Key Takeaways
- Design is evolving due to a blend of business pressures, the rise of modern tech tools, and disrupted career paths for junior designers.
- Business goals are reshaping Design Teams to work faster and cheaper, forcing design leadership to prove their value and relevance with limited resources.
- To remain competitive, companies must shift focus back to differentiation and innovation, with design playing a critical role in driving meaningful business growth.
Listen: 4 powerful trends impacting the future of design.
The role of design is changing. This is not a manifesto. It's not a comprehensive guide to all the complex challenges facing design leaders today, either. In fact, if you're working in the design field, you probably read the first line and thought, “Duh. Tell me something I don't know.”
We may or may not be able to do that. Still, after facilitating six roundtable discussions with 64 senior leaders in our InsideOut Design Leader Community, we spotted some clear trends from their insights that anyone in or around the creative and design profession will find helpful and thought-provoking.
To set the stage, we asked senior design leaders of in-house teams at high-profile brands to come together and share their perspectives based on recent experiences, the content they've consumed, and their deep knowledge of the evolution of their fields. Our commitment is to amplify their voices to support progress and tap into as many brilliant minds as possible to shape what comes next.
Below are real-world insights from the incredible InsideOut design leadership community to keep this conversation front and center as the role of design inside organizations continues to evolve. Here's what we learned.
What's happening with design?
As you'd imagine, after 12 hours of lively discussions, we captured a lot of perspectives, ideas, and opinions. These four themes jumped out above the rest:
- Business expectations of design are shifting.
- Design's role in innovation is in question.
- Career paths are being disrupted.
- Design is having an identity crisis.
Delving into these themes will help explore how they’re shaping the future of design and why that matters to businesses.
Business pressure is reshaping design expectations
For years now, rapid advancements in technology, alongside increased economic challenges, have forced companies to reexamine the costs of doing business and test the limits of productivity to get ahead. In response, Design Teams are being squeezed by financial pressures and shifted around inside organizations, most of which were already unclear on design’s value.
As one leader shared, “faster” has become today's business mantra, asking design to solve problems without the time—or resources—to do so. To increase speed, thinking seems to have become less valued than producing. Add artificial intelligence (AI) to the mix, and the value of human-driven design is even more difficult to demonstrate.
Executives crave the promised cost savings of AI tools. Still, in its current form, AI simply can't deliver high-quality results at scale without human intervention, which costs money. Another attendee shared that the golden age of “Investing in design without knowing what you'll get for that” is over. Today, design leadership must create competitive advantage and show the business the value of design—with or without enough resources—to remain relevant.
The future of design innovation is at risk
One of the most dangerous byproducts of the explosion of easily accessible AI tools is the idea that now “anyone can design.” This belief is leading companies to shift strategy to other parts of the business entirely, like Finance or Product, often reorganizing reporting structures for design directly to the heads of those teams as well.
Doubling down on offshore resources and AI to deliver “design” for those strategies means transitioning from innovation to maintenance mode for many Design Teams. But as one leader noted, AI is helpful for efficiency but not great at differentiation. Instead, it can lead to watered-down sameness.
For impatient companies hyper-focused on short-term profits, a phase of “terrible design” might seem acceptable. In the short term, the trade-off of similar revenues at a reduced cost may even seem to work. While advocating for spending time on innovation, one design VP heard this from an internal stakeholder: “While you were focused on innovation, we were selling stuff.”
Clearly, some leaders have very different visions right now. Still, the best ones know that a lack of differentiation will actually increase costs and decrease both revenue and customer engagement, leading to irrelevance and disruption.
While you were focused on innovation, we were selling stuff.
Design career paths are littered with disruption
Speaking of disruption, let’s talk about the future of design jobs. The way we see it, both ends of the traditional design career path are simultaneously impacted. Let's start at the top. With strategy shifting to other departments and cost-cutting considered paramount, design leadership roles are being cut. Seen as an easy way to reduce larger chunks of spend, shortsighted companies are eliminating VP-level roles, leaving director-level managers to take on more—often without additional training or compensation.
Worse still, layoffs—formerly seen as a sign of business weakness—are becoming normalized. Some even see companies that are not laying off workers as irresponsible in today's economic climate. While not limited to design roles, Layoffs.fyi tracked more than 150,000 layoffs in tech companies in 2024.
With more senior-level talent in the marketplace and fewer roles, junior- to mid-level Designers entering the job market are finding it challenging to compete. In fact, most junior talent entering the workforce right now are terrified. They believe AI will take their jobs. Beyond this challenge, design schools continue to produce craft-focused graduates who lack the modern skills required for designers: business acumen and critical thinking to identify and solve the right problems.
The reality is that AI could take over the production-level work necessary for junior Designers to learn the process and build expertise. Less opportunity to learn up front and fewer chances to rise down the line can only reduce interest in the field. Creative professionals are already leaving the industry out of frustration to pursue new career paths. This will ultimately create a dearth of talent moving forward.
Design is having an identity crisis
Faced with new (often unrealistic) expectations from stakeholders, leaders who have struggled for years to demonstrate the full value of design are taking a hard look at its future. As one VP pointed out, designers have failed to use their own tools on themselves—or to effectively use design thinking to uncover problems and help executives solve them.
Design Teams must create more “Oh, that came from Design!” moments that lead partners to see the value they bring.
True or not, the concept of “design” has lost its luster and is now seen as beautiful but slow, a nice-to-have unable to work at the speed of change. Several attendees also asked whether or not it's time to abandon the word “design” and find new language to show its relevance and impact on the business. One leader noted that Design Teams must create more “Oh, that came from Design!” moments that lead partners to see the value they bring.
On the flip side, as another attendee suggested, organizations must decide if they want design to “walk the dog” or to “unleash it to explore.” Unleashing design would effectively mean bringing design into the strategy phase, looping in uniquely qualified individuals within the design function to solve complex business problems, thereby “unleashing” the power of design to drive revenue. That said, a notable article proving the impact of design was published in 2019. Throughout our roundtables, no one could point to a more recent resource leaders could utilize to prove that “unleashing” the Design Team contributes directly to financial success. Thus, design leaders are often left to independently advocate for the value they bring.
Upholding the value of design in what comes next
Pondering the future of design without proposing a solution may feel frustrating. The reality is that what comes next is up to the very leaders who are being impacted by the challenges outlined above. What we did hear, repeatedly, is that there's hope. No matter what it's called, design remains relevant as a driver of innovation and business outcomes.
How to reignite interest in bringing design into business discussions as a partner, not an afterthought remains elusive—even though the intersection of value for both design and the business is innovation. In our final roundtable of the series, one senior leader pointed out that the pendulum will swing back from “faster and cheaper” to differentiation and innovation. In fact it must, if companies wish to remain competitive. And as it does, we fervently believe that design will play a key role in shaping what comes next.
Why do we care? Our mission is to connect leaders to find solutions. If you're a senior design, experience, or creative operations leader of an in-house team at a high-profile brand and want to connect with others who share your unique challenges, let's talk. Our InsideOut community hosts small format roundtables to support the learning and growth of our members, and we're honored to facilitate those discussions.
About the author
Susie Hall is Aquent's Community & Customer Engagement President. In 1999 she joined Aquent as an interactive Agent. Over the past 21 years, she's led regional teams, developed a robust interactive design practice and launched Aquent's Vitamin T brand in 2011 to address the rapidly evolving digital talent needs of agencies and mid-sized companies. With 15 Best of Staffing service awards and hundreds of thousands of connections made, she brings a deep understanding of creative, design, and leadership. In 2019, Susie launched Aquent's InsideOut Design Leadership Community, connecting senior in-house design, experience, and operations leaders from high-profile brands through facilitated peer discussions based on real-world challenges.
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