Assembly Design had an interesting meeting of practicioners with thoughts on what's next for design. They have a good writeup of the registration data which included a questionaire.
One recurring distinction is between output and authorship. If AI can produce plausible artifacts, then the designer’s value may move upstream into intent, taste, framing, systems thinking, evaluation, and the design of the process that creates the artifact. A few people describe a shift from critiquing finished work to critiquing the protocols, tools, and workflows that generate work.
I see a lot of people that are ahead of the curve (in tech, design etc.) working on systems to encode their craft, or the execution of their craft in a set of skills and basically markdown files.
When execution becomes abundant, what becomes scarce?
The general vibe seems to be: design execution is now mostly cheap. I think that's exactly right, and mirrors what happened in software engineering.
A second point: "AI adoption is being experienced as organization design".
questions are about training, management, career paths, team structures, hiring, change management, and the emotional reality of designers who may feel both excited and threatened.
I have the feeling that most "design leaders" assume UX or design will look similar to what it has in the past. I'm not sure that's right. My feeling is that most things we did in the past will mostly disappear. Some new things will appear. It's hard to figure out which ones exactly.
Attendees seem interested in practical examples: how leaders are training teams, what new rituals or reviews are working, how teams maintain shared standards when output volume rises, and how design managers coach people into new capabilities without reducing the conversation to productivity.
Also interesting. People want to know what is working.
A large share of responses focus on concrete workflows: tool stacks, design-to-code, prototypes, internal tools, agents, AI-assisted production, and the changing path from concept to shipped software. There is clear appetite for honest reports from the field rather than polished predictions.
[...] People want to know which parts of the process are actually better, which parts are only faster, and which parts have become harder.
But again, doing the same things faster or better isn't necessarily where things are going. This sounds more right to me:
They are asking which new workflows, team shapes, and product categories become possible because the tool exists.
And then there's the future of human computer interaction.
push beyond chat as the default interface. Attendees mention voice, agents, physical interfaces, sensor data, adaptive experiences, dynamically composed interfaces, capability-based products, and model behavior as a design surface.
What I'm seeing in the engineering world is: as intelligence goes up, chat as a UI ijust gets better.
Interesting: "Trust, quality, and coherence are the counterweight to speed".
A strong thread in the responses is concern about what happens when production becomes cheap. Attendees mention trust, cognitive load, brand consistency, craft, accessibility, human agency, bias, security, and the risk of generic output. The concern is not nostalgia for slower work. It is the practical fear that abundant output can make systems less coherent unless the design function changes accordingly.
(Again, a deep assumption that there is a design function.)
A lot of good stuff there. "Design systems and brand are becoming machine-readable problems"
I believe that is true. And we see it happen. See for example this new thing from the Tailwind inventors.
This shifts the design system from a static library or governance artifact toward something closer to a production grammar. If models are generating prototypes, UI, content, and code, then design systems need to express constraints, intent, usage patterns, accessibility expectations, and brand behavior in ways that machines can act on.