The details will be off, but this is a useful way of thinking about where "design" is going.

A Constellation of Emerging Design Roles

  1. Design Engineer

  2. AI Experience Designer

  3. Design Orchestrator

  4. Computational Designer

  5. Prompt Designer

  6. Context Engineer

  7. AI Product Strategist

  8. Responsible AI Designer

That's a good first draft. My thinking on these has been:

  1. Context Designer. Context engineering is about creating systems that pull in all the right context. Context design is about understanding humans and usage and figuring out what the context is that needs to go in there.

  2. Forward Deployed Experience Designer. Large amounts of roles and processes are changing with AI. The way the shape of that change is discovered right now is with Forward Deployed Engineers, because they can prototype and implement change. I'll argue that UX design has a TON of experience (see what I did there?) to add to this.

You can think of these as skills as well as as titles.

  1. It's a title. Titles can help with positioning this within the organization, assign budget etc.

  2. It's a skill. Lets people wear different hats, build skills, and aligns with the trend to have fewer titles since the space is changing so fast (see Anthropic's "member of the technical staff").

# Jun 29, 2026