Dead? Yep. Looks dead to me.
Or can we design an Abundant future?
“Is design dead?”
A tempting, clickbaity Fast Company headline.
I fell for it. I clicked, hit the paywall, and subscribed.
I needed someone to clearly tell me that design—which I’ve spent my entire adult life studying, practicing, and teaching—was not dead.
The author—writing in a March 2025 article1—had been a fly on the wall at a closed-door meeting of design executives from a range of companies. The purpose of the gathering? To entertain the provocative question: “Is design dead?”
They discussed some grim stats:
In a survey of hundreds of Fortune 500 companies, 39% had cut the top one or two levels of their design organizations.
9% of those companies had eliminated half of their design team in the last year.
And design is losing influence. In 84% of companies, design now reports into other functions—like marketing—and often not even to the head of that function.
This tracks with the general tone of my LinkedIn feed these days. Design recruiters say they receive thousands of applications for a role, in a single day. Recent massive layoffs have led to an unhealthy situation, where the supply of designers greatly exceeds demand from employers.
There is a much smaller genre of LinkedIn post, where designers appear quite confident that their roles are secure. Design, they say, is immune to automation, never to be replaced by AI systems.
If you don’t believe this, they argue, you don’t understand how special design work is.
They sound a lot like defenders of the horse-drawn carriage at the dawn of the automobile.
Design looks pretty dead. What happened?
I started my design journey as a graphic designer. I made posters, books, printed educational materials, airport signage, logos, and visual identity programs. I enjoyed making all these things, but I often wondered—why are these the things we should be making? I wanted to get involved earlier and answer the bigger question: what should we make?
In grad school at the Institute of Design in Chicago, I studied Design Planning—a structured, reliable approach to envisioning systems that address complex, strategic issues.
We learned about landmark projects that came before us: a user-centered platform ensuring equal access to the legal system; a plan to address climate change by regreening deserts so natural photosynthesis could sequester carbon; and space-based solar panels transmitting energy back to Earth via microwaves, as an alternative to fossil fuels.
My classmates and I envisioned a system for more effective planning and response to natural disasters, and another to reduce traffic congestion in Chicago.
I graduated charged with optimism and a deep conviction in design’s power to address our biggest challenges—by painting compelling visions of better futures that could create movements. I felt confident that my broad range of skills—from strategic visioning to sleeves-rolled-up making—would prove valuable to any organization.
When I landed at the design consulting firm IDEO after grad school, I was fortunate to be applying design planning in a real-world context—even if the projects were less ambitious. I felt I was on the path toward that positive future.
We often worked closely with clients in highly collaborative workshops, though many clients didn’t fully understand what was happening. Standing at the whiteboard or flipchart, a facilitator would quickly divine insights and a point of view—loosely connected to the information generated during the session.
To many clients, we looked like confident masters of a mystical practice—“cutting cubes out of clouds,” as one of my professors used to say. They preferred to leave this business to us.
Other clients, though, wanted to do it themselves. So we packaged it up into convenient lessons, turned the fun up to eleven, gave it a hefty price tag and a catchy, approachable name: Design Thinking. We carried on with these workshops and anointed an entire generation of business leaders with the title design thinker.
I knew Design Thinking was a watered-down caricature of a more rigorous, scalable approach to design strategy—but I didn’t think it was doing any harm to sell workshops and spread the idea that thinking like a designer was valuable, and even fun.
Years later, I realized how that backfired.
In 2007, after seven years at IDEO, I left and spent the next decade hunkered down in startups—on very small teams, where I was often the only designer. I was largely disconnected from the broader design world during that time.
When I shut down my last startup and finally poked my head out to see what was going on, I hardly recognized what I saw.
The entire landscape of design had changed. Design boot camps seemed to have triggered an unchecked boom in the number of people calling themselves some form of designer. As if to accommodate the influx, we invented a wide range of new titles and acronyms for ever-narrower specializations.
We have so many acronyms these days: UXD, UX, UI, UXR, CX, IxD—and just as many fully spelled-out titles: Design Ops Manager, Design Systems Manager, UX Writer, Service Designer, Conversational Designer, and Ethical Design Lead, to name a few.
Most of the roles I saw were focused on creating tangible, concrete artifacts, managing a library of those artifacts, or overseeing the process of creating them. I didn’t see many designers being asked to contribute strategically—setting direction and answering the question: What should we make? I thought we had made progress toward “having a seat at the table” with CEOs and CTOs, but this felt like a regression—a great demotion that was hard to swallow.
If anyone was looking for strategic contributions from designers, it was only as icing on the cake of being a top-notch driver of the latest-greatest screen design tool: Figma. Designers love to say that design is about much more than tools—but good luck finding a job posting that doesn’t start with absolute mastery of Figma.
Did I kill design?
I think I played a part—by handing out Design Thinking certificates to anyone willing to pay the price and participate in a fun workshop. It makes sense that no one was looking to designers for contributions at the level of strategy.
We spent years telling everyone they could do it. So they did. Without us.
What else was the eager army of newly bootcamped designers to do? We leaned hard into what was being asked of us: designing highly optimized screens that are easy to use, highly engaging, and fast to build.
It’s the era of the Figma jockey.
But I think it will be short-lived. We can very nearly write an algorithm for that work today.
At one end of the spectrum, we gave away and democratized a dilute version of design strategy. The other end will soon be eaten by machines. After churning out so many designers—where are they supposed to go?
I stewed in this narrative for a while. Maybe design is dead?
Then Abundance hit me like a defibrillator—after a long, scary flatline.
The book, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, lays out a case for building our way out of our existential crises—a hopeful, concrete vision of the future.
At its core, that’s what design is. Across the entire spectrum of design contributions, it is the practice of imagining and building positive futures—grounded in human values, not just business value.
I see Abundance as a call to action for designers:
To make a compelling case for the value of design—not only in business terms.
To scale the practice of design to meet the needs of our time.
To earn a seat at the strategy table.
I think it’s time to look back at Design Thinking and ask: what thinking is actually going on there? Can we scale it up to address bigger problems than UI flows and button states?
I’m still organizing my ideas about the role design can play in the abundance agenda, but I feel inspired.
This is the most optimistic I’ve felt about design since grad school.
¹ Mark Wilson, “Is Design Dead? Design leaders wrestle with the question behind closed doors” Fast Company, March 19, 2025. https://www.fastcompany.com/91299152/future-of-design-leaders-executives (paywalled)
Read this for a jolt of optimism!
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (New York, NY: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025).
(Amazon)
Many thanks…
My fellow writing buddies helped me out a ton by reviewing one of the MANY drafts of this essay:
, , , , , , , and Adam Siegel.
I have been a licensed, practicing architect for more than 50 years. I can legitimately call myself a designer and a champion for design in its broadest and deepest essence. Design is not dead. Perhaps designers are moribund but design is vital, intrinsic, wholistic component of natural change making. Design isn't simply problem solving. It is creating that which is new, not having existed before. It is part of humans activity, but thrives beyond that: "human/naturally," systemically and holistically. Real design is not fully known or understood until it is engaged in from the prospective of worldview, philosophy, knowledge, skill and a created outcome.
Is design dead? Nah. It's just getting started.