APRIL 2026
Design is a way of thinking that travels. Across tools, constraints, teams. The medium changes, the thinking doesn’t.
When we moved from Sketch to Figma, things changed. Auto-layout, tokens, variants — once you stopped fighting them and started using them, constraints became leverage. The idea was simple: design the way the web is actually built. It brought designers and developers closer and it scaled the work. Design it right once, and you don’t have to redesign it again and again.
To me, it felt like a shift because our languages got closer.
Now it’s happening again. Designing with AI tools means endless possibilities, but it also demands precision. The difference between asking for “a popup to confirm delete” and specifying a modal with a destructive action pattern is the difference between the right pattern and the wrong one. Same request, different language, completely different result.
Language was always the bottleneck. Vague requests meant guesswork. We tolerated it, haphazrdly bridged the gap with unclear social dynamics. AI doesn’t tolerate the gap, it exposes it. If we don’t have the vocabulary, we can’t instruct anyone — human or machine.
So in one way everything changed. In another way nothing changed. It’s just more visible.
There’s a bigger shift underneath this.
For decades we designed journeys because the product didn’t know what the user wanted. So we built navigation, flows, hierarchies — systems that guide people from not-having to having. The journey existed because the product couldn’t read minds.
Intent-driven design flips that. You don’t navigate to find your software expenses. You ask. The interface responds to intent, not location.
The journey was never the point.
It was the workaround.
Chat was just the first visible version of this. The chat box is not the destination, it’s the prototype. What comes next is interfaces that understand intent without perfect instructions.
And that changes what we design.
