are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.

If you're on a team building a product, what matters is the value you bring and your human perspective, not what you call yourself. My students asked what skills were the skills to have in the future, and I think at the core, that empathy is one that AI’s will not be able to replicate anytime soon.  

Exciting demos

I loved Luke Wroblewski's and Amelia Wattenberger's demo of Intent, a tool to foster collaboration between Developers, PM's, and Designers. Very cool.

But we also saw demos from Pencil, Dessn, Magicpath, and Impeccable and these tools are game-changing. 

As mentioned above, this is just a drop in the bucket of the variety of cool things people are doing out there. What are you doing? Share it. I’d love to see it.  

I echo Andrew Turnbull in being honored and grateful to have been invited.

Being in the future can be disorienting, but ultimately, there are such good people there, and the people he points out are super awesome. It was so good to see everyone. Thanks, Jeffrey Veen and Design Futures Assembly, for having me.

Written by Dave Hoffer, a design leader with more than a decade of experience who has previously worked at frog, McKinsey & Company, PwC, and Amazon.