Design is still design
What do you do when the world shifts under your feet?
Figma is dead.
Everyone’s a designer.
You’ve 10x’d.
I’m working more than ever.
Agents do her job now.
We’re living through a tumultuous time in tech - everything is up in the air. It can feel so… exhausting.
Yet here’s something steady: the age-old tenets of design still apply. Perhaps you could even say they’re more necessary now than ever.
In my work, everything is different. We’re applying agents to every domain. In the last 3 months, our whole process has changed to adapt to this new reality.
- Tools are shifting - we don’t use Figma as much anymore and mostly design in a coding environment now (check it out: Patrick Morgan’s Design Studio).
- Roles are merging - product managers and engineers (and design) push designs forward now. Designers are sourcing new product specs and pushing PRs. Everyone does everything to push features forward.
- Agents are involved - every in between step (like fixing paper cuts, updating tickets, pushing PRs) is getting automated so we humans can focus on the gnarliest of UX problems.
Despite all the tumult, design is still design. And this is what I hold onto.
The double diamond still lives.
We start with open minds, observing and gathering information, working together as humans and agents to cast a wide net and absorb much - DISCOVER
We make sense out of that flood of observation, surfacing opportunity or friction - working together as humans and agents to synthesize, find trends, and present insights, and create briefs around specific problems to solve - DEFINE
We explore solutions widely, working together as humans and agents to explore more design ideas than ever before, intaking lofi vibe-coded prototypes from product managers, collaborating with Claude as a conversation partner, and getting UI inspo from Mobbin’s MCP - DEVELOP
We all deliver, working together as humans and agents to get the product into customer hands and tweaking until it’s right, all using our agents to peer at the same codebase and identify changes only those with our expert eyes could see - DELIVER
The judgment layer still rules.
When everyone is a designer, including agents, design judgment must be present to uphold quality.
Agents’ context is historical, so they always revert to the average. Product managers and engineers prioritize different goals from design and often don’t have the lexicon to uphold a high standard of design (yet?).
As designers, we provide a definition of good, just as we always have. Only now, we have to speak it louder.
We answer the questions:
- “What does good design look like?”
- “What differentiates us from everyone else?”
Design is uniquely qualified to answer these questions with a rabidly high bar. We fight for the judgment layer.
In a world of tumult, hold steady to this. Design is still design.
