Reflections on designing beyond the interface
For most of design’s history, the job has been to shape what’s visible. We worked with screens and flows, defined by best practices in visual hierarchy and gestalt principles.
Now that experiences are increasingly powered by AI, the most consequential design decisions live in the substrate beneath the canvas: in how a system reasons, what values it expresses, what judgements it makes when the rules don’t quite cover the situation. As Suff Syed puts it, designers who stay at the surface risk being relegated to decorating the output of systems they never helped shape.