Column: Conscious Experience Design

For the last two decades, design systems have been the operating system of digital product teams. They’ve given UX designers and engineers a shared language and brought consistency to sprawling product portfolios. They’ve helped product teams move faster without having to reinvent buttons, forms, navigation, and interaction patterns every time a new requirement appeared.

But AI is changing the job description of the design system. A design system can no longer be just a Figma library, token set, and documentation site. Although these artifacts still matter, they were built for a world where humans interpreted the system and manually applied it to creating products.

In an AI-native world, generative systems increasingly create screens, workflows, content, prototypes, and production code on demand. This changes the role of the design system entirely. It becomes the source of truth that teaches AI how a product should look, behave, communicate, adapt, and make decisions. Read More

I write most of my columns as playbooks: the system, the principles, and the work in front of us. This column is different. This time, I don’t have a framework to give you. What I have is a growing conviction about what work remains distinctly ours as UX designers—and I worry about what we might inadvertently relinquish if we don’t pay attention.

We’ve been spending a lot of energy asking what artificial intelligence (AI) will change about UX design. We’ve given far less attention to asking how working with AI might change UX designers. I’ve watched capable designers become faster over the last two years without growing more perceptive. AI often hands us more answers while eroding our patience for uncertainty. It can connect us to an ocean of information about people while distancing us from the people themselves. The risk I keep circling back to isn’t our losing the ability to do the work. It’s our becoming highly efficient makers who drift further and further from the people who we serve, the consequences of our designs, and the meaning behind what we make.

I wrote previously about avoiding creative atrophy: protecting our craft and our thinking. This column is about is the deeper version of that mission. Creative atrophy is losing the ability to do the work. Human atrophy is losing sight of those for whom we do our work. Read More

The headlines are stark: junior UX design roles are disappearing, AI can generate wireframes in seconds, and UX recruitment has slowed to levels we’ve not seen since 2019. For experienced UX designers who have built careers on their mastery of the craft of user-interface (UI) design, these developments might feel existential. But there is a crucial distinction that we should not overlook: AI is automating execution, not expertise.

UX designers don’t reach senior-level positions by being exceptional at drawing rectangles, but because of their understanding of the business context and their ability to navigate organizational complexity and make informed judgment calls that shape human-centered product strategy. These capabilities are not only safe from AI disruption—they are becoming exponentially more valuable. Read More