Blue sheets of glass

Hi everyone 👋

It has indeed been a very long time since I sent out this newsletter. January 2025, in fact.

I wanted this one to be different, I hope you can find something to resonate with.

There’s a number of reasons why I haven’t sent the newsletter in so long; some of them bureaucratic, some of them personal, some of them just related to what the world is talking about at the moment.

If you’ve been reading since the pandemic peak, you’ll remember that I had a note in the newsletter that said I would not talk about the pandemic. Similarly, I’ve desperately not wanted to talk about artificial intelligence but the reality is that the entire internet is talking about it…all the time.

This has made it very difficult to find interesting things that I would like to share with you that aren’t on that topic, and I just thought it would be better to not send anything. Flooding your inbox with more things about the same topic is almost the antithesis of why I started this, so wanted to stay true.

I was in Budapest this week and both whilst walking around the city, and in the taxi back to the airport, I noticed that there were AI generated advertisements and billboards outside shops and along the highway.

I was on my way back from a design conference and as you might imagine it was a little disheartening to leave the optimism of a conference talking about the future of design, only to be met with artificially generated rubbish as advertisement material.

Whether or not designers should be making adverts in the first place is separate question, but I think it’s important for us to understand that this is what we’re walking into; or maybe we’ve slept walk into it.

The sheets of blue light omitting glass that we carry around in our pocket, with an infinite amount of red notification badges desperate for attention, are only increasing in frequency and pushing our attention spans down into the dirt. As we spread our fatty fingers across the screens, we create yet more pimples to be popped, with our phones resembling more and more the face of an acne’d teenager. More software is being created, an despite the tools to create increasing in fidelity we don’t seem to be getting closer to quality. What we are exposed to is more trash, faster.

As a person who makes things and is deeply absorbed into the tech ecosystem, one of the hardest things to accept and observe is that pretty much everything that we’re using is becoming the same. Every software product or app that you use is eventually becoming a chatbot interface.

Just this week when logging the expenses from my trip, the expense software was of course a chat based interface. Because we obviously want to talk with our business expenses.

This then presents us with a dichotomy – in order for us to preserve our job roles, we must design for what is the requirement of the business. And as the business requirements all converge into a singular homogenous interface, we must adapt and oblige.

So the creativity that a designer enters the market for can become quickly sapped, as they realise that they are designing something that looks the same as everything else. The production worker feeling is real and I’m seeing it across the globe.

It’s one of the themes that kept coming up in the conference that I was attending. Attendees were asking how designers can balance creativity with artificial generation, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure.

I think that as makers, we must accept that the role is not what the role was sold, and we must adapt, which is why I think there’s an opportunity. As someone with a naturally skeptical mindset it’s challenging, but the opportunity here is to become the generalist that we know the market has always asked for. The opportunity is to widen our skills, becoming broader and more applicable to a business. To become people who are creative and technical and communicative all at the same time, which is logical on the surface but difficult to see you when you’re in the weeds.

What I would say as a slice of advice is to take every opportunity possible to spread your wings as wide as possible. Learn as much about all the adjacent disciplines as you possibly can, and use these tools to help you not just to fall into place but design things that matter.

To me, these new tools are useful for plugging gaps and skills I don’t have. I don’t see them as a way to replace what I’m already strong at, because to me that is a sign of laziness; and lord knows we don’t have space for that in this climate.

Search for what skills you don’t have, whether that is writing or engineering or researching. This is where the opportunity lies, and we have the capacity to really develop skills further instead of sitting down and allowing something else to replace our entire job in a flash.

The good news is that nothing is over. Things are changing, slowly but then all at once. We’re still early, and have an opportunity to wax up the board before jumping into the wave.

This mini essay was, perhaps surprisingly, written in a voice note as I was walking out from my plane as I landed at the airport. Whilst it may feel raw and fresh, I’m assuming this is what has been bubbling around in my mind for the past 9 months, and the key reason that I haven’t sent this newsletter.

I hope you all have a great week, and I’ll speak soon.

Luis ~ @disco_lu