AI

Notes from the future of design

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending a small gathering of design leaders in San Francisco to discuss how AI is reshaping the design industry. Dubbed the Design Futures Assembly, it brought together maybe 50 or 60 people who are deeply immersed in this world: folks from the major design tool companies, heads of design from the big AI labs, senior people from well-known tech companies and consultancies, along with a few people who have been thinking about design for a very long time.

Design has been too settled for too long

The odd thing about product design over the last decade is how stable it became. Not easy. Not boring. Not without progress. But stable.

If you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

I keep seeing this line floating around the internet at the moment:

“If you can’t be bothered putting the effort into writing the article, why should I be bothered reading it?”

It’s a sharp, pithy phrase. Exactly the sort of thing that does well on social media. And I understand where the sentiment comes from.

What gets VC funding now?

I was recently asked to join a local conference panel about what investors are looking for in 2026. The session ranged from angel and seed investing to scale-up capital, bank lending and company valuations. But the question I kept coming back to was narrower: what has changed over the last 12 months, and why does the old early-stage fundraising playbook feel less reliable than it used to?