Digital design has never been in greater demand. It’s also never been in greater flux. While the fundamentals of good design are immutable, the discipline is reinventing its business models, expanding into sectors that once ignored it entirely, and grappling with a future in which its most fundamental product, the visual interface, may no longer matter quite so much.
“These shifts have a variety of causes, but artificial intelligence is accelerating many of them,” says Josh Campo, CEO of the design and technology company Huge, which describes itself as “human-first, AI-native”. “It’s reducing the cost of making things, changing who gets to make them, and changing the nature of digital interactions.”
We asked senior design leaders who are already wrestling with these issues how they think this will play out. Here’s what they see coming.
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Some industries have long prioritized digital experience; others have barely tried. That’s the view of Dan Kenger, chief design officer at Hims & Hers, which provides access to medication and personalized care remotely, via apps and online consultation. He believes that this state of affairs mostly came down to one thing: Consumers had no reason to expect anything better.
Healthcare is one such example. When people’s experience of other services, such as banking, travel, and retail, was being transformed by digital design, healthcare stubbornly held out. “Providers never really had to deal with the consumer directly,” reflects Kenger. “So there was no incentive to make things easier.” But as digital life led consumers to expect better, that started to change, and telehealth accelerated the process by introducing greater choice into the market. It is now much more commonplace to encounter healthcare products with slick interfaces and smart user experiences. “When consumers are able to choose,” says Kenger, “design emerges as a competitive advantage.”
Whether it’s down to competition, rising consumer expectations, or a combination of both, in the future he expects to see a greater emphasis on digital design in sectors such as government, legal services, and insurance. But getting design thinking into these areas isn’t straightforward, and Kenger is candid about the obstacles.
The biggest is cultural. Sometimes organizations are wary of making a departure from industry norms or they make the assumption that being “undesigned” signals utility and seriousness, and that this is what consumers want. Occasionally, says Kenger, it comes down to something more dispiriting. “Incumbents sometimes don’t have a mutual respect for who’s engaging with them.”
Regulatory hurdles are real, too, though more navigable than designers often assume. “Regulatory requirements don’t have to fight visual appeal,” says Kenger. “Good design is how you reconcile the two.”
The third obstacle is that design needs a champion at the leadership level, not just advocates in the production team. “Only then can it really propagate and culturally affect the bedrock of the organization,” he stresses.
If these obstacles can be overcome, how will we benefit? Kenger believes that an emphasis on design thinking is a natural enabler of new, value-adding experiences. By way of example, he imagines how public healthcare will look in the future. “In 10 years, you’re going to pull up your phone and know your B12 from yesterday to right now,” he predicts. “We’re going to look back and think it was barbaric that you had to ask your doctor once a year what your levels were.”
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The hourly rate has always been one of the creative industry’s more convenient fictions. Clients pay for time, agencies invoice for time. But this is really a proxy for the underlying value: the ideas and strategic insight. This is the stuff that’s always just bundled in, without ever being named or priced separately.
Once, this suited both sides. Clients could budget predictably, and agencies didn’t have to prove what their ideas were worth. But when AI compresses weeks of execution into hours, it no longer hangs together quite so easily because, as Huge’s Josh Campo puts it, “‘Done’ is quickly becoming ‘nearly free’.”
But execution was never really where the value was. “We charged for getting something done, because it was the easiest way to monetize,” he says. “The ideas, the thinking: That’s always been the hard part to put a price on.”
This is leading digital design companies such as Huge to rethink their business models. Huge is already piloting fee structures tied to value creation, where the majority of what the company earns depends on what the work delivers. “We’re talking about flipping things around,” says Campo, “so that 70 percent of the fees are tied up in that value creation.”
As the cost of accessing competent design falls, Campo believes the market for great design may, in fact, grow. Businesses that couldn’t previously afford serious design investment will no longer face that barrier. “If you further democratize access to great work,” says Campo, “the demand for it will go up.”
For most of the history of media, the relationship between brand and audience was simple: One spoke, many listened. Design’s job was to make the speaking as clear and compelling as possible. Andreina Carrillo, VP of design at NBA Take-Two Media, an entertainment venture from the NBA and gaming company Take-Two Interactive, is making that model look decidedly old fashioned.
The company takes basketball and extends it into the worlds of fashion, food, music, and more via content, gaming, and live experiences. The goal is to turn the brand into a multiplatform, participatory universe. “For us, community shapes the brand as much as the brand shapes the community,” she says.
One example of how this looks in practice is a YouTube travel show called NOMAD, which explores what basketball means to different local communities around the world. The next step for Carrillo is figuring out how that shows up in other channels that bring players and fans closer together.
In the future, this model—building an ecosystem of omnichannel interactive experiences—may become increasingly mainstream. One reason is that fandom is seen as core to Gen Z cultural identity, so the expectations and dynamics of fan communities will inevitably shape digital strategies. Another reason is that in an age of AI-created content, standing out is at a premium and so is realness. “Fandom is about authentic human connection,” she says.
So where does that leave digital designers: How do you build a recognizable identity for a brand that exists everywhere, keeps changing shape, and involves user-generated content? Traditional brand guidelines are giving way to what Carrillo calls a “toolkit of elements”: behaviors and feelings that let formats evolve as culture evolves, and leave room for audiences to make them their own. “We have to give some parameters and structure at the beginning,” says Carrillo, “but then really let users take control and see what happens.”
At this point, the role of the designer shifts from creator to observer: watching how users participate, taking learnings, and then making changes. “It’s never fixed,” she says. “You have to keep evaluating.”
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For most of the internet’s history, designing a website meant designing for human eyes. But what if the user is no longer a person? If we are entering a world of AI agents that get things done on our behalf, such as browsing the web, booking hotels, and handling finances, all without you ever opening an app, where does that leave design?
Donald Chesnut, chief design officer at Candescent, which creates digital solutions for banks and credit unions, has been preoccupied with exactly this question. He believes that as software becomes “headless”, meaning built not for human eyes but for AI agents operating via APIs, visual craft will be a smaller part of the picture. Chesnut puts it starkly: “There’ll be far fewer interfaces than there are today.”
But that doesn’t mean less need for design thinking. Imagine your banking agent negotiates a better mortgage rate, or flags a suspicious transaction and sends you a message explaining what it did and why. Every word of that message, every piece of information included or left out, and how it’s all presented, is a design decision with real consequences.
“How do you help the user understand every step along the way of that interaction,” asks Chesnut, “so that it’s either helping to reassure trust or diminish it?” This, he argues, will be a design problem of a different order from anything the profession has faced before. “You might not be designing interfaces, but the role of a designer is, and always has been, how you build trusted experiences, and even when they happen through agents those experiences still need to be designed. It’s just a very different medium: You’re working with technical systems.”
As we start to see this shift happen, Chesnut believes it will coincide with a shift toward AI taking on more creative design work. All of which means the job will fundamentally change: It will be more about curation, data analysis, and systems. “I don’t know that we’ll actually have ‘designers’,” says Chesnut. “There’ll be something else. Maybe there’ll be ‘product strategists’. I feel it will morph.”
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