The future of design isn’t yesterday’s hiring boom.

I read three things last week that, put together, made me feel pretty crummy about the state of UX, and of work in general. Maybe you can relate.

First, there was the HBR “workslop” study that’s been everywhere the past two weeks. If you missed it: workslop is what you get when people use AI tools “to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers.” And it’s everywhere: in a survey of 1,150 US workers, 40 percent said they’d received workslop in the last month—leading to hours of rework and confusion. 

Then I read this tech CEO memo telling his entire company that not only do they need to “default to AI,” but that the frequency with which they use AI will be just as important at their next performance review as the impact they make. Not what they do with AI—not the company goals they hit or the efficiencies they gain. Just…how often they use it. Oh, and if you dare to start a project in a Google Doc—aka by thinking things through with your own brain and writing some sentences down? The memo is explicit: you don’t belong here. 

And finally, I read about Google laying off over 100 UX workers in their Cloud division, including a boatload of UX researchers. That sparked a pretty stark analysis of the situation by Constantine Papas: “UX research doesn't ship products. It doesn't close deals. And in a downturn, ‘non-essential’ is just corporate speak for ‘you’re fired,’” they wrote last week. And also: “If you're a mid-level researcher who thought you'd climb the ladder by doing great work, surprise: the ladder just got sawed in half.” 

That’s dark. And I’m not going to try to tell you that the author is wrong, exactly. What I will say is that this dark lens is seductive—one that appeals to us most when we’re afraid, or angry, or hurt. But it’s also a limited one—a lens that encourages us to stay so narrowly focused on what was lost that it threatens to keep us tethered to the past. 

Not that I’m immune to it myself. The more user-hostile, inhumane, productivity-pilled links I read last week, the more I felt the lure of this dark lens myself. Why are we even still trying to do knowledge work in a moment where having actual knowledge is increasingly treated as a weakness? Why bother? 

Pack it up, folks. UX is cooked.

And if that’s all I’d done last week—scroll panic posts on LinkedIn, read stories about the horrors of late capitalism—I’d probably still be feeling that way. 

Thankfully, that’s not all I did. I also had a long chat with Ron Bronson. And it completely shifted my mood. 

If you know the year Ron’s had, that might surprise you. Up until March, he was the head of design at 18F—the tech consultancy within the federal government that, for over a decade, focused on modernizing government agencies’ digital experiences and infrastructure. 

Then DOGE got its hands on it. And suddenly, 18F—an agency that used a cost-recovery model (not additional taxpayer dollars) to create wildly successful tools and accessible, well-designed websites—was gone. Everyone fired. Projects cancelled. 

So yeah. If anyone, Ron should be the poster child of design despair right now. But he’s not. 

Instead, he’s thinking about design as repair. Rather than viewing the work of design as “big ideas or breakthrough products,” he writes, it’s “paying attention to what is already in motion. The fragile, fragmented, overburdened systems we inherit. And asking: How do we maintain this? Who holds it together? What makes it fail?” 

This version of design isn’t about interfaces, but about infrastructure: 

Look, there’s probably not a job at your company right now for “infrastructure steward.” I get that. And if you built your career during the design (and research and content) hiring boom of the ZIRP era, it’s OK to feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under you. It has. 

But design existed, and thrived, and did all kinds of interesting and meaningful things, long before big tech decided to pay attention to it. And design will still exist long after big tech abandons it in favor of spending a literal trillion dollars on an AI bubble. 

Over the summer, Pavel Samsonov put it like this: Design isn’t dead. It struggles to be born. The ZIRP era, he writes, perhaps wasn’t actually “Peak Design, a golden age to be mourned,” but rather “a confused scramble for the latest hype.” 

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get into UX to scramble for the latest hype. I got into it because I cared about the people we were designing for. Because I cared about making things usable, accessible, and meaningful. Because I liked to solve hard problems.

That work is still needed. It’s perhaps needed more than ever. But we might have to think more expansively about where we do that work, and what it’s called. We might have to create new organizations, join new industries, find weirder and wilder corners to spend our days in. 

And we might have to let go of the fantasy of designers getting to have it all: Big salary. RSU package. The clout of working for a “cool” company. And also: meaningful, meaty design work that legitimately makes the world a better place for anyone other than shareholders. 

I don’t know where that takes us, or who wants to come along for the ride. But I do know that we can’t slop our way to the future of design. And we can’t get there by wishing it were 2018 again, either. 

We need to shift our attention to what we want design and UX to be next. Because there’s too much work to do—too much to repair, too much at stake—to stay tethered to an idea of design that’s no longer serving us, or the world. 

So grieve what’s been lost. Grieve the hardships and uncertainty that come with that loss. But also know that that’s not the end of design’s story, or yours.