The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, marked a horrifying inflection point in the growing debate over how digital platforms amplify rage and destabilize politics. As someone who had already stepped back from social media after Trump’s re-election, watching these events unfold from a distance only confirmed my decision. My feeds had become pits of despair, grievances, and overall negativity that didn’t do well for my mental health. While I understand the need to shine a light on the atrocities of Trump and his government, the constant barrage was too much. So I mostly opted out, save for the occasional promotion of my writing.

Kirk’s death feels like the inevitable conclusion of systems we’ve built—systems that reward outrage, amplify division, and transform human beings into content machines optimized for engagement at any cost.

I rewatched the 1982 film TRON for the umpteenth time the other night with my wife. I have always credited this movie as the spark that got me interested in computers. Mind you, I was nine years old when this film came out. I was so excited after watching the movie that I got my father to buy us a home computer—the mighty Atari 400 (note sarcasm). I remember an educational game that came on cassette called “States & Capitals” that taught me, well, the states and their capitals. It also introduced me to BASIC, and after watching TRON, I wanted to write programs!

In the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then 85 year-old sushi master Jiro Ono says this about craft:

Once you decide on your occupation… you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably.

Craft is typically thought of as the formal aspects of any field such as design, woodworking, writing, or cooking. In design, we think about composition, spacing, and typography—being pixel-perfect. But one’s craft is much more than that. Ono’s sushi craft is not solely about slicing fish and pressing it against a bit of rice. It is also about picking the right fish, toasting the nori just so, cooking the rice perfectly, and running a restaurant. It’s the whole thing.

In Part I of this series on the design talent crisis, I wrote about the struggles recent grads have had finding entry-level design jobs and what might be causing the stranglehold on the design job market. In Part II, I discussed how industry and education need to change in order to ensure the survival of the profession.

Part III: Adaptation Through Action

Like most Gen X kids, I grew up with a lot of freedom to roam. By fifth grade, I was regularly out of the house. My friends and I would go to an arcade in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf called The Doghouse, where naturally, they served hot dogs alongside their Joust and TRON cabinets. But we would invariably go to the Taco Bell across the street for cheap pre-dinner eats. In seventh grade—this is 1986—I walked by a ComputerLand on Van Ness Avenue and noticed a little beige computer with a built-in black and white CRT. The Macintosh screen was actually pale blue and black, but more importantly, showed MacPaint. It was my first exposure to creating graphics on a computer, which would eventually become my career.

For my series on the Design Talent Crisis (see Part I, Part II, and Part III) I interviewed five recent graduates from California College of the Arts (CCA) and San Diego City College. I’m an alum of CCA and I used to teach at SDCC. There’s a mix of folks from both the graphic design and interaction design disciplines. 

In Part I of this series, I wrote about the struggles recent grads have had finding entry-level design jobs and what might be causing the stranglehold on the design job market.

Part II: Building New Ladders

When I met Benedict Allen, he had just finished with Portfolio Review a week earlier. That’s the big show all the design students in the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College work toward. It’s a nice event that brings out the local design community where seasoned professionals review the portfolios of the graduating students.

Allen was all smiles and relief. “I want to dabble in different aspects of design because the principles are generally the same.” He goes on to mention how he wants to start a fashion brand someday, DJ, try 3D. “I just want to test and try things and just have fun! Of course, I’ll have my graphic design job, but I don’t want that to be the end. Like when the workday ends, that’s not the end of my creativity.” He was bursting with enthusiasm.

This is the first part in a three-part series about the design talent crisis. Read Part II and Part III.

Part I: The Vanishing Bottom Rung

Erika Kim’s path to UX design represents a familiar pandemic-era pivot story, yet one that reveals deeper currents about creative work and economic necessity. Armed with a 2020 film and photography degree from UC Riverside, she found herself working gig photography—graduations, band events—when the creative industries collapsed. The work satisfied her artistic impulses but left her craving what she calls “structure and stability,” leading her to UX design. The field struck her as an ideal synthesis, “I’m creating solutions for companies. I’m working with them to figure out what they want, and then taking that creative input and trying to make something that works best for them.”

Since graduating from the interaction design program at San Diego City College a year ago, she’s had three internships and works retail part-time to pay the bills. “I’ve been in survival mode,” she admits. On paper, she’s a great candidate for any junior position. Speaking with her reveals a very thoughtful and resourceful young designer. Why hasn’t she been able to land a full-time job? What’s going on in the design job market? 

I was in London last week with my family and spotted this ad in a Tube car. With the headline “Humans Were the Beta Test,” this is for Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup peddling AI-powered “digital workers.” Specifically an AI agent that will perform sales outreach to prospects, etc.

Artisan ad as seen in London, June 2025

I’ve long left the Bay Area, but I know that the 101 highway is littered with cryptic billboards from tech companies, where the copy only makes sense to people in the tech industry, which to be fair, is a large part of the Bay Area economy. Artisan is infamous for its “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign which went up late last year. Being based in San Diego, much further south in California, I had no idea. Artisan wasn’t even on my radar.

I kind of expected it: a lot more ink was spilled on Liquid Glass—particularly on social media. In case you don’t remember, Liquid Glass is the new UI for all of Apple’s platforms. It was announced Monday at WWDC 2025, their annual developers conference.

The criticism is primarily around legibility and accessibility. Secondary reasons include aesthetics and power usage to animate all the bubbles.

I remember two years ago, when my CEO at the startup I worked for at the time, said that no VC investments were being made unless it had to do with AI. I thought AI was overhyped, and that the media frenzy over it couldn’t get any crazier. I was wrong.

Looking at Google Trends data, interest in AI has doubled in the last 24 months. And I don’t think it’s hit its plateau yet.

Four months into his role as interim CEO, Tom Conrad has been remarkably candid about Sonos’ catastrophic app launch. In recent interviews with WIRED and The Verge, he’s taken personal responsibility—even though he wasn’t at the helm, just on the board—acknowledged deep organizational problems, and outlined the company’s path forward.

But while Conrad is addressing more than many expected, some key details remain off-limits.

Product design is going to change profoundly within the next 24 months. If the AI 2027 report is any indication, the capabilities of the foundational models will grow exponentially, and with them—I believe—will the abilities of design tools.

The AI foundational model capabilities will grow exponentially and AI-enabled design tools will benefit from the algorithmic advances. Sources: AI 2027 scenario & Roger Wong

The TL;DR of the report is this: companies like OpenAI have more advanced AI agent models that are building the next-generation models. Once those are built, the previous generation is tested for safety and released to the public. And the cycle continues. Currently, and for the next year or two, these companies are focusing their advanced models on creating superhuman coders. This compounds and will result in artificial general intelligence, or AGI, within the next five years. 

In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”

A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”

The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.

What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.

My wife and I are big movie lovers. Every year, between January and March, we race to see all the Oscar-nominated films. We watched A Complete Unknown last night and The Brutalist a couple of weeks ago. The latter far outshines the former as a movie, but both share a common theme: the creative obsession.

Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan, is up at all hours writing songs. Sometimes he rushes into his apartment, stumbling over furniture, holding onto an idea in his head, hoping it won’t flitter away, and frantically writes it down. Adrien Brody, playing a visionary architect named László Tóth, paces compulsively around the construction site of his latest project, ensuring everything is built to perfection. He even admonishes and tries to fire a young worker who’s just goofing off.

There is an all-consuming something that takes over your thoughts and actions when you’re in the groove willing something to life, whether it’s a song, building, design, or program. I’ve been feeling this way lately with a side project I’ve been working on off-hours—a web application that’s been consuming my thoughts for about a week. A lot of this obsession is a tenacity around solving a problem. For me, it has been fixing bugs in code—using Cursor AI. But in the past, it has been figuring out how to combine two disparate ideas into a succinct logo, or working out a user flow. These ideas come at all hours. Often for me it’s in the shower but sometimes right before going to sleep. Sometimes my brain works on a solution while I sleep, and I wake up with a revelation about a problem that seemed insurmountable the night before. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

For my mental health, I’ve been purposely avoiding the news since the 2024 presidential election. I mean, I haven’t been trying hard, but I’m certainly no longer the political news junkie I was leading up to November 5. However, I get exposed via two vectors: headlines in the New York Times app on my way to the Wordle and Connections, and on social media, specifically Threads and Bluesky. So, I’m not entirely oblivious.

As I slowly dip my toe into the news cycle, I have been reading and listening to a few long-form pieces. The first is the story of how Hitler destroyed the German democracy legally using the constitution in just 53 days.

In the early 2000s to the mid-oughts, every designer I knew wanted to be featured on the FWA, a showcase for cutting-edge web design. While many of the earlier sites were Flash-based, it’s also where I discovered the first uses of parallax, Paper.js, and Three.js. Back then, websites were meant to be explored and their interfaces discovered.

A grid of winners from The FWA in 2009. Source: Rob Ford.

One of my favorite sites of that era was Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, where users could type free text into a chat box to command a man dressed in a chicken suit. In a full circle moment that perfectly captures where we are today, we now type commands into chat boxes to tell AI what to do.

Cold Arrival

It’s 11 degrees Fahrenheit as I step off the plane at Toronto Pearson International. I’ve been up for nearly 24 hours and am about to trek through the gates toward Canadian immigration. Getting here from 73-degree San Diego was a significant challenge. What would be a quick five-hour direct flight turned into a five-hour delay, then cancelation, and then a rebook onto a red-eye through SFO. And I can’t sleep on planes. On top of that, I’ve been recovering from the flu, so my head was still very congested, and the descents from two flights were excruciating.

After going for a short secondary screening for who knows what reason—the second Canada Border Services Agency officer didn’t know either—I make my way to the UP Express train and head towards downtown Toronto. Before reaching Union Station, the train stops at the Weston and Bloor stations, picking up scarfed, ear-muffed, and shivering commuters. I disembark at Union Station, find my way to the PATH, and headed towards the CN Tower. I’m staying at the Marriott attached to the Blue Jays stadium.

Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, in their annual The State of UX report:

Despite all the transformations we’re seeing, one thing we know for sure: Design (the craft, the discipline, the science) is not going anywhere. While Design only became a more official profession in the 19th century, the study of how craft can be applied to improve business dates back to the early 1800s. Since then, only one thing has remained constant: how Design is done is completely different decade after decade. The change we’re discussing here is not a revolution, just an evolution. It’s simply a change in how many roles will be needed and what they will entail. “Digital systems, not people, will do much of the craft of (screen-level) interaction design.”

Scary words for the UX design profession as it stares down the coming onslaught of AI. Our industry isn’t the first one to face this—copywriters, illustrators, and stock photographers have already been facing the disruption of their respective crafts. All of these creatives have had to pivot quickly. And so will we.

I recently read a post on Threads in which Stephen Beck wonders why the New York Times needs an external advertising agency when it already has an award-winning agency in-house. You can read the back-and-forth in the thread itself, but I think Nina Alter’s reply sums it up best:

Creatives need to be free to bring new perspectives. Drink other kool-aid. That’s much of the value in agencies.

This all got me thinking about the differences between working in-house and at an agency. As a designer who began my career bouncing from agency to agency before settling in-house, I’ve seen both sides of this debate firsthand. Many of my designer friends have had similar paths. So, I’ll speak from that perspective. It’s biased and probably a little outdated since I haven’t worked at an agency since 2020, and that was one that I owned.

I was floored. Under immense pressure, under the highest of expectations, Kamala outperformed, delivering way beyond what anyone anticipated. Her biography is what makes her relatable. It illustrates her values. And her story is the American story.

When she talked about her immigrant parents, I thought about mine. My dad was a cook and a taxicab driver. My mother worked as a waitress. My sister and I grew up squarely in the middle class, in a rented flat in the San Francisco working class neighborhood of North Beach (yes, back in the 1970s and '80s it was working class). Our school, though a private parochial one, was also attended by students from around the neighborhood, also mostly kids of immigrants. Education was a top value in our immigrant families and they made sacrifices to pay for our schooling.

Because my mother and father worked so hard, my parents taught my sister and me the importance of dedication and self-determination. Money was always a worry in our household. It was an unspoken presence permeating all decisions. We definitely grew up with a scarcity mindset.

After years of rumors and speculation, Apple finally unveiled their virtual reality headset yesterday in a classic “One more thing…” segment in their keynote. Dubbed Apple Vision Pro, this mixed reality device is perfectly Apple: it’s human-first. It’s centered around extending human productivity, communication, and connection. It’s telling that one of the core problems they solved was the VR isolation problem. That’s the issue where users of VR are isolated from the real world; they don’t know what’s going on, and the world around them sees that. Insert meme of oblivious VR user here. Instead, with the Vision Pro, when someone else is nearby, they show through the interface. Additionally, an outward-facing display shows the user’s eyes. These two innovative features help maintain the basic human behavior of acknowledging each other’s presence in the same room.

I know a thing or two about VR and building practical apps for VR. A few years ago, in the mid-2010s, I cofounded a VR startup called Transported. My cofounders and I created a platform for touring real estate in VR. We wanted to help homebuyers and apartment hunters more efficiently shop for real estate. Instead of zigzagging across town running to multiple open houses on a Sunday afternoon, you could tour 20 homes in an hour on your living room couch. Of course, “virtual tours” existed already. There were cheap panoramas on real estate websites and “dollhouse” tours created using Matterport technology. Our tours were immersive; you felt like you were there. It was the future! There were several problems to solve, including 360° photography, stitching rooms together, building a player, and then most importantly, distribution. Back in 2015–2016, our theory was that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple would quickly make VR commonplace because they were pouring billions of R&D and marketing dollars into the space. But it turned out we were a little ahead of our time.

I can’t remember the last time I picked up a newspaper. At least ten years, maybe even twenty. But this morning, as I walked into my hotel restaurant for breakfast, they had one copy of today’s San Francisco Chronicle left. And I grabbed it.

I used to read the Chronicle all the time. Whether I bought it for a quarter from one of the hundreds of yellow and blue machines that dotted every corner in downtown San Francisco, from a newsstand sold by someone wearing fingerless gloves but whose fingertips were black with ink, or from somewhere within ten feet of my front door depending on the paperboy’s aim that morning.

I rarely read each story in every edition of the Chronicle. Instead, I had some favorite sections. I’d usually read the main stories in the A section and then US news. The B section was world news, which I often skipped. Usually, a few stories in the C section, Business, piqued my interest. And I always read through the Datebook, the paper’s entertainment and lifestyle area.

I recently came across Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by former software engineer Ken Kocienda. It was in one of my social media feeds, and since I’m interested in Apple, the creative process, and having been at Apple at that time, I was curious.

I began reading the book Saturday evening and finished it Tuesday morning. It was an easy read, as I was already familiar with many of the players mentioned and nearly all the technologies and concepts. But, I’d done something I hadn’t done in a long time—I devoured the book.

Ultimately this book gave more color and structure to what I’d already known, based on my time at Apple and my own interactions with him. Steve Jobs was the ultimate creative director who could inspire, choose, and direct work. 

I was feeling emotionally off today and I wasn’t quite sure until I realized that the events of January 6, 2021 deeply affected me as a patriotic American. At the time, I thought it was the culmination—the last act of a power-hungry, extremist wing of our country. Donald Trump and his deliberate peddlers of lies and misinformation had incubated and unleashed this insurrectionist mob against the Capitol, against the United States.

But I was wrong. It was not the last act. It did not end. In fact, it continued to fester. One year on, as much as 21 million Americans think that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, and that Trump should be restored via violent means. That’s more than the population of New York state (19.3M)!

I struggle to understand what caused this, much less what the solution might be. Yes, the obvious cause was the Big Lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election. With the Republican Party constantly attacking the legitimacy of a free and fair election for months, it worked its base up into a frothy frenzy. But what caused that? Power? Maybe, but why? Why are they so hell-bent on holding onto power as to destroy our democracy?