I have this really terrible joke. Like, how many designers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Well, first, we need to do a six-month study in the role of light in society. This is how often, or this is how a lot of our business partners see. They just say, hey, look, the light bulb's broken. Can you fit a light bulb? And us designers are going, hey, you know, we've seen conversations with Johnny Ives. We're like, you know, like, hey, maybe the real question isn't like a light bulb. Maybe it's a form of light creation or the ability to see in the dark. And like, hey, if we step back, maybe it's not a light bulb, it's a candle. Maybe it's a spotlight. Maybe it's something that we've never even dreamed of before. And from a design perspective, that's wonderful. And the product manager is like, I just need the light to be turned on because it's dark and we need to get our work done. And so it's this tension that I see that is constantly frustrating. So yeah, it's this lash of cultures. And a lot of my coaching work is trying to help design leaders navigate through those challenges. But yeah, I do think the AI gives designers the opportunity not only to argue for a course of action, but to actually launch it and see whether it works. You know, again, I'm bouncing around a lot of design law here, but I love Doug Bowman, amazing guy, used to work at Google. He was asked by the Google. Engineers to multivariate test the color of a link. And the law goes that he was so frustrated by how engineering-driven the Google mindset was. He thought it was a ridiculous thing that you would have to try 50 different versions of the color blue, you know, to just believe in the design authority and it doesn't matter. And so he handed his notice in and left. That's the law. I'm sure there's a lot more to it. And then obviously a few months later, the Google engineers came back and said, well, actually, we tested it. And there was a 0.1% difference between this blue and this blue. But for a company that sees a billion users a year a day, actually, that made a statistically valid choice that meant we had, I don't know, I'm making up the number, 50 million more clicks on this link than we had before. And so it's that tension there that I think makes it really difficult, which is also why I think a lot of designers are moving to doing their own thing. Because if you're doing your own thing, you get to make the choices. You know, you can choose whether you want to multivariate and test 50 versions of blue, or you can choose that you just want to go with your gut because this is what you want to do. A lot of the designers building their own thing, it's giving them a level of agency, which they haven't had for years. You know, for the last 10 years, like I say, they've been told what to build, they've been told how to build it, they've been told when to deliver it. And that can be really agency sapping. Whereas now, if you want to go out and use Claude Code to build your own little small app or your small business, it's delightful because no one's telling you what to do. So I'm seeing a whole generation of designers falling back in love again with the act of making and building and shipping because they are the ones that are in charge of doing that. And it's really, really great. And it feels really freeing. So I think that's an interesting trend.

In both your bull and bear scenarios, it seems like the winners, if there is such a thing, are more senior designers or senior leads that it doesn't seem to allow for too much space for junior designers, except maybe when it comes to entrepreneurship, because they don't have, they don't have that innate product sense that's been built up for years. How, how do you address that?

What do you think in these scenarios happens to? I mean, we've been talking about what happens to people inside product orgs. What happens to the design industry? I mean, as a thing, is it a collapse? Because there's conferences, there's coaches, there's educators, there's a whole group of people that are part of the industry that this is going to affect them. If suddenly there's 50% less designers, that's a big impact.

It is. It's almost like Thanos has come and clicked his fingers and half of, you know, potentially half of the design world. Yeah. Who knows? I honestly don't know. I say that the bull case is its peak designer is 95%. That's entirely possible. There are plenty of people out there that will look back at past technical innovations and say, every time a new technical innovation has come along, everyone said that jobs are going to be destroyed. And some jobs have been destroyed, but that technology also creates a whole bunch of new jobs. And for some people, maybe they're early to middle of their career, they are around and are flexible enough where they can pivot into from the old role to the new role. And there are maybe some people who are slightly longer in their tooth that don't want to pivot and they will maybe age out. And so there might be a simple transition. There aren't too many people who are doing lead-based typography anymore. You know, there was a time when a newspaper had to have people doing the design using layout. Some of them moved to desktop publishing. Some of them retired. Don't now, you know, some people take it up as a hobby. You know, there literally is, there's a really old heritage press in the town next to me. There's a 300-year-old metal type press. And people do it for fun. They let oppress posters because it's fun. So maybe that's where we've been moving. A lot of people will transition into something new. Maybe everyone will become a design engineer. What happens next? I think there'll be a bunch of boutique designers just love doing it. You know, I know a bunch of people that were heads of design at big tech companies. They've made their money. They run a little design studio, not because they need to pay the bills because they've got their mortgage paid off or whatever, because they love doing design and it becomes almost being a carpenter or running a little thrift shop. You're not doing it because you make a lot of money. You're just doing it for the love of it. And so that's one future. It might be that the amount of design that's needed is infinitely increased. It might be the same way at the moment. Engineers are not being made redundant. There's more desire for engineers with AI skills than ever before. So there's a possibility it might uptick. And there's a possibility in Mandantic. There's a possibility that this is different. The model I use is most of these sort of technical innovations, we have given up a lower level human skill for high level human skill. It used to be that you would use physical labor to pump water and then you attach a horse to the pump or you attach a steam engine to the pump and now you no longer need to use physical labor. So you can use, you know, you move to using IQ and intelligence. And then you maybe sit in a room full of people calculating things and then a spreadsheet comes along and now you don't need this room full of calculators. But then maybe you're using creativity. And for the last, you know, the last 20 years, we've been knowledge workers. We have been using our knowledge built up over 20, 30 years to deliver work. I think AI is a great knowledge work killer because how can you compete against a machine that has the whole sum total of human knowledge? But maybe we're moving away from knowledge work towards judgment work, which is another word for taste. And so if these systems are still spitting stuff out, there might be need for people that have got judgment and taste to guide what gets built and how we build it and all that kind of stuff. And so I think those senior people will actually move more into a product leadership equal, less hands-on, more coordinating, more orchestrating. But I do think there is a world where 90% of design is automated. Now, there's one thing, again, because I'm not putting any value judgment here. If you are a young designer, this is quite scary. But if you're a young solicitor, this is quite scary. If you're a young engineer, this is quite scary. If you're young anything at the moment, it's quite scary. It's really hard to know where the job market will go. I think the skills I'd be teaching my students aren't particular design skills, but the ability to learn, which is arguably what university was always meant to be. I think we're moving into a world where you will probably have to change your career every six or seven or eight years. Not change your job or change your role, but change your career. And so I think if you are somebody that loves new technology, loves to learn, is incredibly flexible, you might start down a design career path now. And it might, as we know it, it might last for five, six, seven, eight years. And then something else will come along and you will pivot. And that might be a different form of design or it might be something else entirely. Or you might choose to open, you know, become a plumber or open a cafe or a bike repair shop or whatever. I'm increasingly meeting people that literally, I had my house painted a couple of weeks ago. There's a guy in the street painting a house. I was like, do you do this? He's like, yeah, I used to be a marketer, but there's no work for marketers anymore. So now I paint houses. I was like, oh, well, come and paint my house. Maybe we're all going to be painting houses in the future. I don't know.

Well, that seems like a good place to end this. Oh, a terrifying place