storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, coherence on noise, & legitimacy on power.
strategy, ops, & capital are all downstream. without narrative control, none it will ever stick.
this has been the core premise of my account. in a world of infinite output, story is the scarce primitive. whoever can compress chaos into something ppl can feel, remember, forgive, & rally around actually runs the system. this skill is worth more than the entire c suite combined.
Spent the weekend at RISD giving a talk with @adamho on the shifting design industry.
AI is collapsing the distance between idea and artifact. But taste and craft still compound, maybe more than ever.
remarkable that podcasts are now acquisition targets for technology companies.
goes to show you how powerful you can become if you develop a respected voice on this platform.
@meag_han_c do you ask product thinking questions in claude? then once you complete the “divergence” phase then you go back to “converging” in figma via pixels?
as agents make it easy to add features, design matters more, not less. the role is no longer just pushing pixels – it’s deciding what should exist, how it fits together, how humans stay in control, and how intelligence feels clear, trustworthy, and useful.
taste, craft, and judgment have always been the bottleneck. the game is not who ships fastest, but who makes the right thing for humans.
the best designers i've worked with go rogue at least 10% of the time in every project, and that's how the product ends up better than anyone expected.
Your work tools in Claude are now available on mobile.
Explore Figma designs, create Canva slides, check Amplitude dashboards, all from your phone.
Give it a try: https://t.co/hwPB3zlk0w
design seems to be viewed as dispensable in this very moment
but the reality that will become clear, as time has shown, is that design is what will make you rise above the rest
The future will be great products executed by ai, guided by design visionaries — grounded in a deep understanding of the past and present, incorporating thoughtful bets based on how they predict society, technology, and culture will evolve.
“taste, judgement, ethics don’t compress”
my favorite line by @chloepark at New Canvas 001
In a world where AI is “compressing” the double diamond process, and exploration and execution happens much faster and more frequently, what, then, will the designer’s role be?
This is where ai becomes a real advantage —
it expands a designers field of view: more references, more ideas, more inspiration.
It becomes easy to look at something and know exactly what makes it special — and say, “this… this is the feeling.”
None of this happens without being deeply well-versed.
You can feel it in how someone references examples:
history of human civilization, current trends, great products, artwork, — what worked, what didn’t, what’s worth carrying forward and incorporating into their own work.
the designer’s role is becoming more like a conductor — coming to the table with a vision for the feeling they want to create, bringing the right pieces together, harmonizing how they work, letting them sing, and doing the last mile of polish to make it exceptional.