I don't think that AI is going to "kill design" in the next few years (as some pundits are claiming). However I do think we reached "peak designer" several years ago, and the volume of designers needed over the next 10 years will be less than the previous 10. (This is as much to do with the rise of design systems leading to the industrialisation of design, and the power shift of decision making, as it is AI)
There was a time when design was slow, considered and informed. This was not simply a matter of culture or temperament. It reflected the economics of software at the time. Development used to be slow, expensive and risky. If you built the wrong thing, the cost of fixing it could be enormous, so product teams created space to think before they made.
We find ourselves at a singular moment of time. As an industry we’re starting to reach what I call The Feature Event Horizon. The point at which the time it takes to ship an idea is almost the same as the time it takes to come up with the idea in the first place. As we get closer to the threshold, time dilates. reality warps and we start to experience process collapse. What happens on the other side is anybody's guess, but it’s going to be bumpy. Let me explain. But first, let me start with a story.
I meet a lot of designers who say something like, “I’m okay at UI design, but what I really want to be doing is strategy.”
I get it. In large organisations with mature design systems, visual and interaction design can start to feel like assembling someone else’s product from pre-approved parts. It’s easy to crave something higher up the food chain — a seat in those mysterious meetings where “strategy” supposedly happens.
Every designer has felt it: that pang of frustration when you’re asked to make a product worse. Maybe it’s hiding a feature behind a paywall. Maybe it’s adding extra steps to the sign-up flow to capture more data. Maybe it’s cramming in additional ads in places you know will annoy people, just to squeeze out more revenue. It can feel like the opposite of what we signed up for. We’re here to improve things, not to degrade them.