As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities.

Cities have lots of rules and regulation about how things can be designed and built, reducing the need for and value of creativity

The situation is similar in our field. In 2009, companies might ask a designer to “imagine the shoe-shopping experience on mobile,” and such a designer would need to marshal a considerable number of skills to do so: research into how such activity happens today and how it had been attempted online before and the psychology of people engaged in it; explorations of many kinds of interfaces, since no one really knew yet how to present these kinds of information on smartphones; market investigations to determine e.g. “what % of prospective shoppers have which kinds of devices, and what designs can accommodate them all”; testing for raw usability: can people even figure out what to do when they see these screens? And so on.In 2023, the scene is very different. Best practices in most forms of software and services are commodified; we know, from a decade plus of market activity, what works for most people in a very broad range of contexts. Standardization is everywhere, and resources for the easy development of UIs abound.

It’s also the case that if a designer adds 15% to a design’s quality but increases cycle time substantially, is another cook in the kitchen, demands space for ideation or research, and so on, the trade-off will surely start to seem debatable to many leaders, and that’s ignoring FTE costs! We can be as offended by this as we want, but the truth is that the ten millionth B2B SaaS startup can probably validate or falsify product-market-fit without hiring Jony Ive and an entire team of specialists.

We design apps downstream of how Apple designs iOS. There’s just not that much room for innovating in UI at the moment

Today, for a larger-than-ever percentage of projects, some good libraries and guidelines like Apple’s HIG can get non-designers where they need to go. Many companies could probably do very well with1 designer to do native design + create and maintain a design systemPMs and executives for ideationFront-end engineers working off of the design system / component library to implement ideasSo even where commodification doesn’t mean no designers, it still probably means fewer designers.

If, for example, they land AR / VR, we will once again face a world of businesses who need to figure out how their goods and services make sense in a new context: how should we display Substack posts in AR, for example? Which metaphors should persist into the new world? What’s the best way to shop for shoes in VR? What affordances empower the greatest number of people?

But there will at least be another period when engineers who “just ship” will produce such massively worse user interfaces that software designers will be important again.

“design process” and “design cycles” are under pressure and may face much more soon. Speed helps, and so too does a general orientation towards working with production however it’s happening. This basically sums to: “Be less precious, and try to fit in in whatever ways help your company ship.”

being capable of more of the work of making software can mean becoming better at strategy and ideation, such that you’re ever executive’s favorite collaborative partner; you listen well, you mock fast (maybe with AI), and you help them communicate; or it can mean becoming better at execution, learning, for example, to code.

VidCon has “gone from weirdos to entrepreneurs.”Young people have increasingly turned to online video for entertainment. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, digital content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok dominated, which experts at VidCon said helped propel digital media as a serious form of entertainment.

Digital-first talent are the power players today

It really drove people into watching creators, not as a hobby thing but as another linear option,” said Joe Gagliese, CEO of Viral Nation, an influencer marketing and talent management company.

creators are no longer just using social media as a jumping off point for bigger stardom. Instead, online content is the end goal. Over the years, content creation has become a serious and feasible career option for many.

Hecox said that toward the end of his and Padilla’s initial partnership, they gave priority to production quality in a way their audience didn’t like.“We had strayed too far away from digital and we started looking more like TV, and I think people didn’t connect with that,” Hecox said.

Instead of stretching themselves thin to fit a traditional mold, they've redirected their focus to their roots and what fans liked the best.

I wrote five scripts during my season and a half on TZ, and I was deeply involved in every aspect of every one of them.   I did not just write my script, turn it in, and go away.   I sat in on the casting sessions.   I worked with the directors.   I was present at the table reads.   “The Last Defender of Camelot” was the first of my scripts to go into production, and I was on set every day.   I watched the stuntmen rehearse the climactic sword fight (in the lobby of the ST ELSEWHERE set, as it turned out), and I was present when they shot that scene and someone zigged when he should have zagged and a stuntman’s nose was cut off… a visceral lesson as to the kind of thing that can go wrong.   With Phil and Jim and Harvey Frand (our line producer, another great guy who taught me a lot), I watched dailies every day.    After the episode was in the can, I sat in on some post-production, and watched the editors work their magic.   I learned from them too.

Streamers and shortened seasons have blown the ladder to splinters.   The way it works now, a show gets put in development, the showrunner assembles a “mini-room,” made up of a couple of senior writers and a couple newcomers, they meet for a month or two, beat out the season, break down the episodes, go off and write scripts, reassemble, get notes, give notes, rewrite, rinse and repeat… and finally turn into the scripts.   And show is greenlit (or not, some shows never get past the room) and sent into production.  The showrunner and his second, maybe his second and his third, take it from there.   The writer producers.   The ones who already know all the things that I learned on TWILIGHT ZONE. The junior writers?  They’re not there.   Once they delivered their scripts and did a revision of two, they were paid, sent home, their salary ended.   They are off looking for another gig.

In many cases they won’t be asked to set even when the episodes they wrote are being filmed.   (They may be ALLOWED on set, if the showrunner and execs are cool with that, but only as a visitor, with no authority, no role.   And no pay, of course.   They may even be told they are not allowed to speak to the actors).

One of the things the AMPTP put forward in their last offer to the WGA is that some writers might be brought onto sets as unpaid interns, to “shadow” and “observe.”   Even that will not be an absolute right.   Maybe they will be let in, maybe not.   These are the people who wrote the stories being filmed, who created the characters, who wrote the words the actors are saying.   I was WAY more than that in 1985, and so was every other staff writer in television at the time.

Mini-rooms are abominations, and the refusal of the AMPTP to pay writers to stay with their shows through production — as part of the JOB, for which they need to be paid, not as a tourist —  is not only wrong, it is incredibly short sighted.   If the Story Editors of 2023 are not allowed to get any production experience, where do the studios think the Showrunners of 2033 are going to come from?

those most likely to become entrepreneurs are well-rounded. A 2005 study from Edward Lazear suggests that the self-employed tend to be generalists, not specialists.

Stories like these are unhelpful at best, and damaging at worst. Someone skimming the Insider homepage uncritically might see this headline and chuckle at how coddled the kids are these days. That simply is not the case. The kids are alright. It is, as ever, the rich and truly powerful — the actual managerial bureaucracy — who are enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

Gen Z has its own problems to confront: its members began their adult lives in the middle of a pandemic with a whiplashing economy and, in many parts of the world, an overheated market for renting or owning a home. Surveys show they want a healthier balance between their work and personal lives, and they understand developing a successful career takes time and constant learning. They do not want to be pandered to; they just want a reasonable level of respect, as with pretty much everyone else.

We humans are so interconnected to our jobs, admittedly more than we should be. We identify our job with who we are as people. This means that if we are not growing at work or in our business, we feel like we are not growing as people. Growth can, and should be divided. We can both be growing as people and growing as workers or business owners.

Growth at the group level and specifically scaling growth is not good for us as people. The amount of stress and pressure that is undertaken while trying to scale is unhealthy and unsustainable – regardless of what your favorite hustle culture influencer says.We need time, space, and agency to grow at our own paces. We need to be able to get better and worse at things, without being vilified for it.

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

Shifts in visual narratives happen every decade or so, so it’s not surprising that the design world is moving away from the corporate flatness of web2. Instead of reminding us of the problems of our current world and the harm that’s been caused by Big Tech, the new, abstract forms of web3 distract us from the crises of the day with the promise of a new virtual world.

It’s not just a question of “how do we make this usable?” it’s more about “how do we make this usable for users and increase feature adoption which will drive more revenue?“

I’m in meetings completely credulous, believing whatever anyone says, even though Lucy from Peanuts taught me that that’s a mistake. I don’t have an intuitive sense for where money is. I spend hours on laborious projects that will make me just enough money to buy me four burritos, and fail to follow up on opportunities that would pay my rent for months. I have almost 80,000 followers on Twitter, and have made maybe only $1000 off the platform, most of which has been in the form of meal kits I’ve had to beg companies to send me after they used my Tweets without compensation on their Instagram page.

My job is actually one billion smaller jobs in a trench coat, many of which I’m actually not preternaturally gifted at or even experienced in.

in terms of innovation and economic output, the people in these regions are about eight times more productive than the average person. These regions in 2008 were: (1) Greater Tokyo (2) Boston-Washington corridor (3) Chicago to Pittsburgh (4) Amsterdam-Brussels-Antwerp (5) Osaka-Nagoya (6) London and South East England (7) Milan to Turin (8) Charlotte to Atlanta (9) Southern California (LA to San Diego) (10) Frankfurt to Mannheim. Silicon Valley, Paris, Berlin, and Denver-Boulder also deserve a mention as having some of the highest rates of innovation per person.

Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything." It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself. I've seen it happen. I often have to encourage founders who don't see the full potential of what they're building. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of the size it turned out to be. [4] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.

Every platform has its royalty. On Instagram it's influencers, foodies, and photographers. Twitter belongs to the founders, journalists, celebrities, and comedians. On LinkedIn, it’s hiring managers, recruiters, and business owners who hold power on the platform and have the ear of the people.

On a job site, they’re the provisioners of positions and never miss the chance to regale their audience with their professional deeds: hiring a teenager with no experience, giving a stressed single mother a chance to provide for her family, or seeing past a candidate’s imperfections to give them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. These stories are relayed dramatically in what’s now recognizable as LinkedIn-style storytelling, one spaced sentence at a time, told by job-givers with a savior complex.