Hello!
Today I'm thinking about job hunting, specifically that the world you're applying for a job in no longer exists. There are remnants of it in bigger, older companies, but not for long. Why? Because the job descriptions most people are applying against assume a workflow that's already gone. For years, designers worked "out ahead" of engineering in mockups. Now development teams are "out ahead" of design, with new features becoming code at a furious pace, and design's job shifts toward making all that output fit together. At the Design Futures Assembly this spring, close to half of designers had shipped AI-generated code to production, and at the best teams the "stack" was dozens of internal tools that change month to month. Try writing a stable job req for that. So the natural reaction is to grab every tool and try to do every role. Designers pick up coding agents, developers spin up layouts, and everyone ends up here: That approach spreads us thinly across multiple complex and important jobs. I can play a developer on TV, but in real life I'm a pretty crappy one. The better move is the lesson we taught designers at Yahoo! years ago: double down on the thing you're uniquely good at and apply it elsewhere. So if you're looking for work right now, don't optimize for the job posting. Get hands-on with the tools, figure out what they can and can't do, and show how your particular superpower reaches further because of them. That's the job that actually exists.
What are the most important universal design skills to focus on when adapting to new technologies like AI?
Every time a new technology shows up, people ask which skills still matter. AI will end up in every product, so eventually we'll stop saying "AI products" (just like we stopped saying "web software"). And the most valuable thing designers bring hasn't really changed: establishing and maintaining the coherency, simplicity, and visual communication that make technology work for people.
I've long called this humanizing technology. It's very easy to stack feature upon feature until the tools become the focus instead of what people actually want to get done. Web forms are my favorite example. Nobody wants to fill in a form. They want to buy something or attend an event, and the form is just the barrier in between. Designers should make emerging technologies like AI accessible and understandable by managing complexity so end users aren't burdened with it. That empathetic perspective (What do people need to know? What are they thinking and feeling?) transfers to any technology.
Underneath that is understanding people. Bill Buxton made this point years ago: the most important technology is the "wetware." Humans change the least, so if you grow your awareness of people, you can build across many new technologies as they come and go. That was 2010, and it holds up remarkably well.
Next, know your medium. If you're designing an iPhone app, it helps to know it has a camera and can locate you to within 50 meters. AI is the same. Understanding capabilities like pattern detection, recommendation, prediction, classification, clustering, and generation lets you see past the "black box" and assemble those pieces into real systems.
Then there's a shift in how we work. The traditional PRD, then design, then engineering process no longer holds up. It's more "prototype to productize," with designers working directly with the actual product instead of mockups. In that world, product mechanics (how it works) matter more than UI aesthetics, and the best software comes when people with strong opinions on how it should work are working directly on the code.
Finally, I'll say something that may sound a bit cheeky. I keep seeing people claim that in an age of AI, whatever skill they already have will matter even more. But the most important skill in an age of AI is... AI. Knowing how to learn from and work with AI models and systems.
So my advice is to keep your focus on people, learn what the technology can and can't do, and get your hands dirty making real things. The skills that last are the ones that let you bend technology to people instead of the other way around.