June 6, 2026
Design mindfulness
AI
The tool is not the author
I keep hearing the same worry from designers I work with, sometimes said plainly and sometimes only half-spoken. If a machine can generate a thousand layouts before lunch, what is left for me to do? If it can produce a finished image from a sentence, why spend years learning to see, to compose, to decide? The fear underneath is human. It is the fear of being made unnecessary and obsolete.
I want to take that fear seriously. Dismissing it would be dishonest. The tools really are powerful, and they are getting better quickly. But I have come to believe the fear rests on a misunderstanding of what a designer actually does. A designer is not a person who produces images. A designer is a person who decides which image should exist, and why, and for whom. That work has not been automated. If anything, it has become more valuable.
What the machine gives you, and what it can't
Generative tools are good at one thing in particular: producing many plausible options at low cost. This is useful. The blank page has always been the hardest part of the work, and these systems can fill it instantly with material to react to. You can explore a visual direction in an afternoon that once took a week. You can test ten typographic systems instead of defending your first guess. Used well, the tool widens the space of what you can consider.
What it cannot do is care. It does not know your stakeholder's unspoken anxiety about looking too corporate, stiff, or legal. It does not feel the small wrongness of a color that technically matches the brand but betrays the vibe. It has no taste (!), only an average of everyone else's. When it gives you a thousand options, every one of them is a remix of what already exists. The judgment about which option means something, and the courage to choose the one that is harder to defend but truer, comes from you, designer.
So the skill worth building is not the production of pictures. It is discernment. The designer who thrives in this period is the one who can look at a hundred generated directions and say, with reasons, "this one, not those." That ability does not come from the tool. It comes from a trained eye and a point of view. Those still take years — the "10,000 hours" to mastery.
Don't outsource your imagination
A practical posture I suggest to my associates: treat these tools as collaborators for ideation, not as a replacement for thinking. Let them break your fixation on your first idea. Let them show you the obvious options quickly so you can move past them. Let them handle the variations and the tedious permutations that used to eat your hours. This is the empowerment that is genuinely on offer. You can now reach further than your own hands once allowed.
But notice the trap inside the convenience. When answers arrive instantly, the temptation is to keep accepting them, to let the speed of the tool set the pace of your judgment. You begin to choose from what you are shown rather than from what you can imagine. The machine offers a well-lit room full of existing ideas, and it is easy to forget that the most original work has always come from somewhere deeper — typically, the same place where we get strikingly good art from.
Ideas that are only yours come from stillness
Original ideas rarely arrive on demand, and almost never under pressure. They tend to surface when you stop searching outward and turn inward, when you give a problem room to sit unsolved. This is not necessarily mysticism. It is how attention works. The mind connects distant things when it is not being rushed, and it needs unstructured time to do it.
The danger of fast tools is not that they make bad work. It is that they make the rushing feel productive. You can spend a whole day generating, selecting, refining, and never once sit with the problem long enough to hear what you actually think about it. The output piles up while the original thought never forms.
So I would ask you to protect the slow part of the work as deliberately as you adopt the fast part. Build the space the way you would build anything that matters. Before you open the tool, sit with the brief and let yourself be confused by it for a while. Take the walk. Meditate, if that word fits you, or simply allow yourself stretches of quiet with no screen and no prompt. The idea that is only yours, the one no average of the internet could have produced, comes from that interior place. The tool can extend an idea once you have it. It cannot give you the idea in the first place.
What I want you to hold
You are not being replaced. You are being asked to become more clearly what you already were: the person who decides what is worth making. The machine is a remarkable instrument, and you should learn it deeply and use it without guilt. But keep your hands on the two things it cannot supply: your judgment and your inner life. Let it expand your reach, and let your stillness supply the direction. Held that way, this is not the end of the designer. It is an invitation to design from a deeper place than the speed of the tools would otherwise allow.
March 25, 2026
Design mindfulness
Finding stillness in organizational chaos
Many of us experience work as a series of small emergencies. A deadline shifts, someone changes their mind, a cascade of consequences follows. Something fails during the crunchiest moment. The natural response is to match that urgency.
The most effective people I work with do not fight chaos. They don't subscribe to it, move through it without getting tangled, and don't get swept away. Something in them stays quiet even when everything around them is loud. They aren't passive or checked out. More specifically, they know what actually matters right now, and are consistently willing to let go of what doesn't. They ask: are we solving the right problem?
When you're genuinely grounded, you can tell the difference between noise and signal. The meeting that derails isn't derailing you. Your ability to make this distinction depends on whether you're centered or scattered. If you're scattered, everything feels equally important — which means nothing gets proper priority, and everything is queued with a layer of fear. If you're centered, the priority becomes obvious.
What does this look like in practice? Before responding to the next crisis, pause. Thirty seconds is enough. Feel your feet on the floor. Ask yourself what this moment actually needs — not what it appears to need. Most of the time the answer is simpler than the urgency suggests: an acknowledgement, a timeline, an opinion.
Teams sense whether you're panicked or clear. Groups with someone genuinely calm make better decisions faster. They don't waste time on performative urgency. This creates real space for thinking.
When I worked at Meta, we were slowly but surely outgrowing the "move fast and break things" mantra. As we matured and became more deliberate, we assessed risk much more carefully. We gave ourselves space to focus on polish, and create delightful experiences — not just what got the task done or fit the requirement.
The organizations that actually work aren't always the ones moving fastest. They're the ones where people can stay focused on what matters. That focus comes from individuals who refuse to let the chaos become their internal state. They hold a boundary with it. They let it exist without letting it take over.
This matters practically: when you're not exerting energy on agitation, you have energy for problems. When you're not executing under stress, you can actually think about solutions. When you're not reacting to surface turbulence, you can see the deeper patterns that create the turbulence in the first place.
In every company I've worked, ICs have thrown around a very familiar sentence: "Because [HIPPO] said so." The Hippo is the Highest Paid Person's Opinion — a senior leader with a vision who may not be executing alongside UXR, necessarily familiar with the tech debt, or speaking from a place of universal truth. Sometimes they're just riffing. But they hold power, and ICs interpret their ideation as prescriptive. When ICs follow leadership directions at face value without considering the why, simply out of fear of controversy, they make less deliberate decisions. What follows is a "fix it later" culture, cycling through Fast Follows indefinitely.
I think the next few years are going to require us human designers to practice this skill of stillness more than ever. Organizations are getting more complex, more distributed, more responsive to things no one controls. The old command-and-control approach is breaking down. What comes next won't be tidy. It will be something like organized adaptation — where individuals stay grounded enough to make good decisions moment by moment without needing permission for everything.
The people who will actually feel alive in that environment are the ones who've learned to be still inside it — not frozen. You can move decisively from a place of quiet. In fact, that's when your movement works best.
The chaos isn't going away. But your relationship to it can change. That change starts with deciding that your internal stability matters. It's not a luxury — it is a practical tool, and a daily practice. It's how you do the work that actually means something.
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