A former colleague of mine, designer Evan Sornstein wrote a wonderful piece on LinkedIn applying Buddhist principles to design.

Buddhism begins with the recognition that life is marked by impermanence, suffering, and non-self. These aren’t abstract doctrines — they are observations about how the world actually works. Over centuries, these ideas contributed to Japanese aesthetics: wabi-sabi (imperfection), ma (meaningful emptiness), yo no bi (beauty in usefulness), the humility of the shokunin, and the care of omotenashi. What emerges is not a set of rules, but an extraordinary perspective: beauty is inseparable from impermanence; usefulness is inseparable from dignity; care is inseparable from design. In an age when our digital products too often prioritize stickiness and metrics over humanity, these ideas offer a different path. They remind us that design is not about control or cleverness — it’s about connection, trust, and care.

The following eight principles aren’t new “methods” or “laws,” but reflections of this lineage, reframed for product design — though they apply to nearly any creative practice. They are invitations to design with the same attention, humility, and compassion that Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics have carried for centuries.

There’s a famous quote that Henry Ford allegedly said:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Anton Sten argues that a lot of people use this quote to justify not doing any user (or market) research:

This quote gets thrown around constantly—usually by someone who wants to justify ignoring user research entirely. The logic goes: users don’t know what they want, so why bother asking them?

I think he’s right. The question to ask users isn’t “What should we build?” but “What are your biggest pain points?”

Good research uncovers problems. It reveals pain points. It helps you understand what people are actually struggling with in their daily lives. What they’re working around. What they’ve given up on entirely.

Users aren’t supposed to design your product. That’s your job. But they’re the only ones who can tell you what’s actually broken in their world.

When you focus on understanding problems instead of collecting feature requests, you stop getting “faster horses” and start hearing real needs.

It’s always interesting to hear how others think about the design process from the outside. Eli Woolery and Aaron Walter interview creativity researcher and author Keith Sawyer to learn about what he’s found to be true after interviewing hundreds of art and design professors and students over a decade for his new book:

The creativity doesn’t come at the beginning. You don’t start by having a brilliant insight. You just dive into the process. And then as you’re engaging in the process, the ideas emerge.

Sawyer emphasizes that art and design schools are not just teaching students how to create, but how to “see.” He found that many professors believe students already possess creativity, but the role of art and design school is to help them realize and develop that potential by teaching them to observe, critique, and reflect more deeply on their own work.

When I interviewed these artists and designers, I would say, how are you teaching students how to create? And everyone was quite uncomfortable with that question. A lot of them would say, we’re not teaching students how to create. Or they’ll say something like, the students are already creative. We’re teaching them how to realize the potential they have as creatives.

Sawyer notes that the hardest thing for students to learn is how to see their own work—that is, to understand what they have actually made rather than sticking rigidly to their original idea.

When we talk about learning to see, you’re talking about learning to see yourself. The hardest thing to teach a student is how to see their own work, to see something that they’ve just generated. Because these studio classes, students have opportunities to share their work in interim stages along the way. You don’t go off and work for two weeks or four weeks and then bring back in the finished product. You bring in your interim and you get a lot of feedback and comments on it.

And what the professors tell me is these 18, 19, and 20-year-olds, they don’t realize what they put on the canvas. Or if they’re a graphic designer, they don’t realize what it is that they’ve generated. A lot of times, they’ll think they’ve done a certain thing. So they have this kind of linear approach—model of the creative process where I’m going to have an idea and I’m going to execute it so they’ll start with their idea and they’ll execute it. They’ll think that what they put on the canvas is their original idea, but in a lot of cases, it’s not. They can’t see what they’ve done themselves, so that’s kind of powerful how do you teach someone that what you put on the canvas isn’t what you say you’re doing.

You can’t just tell them, “Hey, you’re wrong. Let me tell you what you’ve done.” You have to lead someone through that. You have to walk them through it.

One way you do it is you put students in the classroom together and then have them comment on other students’ work so they will be on the other side. And they’ll see another student. talking about what they’ve done and not really describing what’s really on the canvas.

So I think that’s the hardest thing about learning to see is learning to see yourself, learning to see your own work.

I think that’s the power of art and design school, this studio learning environment. I’m biased, of course, because that’s how I learned. Those who are self-taught or have gone through bootcamps miss out on a lot of this experience. The other thing the design school environment teaches is how to give and take critiques. It’s about the work, not you.

When I read this, I thought to myself, “Geez, this is what a designer does.” I think there is a lot of overlap between what we do as product designers and what product managers do. One critical one—in my opinion, and why we’re calling ourselves product designers—is product sense. Product sense is the skill of finding real user needs and creating solutions that have impact.

So I think people can read this with two lenses:

• If you’re a designer who executes the assignments you’re given, jumping into Figma right away, read this to be more well-rounded and understand the why of what you’re making.
• If you’re a designer who spends 80% of your time questioning everything and defining the problem, and only 20% of your time in Figma, read this to see how much overlap you actually have with a PM.

BTW, if you’re in the first bucket, I highly encourage you to gain the skills necessary to migrate to the second bucket.

While designers often stay on top of visual design trends or the latest best practices from NNG, Jules Walter suggests an even wider aperture. Writing in Lenny’s Newsletter:

Another practice for developing creativity is to spend time learning about emerging trends in technology, society, and regulations. Changes in the industry create opportunities for launching new products that can address user needs in new ways. As a PM, you want to understand what’s possible in your domain in order to come up with creative solutions.

This post from Carly Ayres breaks down a beef between Michael Roberson (developer of an AI-enabled moodboard tool) and Elizabeth Goodspeed (writer and designer, oft-linked on this blog) and explores ragebait, putting in the reps as a junior, and designers as influencers.

Tweet from Michael Roberson

The tweet earned 30,000 views, but only about 20 likes. “That ratio was pretty jarring,” [Roberson] said. Still, the strategy felt legible. “When I post things like, ‘if you don’t do X, you’re not going to make it,’ obviously, I don’t think that. These tools aren’t really capable of replacing designers just yet. It’s really easy to get views baiting and fear-mongering.”

Much like the provocative Artisan campaign, I think this is a net negative for the brand. Pretty sure I won’t be trying out Moodboard AI anytime soon, ngl.

But stepping back from the internet beef, Ayres argues that it’s a philosophical difference about the role friction in the creative process.

Michael’s experience mirrors that of many young designers: brand audits felt like busywork during his Landor internship. “That process was super boring,” he told me. “I wasn’t learning much by copy-pasting things into a deck.” His tool promises to cut through that inefficiency, letting teams reach visual consensus faster and spend more time on execution.

Young Michael, the process is the point! Without doing this boring stuff, by automating it with AI, how are you going to learn? This is but one facet of the whole discussion around expertise, wisdom, and the design talent crisis.

Goodspeed agrees with me:

Elizabeth sees it differently. “What’s interesting to me,” Elizabeth noted, “is how many people are now entering this space without a personal understanding of how the process of designing something actually works.” For her, that grunt work was formative. “The friction is the process,” she explained. “That’s how you form your point of view. You can’t just slap seven images on a board. You’re forced to think: What’s relevant? How do I organize this and communicate it clearly?”

Ultimately, the saddest point that Ayres makes—and noted by my friend Eric Heiman—is this:

When you’re young, online, and trying to get a project off the ground, caring about distribution is the difference between a hobby and a company. But there’s a cost. The more you perform expertise, the less you develop it. The more you optimize for engagement, the more you risk flattening what gave the work meaning in the first place. In a world where being known matters more than knowing, the incentives point toward performance over practice. And we all become performers in someone else’s growth strategy.

…Because when distribution matters more than craft, you don’t become a designer by designing. You become a designer by being known as one. That’s the game now.

In a fascinating thread about designing a typeface in Illustrator versus a font editor, renowned typographer Jonathan Hoefler lets us peek behind the curtains.

But moreover, the reason not to design typefaces in a drawing program is that there, you’re drawing letters in isolation, without regard to their neighbors. Here’s the lowercase G from first corner of the HTF Didot family, its 96pt Light Roman master, which I drew toward the end of 1991. (Be gentle; I was 21.) I remember being delighted by the results, no doubt focussing on that delicate ear, etc. But really, this is only half the picture, because it’s impossible to know if this letter works, unless you give it context. Here it is between lowercase Ns, which establish a typographic ‘control’ for an alphabet’s weight, width, proportions, contrast, fit, and rhythm. Is this still a good G? Should the upper bowl maybe move left a little? How do we feel about its weight, compared to its neighbors? Is the ear too dainty?

Ben Davies-Romano argues that the AI chat box is our new design interface:

Every interaction with a large language model starts the same way: a blinking cursor in a blank text field. That unassuming box is more than an input — it’s the interface between our human intent and the model’s vast, probabilistic brain.

This is where the translation happens. We pour in the nuance, constraints, and context of our ideas; the model converts them into an output. Whether it’s generating words, an image, a video sequence, or an interactive prototype, every request passes through this narrow bridge.

It’s the highest-stakes, lowest-fidelity design surface I’ve ever worked with: a single field that stands between human creativity and an engine capable of reshaping it into almost any form, albeit with all the necessary guidance and expertise applied.

In other words, don’t just say “Make it better,” but guide the AI instead.

That’s why a vague, lazy prompt, like “make it better”, is the design equivalent of telling a junior designer “make it intuitive” and walking away. You’ll get something generic, safe, and soulless, not because the AI “missed the brief,” but because there was no brief.

Without clear stakes, a defined brand voice, and rich context, the system will fill in the blanks with its default, most average response. And “average” is rarely what design is aiming for.

And he makes a point that designers should be leading the charge on showing others what generative AI can do:

In the age of AI, it shouldn’t be everyone designing, per say. It should be designers using AI as an extension of our craft. Bringing our empathy, our user focus, our discipline of iteration, and our instinct for when to stop generating and start refining. AI is not a replacement for that process; it’s a multiplier when guided by skilled hands.

So, let’s lead. Let’s show that the real power of AI isn’t in what it can generate, but in how we guide it — making it safer, sharper, and more human. Let’s replace the fear and the gimmicks with clarity, empathy, and intentionality.

The blank prompt is our new canvas. And friends, we need to be all over it.

My former colleague from Organic, Christian Haas—now ECD at YouTube—has been experimenting with AI video generation recently. He’s made a trilogy of short films called AI Jobs.

You can watch part one above 👆, but don’t sleep on parts two and three.

Haas put together a “behind the scenes” article explaining his process. It’s fascinating and I’ll want to play with video generation myself at some point.

I started with a rough script, but that was just the beginning of a conversation. As I started generating images, I was casting my characters and scouting locations in real time. What the model produced would inspire new ideas, and I would rewrite the script on the fly. This iterative loop continued through every stage. Decisions weren’t locked in; they were fluid. A discovery made during the edit could send me right back to “production” to scout a new location, cast a new character and generate a new shot. This flexibility is one of the most powerful aspects of creating with Gen AI.

It’s a wonderful observation Haas has made—the workflow enabled by gen AI allows for more creative freedom. In any creative endeavor where the production of the final thing is really involved and utilizes a significant amount of labor and materials, be it a film, commercial photography, or software, planning is a huge part. We work hard to spec out everything before a crew of a hundred shows up on set or a team of highly-paid engineers start coding. With gen AI, as shown here with Google’s Veo 3, you have more room for exploration and expression.

UPDATE: I came across this post from Rory Flynn after I published this. He uses diagrams to direct Veo 3.

Coincidentally, I was considering adding a service designer to my headcount plan when this article came across my feeds. Perfect timing. It’s hard to imagine that service design as a discipline is so young—only since 2012 according to the author.

Joe Foley, writing in Creative Bloq:

As a discipline, service design is still relatively new. A course at the Royal College of Art in London (RCA) only began in 2012 and many people haven’t even heard of the term. But that’s starting to change.

He interviews designer Clive Grinyer, whose new book on service design has just come out. He was co-founder of the design consultancy Tangerine, Director of Design and Innovation for the UK Design Council, and Head of Service Design at the Royal College of Art.

Griner:

Great service design is often invisible as it solves problems and removes barriers, which isn’t necessarily noticed as much as a shiny new product. The example of GDS (Government Digital Service) redesigning every government department from a service design perspective and removing many frustrating and laborious aspects of public life from taxing a car to getting a passport, is one of the best.

The key difference between service design and UX is that it’s end product is not something on a screen:

But service design is not just the experience we have through the glass of a screen or a device: it’s designed from the starting point of the broader objective and may include many other channels and touchpoints. I think it was Colin Burns who said a product is just a portal to a service.

In other words, if you open the aperture of what user experience means, and take on the challenge of designing real-world processes, flows, and interaction—that is service design.

Stephanie Tyler, in a great essay about remembering what we do as designers:

In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer ‘can it be made?’ but ‘is it worth making?’ The frontier isn’t volume—it’s discernment. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.

And this is my favorite passage, because this is how I think about this blog and my newsletter.

There will always be creators. But the ones who stand out in this era are also curators. People who filter their worldview so cleanly that you want to see through their eyes. People who make you feel sharper just by paying attention to what they pay attention to.

Curation is care. It says: I thought about this. I chose it. I didn’t just repost it. I didn’t just regurgitate the trending take. I took the time to decide what was worth passing on.

That’s rare now. And because it’s rare, it’s valuable.

We think of curation as a luxury. But it’s actually maintenance. It’s how you care for your mind. Your attention. Your boundaries.

This blog represents my current worldview, what I’m interested in and exploring. What I’m thinking about now.

Speaking of prompt engineering, apparently, there’s a new kind in town called context engineering.

Developer Philipp Schmid writes:

What is context engineering? While “prompt engineering” focuses on crafting the perfect set of instructions in a single text string, context engineering is a far broader. Let’s put it simply: “Context Engineering is the discipline of designing and building dynamic systems that provides the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time, to give a LLM everything it needs to accomplish a task.”

In a dual profile, Ben Blumenrose spotlights Phil Vander Broek—whose startup Dopt was acquired last year by Airtable—and Filip Skrzesinski—who is currently working on Subframe—in the Designer Founders newsletter.

One of the lessons Vander Broek learned was to not interview customers just to validate an idea. Interview them to get the idea first. In other words, discover the pain points:

They ran 60+ interviews in three waves. The first 20 conversations with product and growth leaders surfaced a shared pain point: driving user adoption was painfully hard, and existing tools felt bolted on. The next 20 calls helped shape a potential solution through mockups and prototypes—one engineer was so interested he volunteered for weekly co-design sessions. A final batch of 20 calls confirmed their ideal customer was engineers, not PMs.

As for Skrzesinski, he’s learning that being a startup founder isn’t about building the product—it’s about building a business:

But here’s Filip’s counterintuitive advice: “Don’t start a company because you love designing products. Do it in spite of that.”

“You won’t be designing in the traditional sense—you’ll be designing the company’s DNA,” he explains. “It’s the invisible work: how you organize, how you think, how you make decisions. How it feels to work there, to use what you’re making, to believe in it.”

My family and I are going on vacation, and I thought it might be great to share this design summer reading list from Design Better. For me, I’ll be picking up Nonlinear by Kevin Bethune. It looks great.

Brian Balfour, writing for the Reforge blog:

Speed isn’t just about shipping faster, it’s about accelerating your entire learning metabolism. The critical metric isn’t feature velocity but rather your speed through the complete Insight → Act → Learn loop. This distinction separates products that compound advantages from those that compound technical debt.

The point being that now with AI, product teams are shipping faster. And those who aren’t might get lapped (to use an F1 phrase).

I’ve been very interested in finding tools to close the design-to-code gap. Martina Sartor writing in UX Planet articulates why that is so important:

After fifteen years hopping between design systems, dev stand-ups, and last-minute launch scrambles, I’m convinced design-to-dev QA is still one of the most underestimated bottlenecks in digital product work. We pour weeks into meticulous Figma files, yet the last mile between mock-up and production code keeps tripping us up.

This is an honest autopsy of why QA hurts and how teams can start healing it — today — without buying more software (though new approaches are brewing).

In the early days of computing, it was easy for one person to author a complete program. Nowadays, because the software we create is so complex, we need teams.

Gaurav Sinha writing for UX Planet:

The faster you accept that they’re not going to change their communication style, the faster you can focus on what actually works — learning to decode what they’re really telling you. Because buried in all that technical jargon is usually something pretty useful for design decisions.

It’s a fun piece on learning how to speak engineer.

When you’re building a SaaS app, I believe it’s important to understand the building blocks, or objects, in your app. What are they? How do they relate to each other? Should those relationships be peer-to-peer or parent-child? Early in my tenure at BuildOps, I mentioned this way of thinking to one of my designers and they pointed me to Object-Oriented UX (OOUX), a methodology pioneered by Sophia Prater.

Mateusz Litarowicz writes:

Object-Oriented UX is a way of thinking about design, introduced and popularized by Sophia Prater. It assumes that instead of starting with specific screens or user flows, we begin by identifying the objects that should exist in the system, their attributes, the relationships between them, and the actions users can take on those objects. Only after this stage do we move on to designing user flows and wireframes.

To be honest, I’d long thought this way, ever since my days at Razorfish when our UX director Marisa Gallagher talked about how every website is built around a core unit, or object. At the time, she used Netflix as an example—it’s centered around the movie. CRMs, CMSes, LMSes, etc. are all object-based.

Anyway, I think Litarowicz writes a great primer for OOUX. The other—and frankly more important, IMHO—advantage to thinking this way, especially for a web app, is because your developers think this way too.

Apologies for linking to a lot of Christopher Butler recently, but I really love his thinking about design. This time, Butler reminds us about the importance of structure and how the proto-graphic designers we studied in art history, like Piet Mondrian, mastered it.

A well-composed photograph communicates something essential even before we register its subject. A thoughtfully designed page layout feels right before we read a single word. There’s something happening in that first moment of perception that transcends the individual elements being composed.

My favorite passage in his essay begins here:

Perhaps we “read” composition the way we read text — our brains processing visual structure as a kind of fundamental grammar that exists beneath conscious recognition. Just as we don’t typically think about parsing sentences into subjects and predicates while reading, we don’t consciously deconstruct the golden ratio or rule of thirds while looking at an image. Yet in both cases, our minds are translating structure into meaning.

The next eight short paragraphs build on this idea and crescendo with this banger:

In recognizing composition as this fundamental visual language, we begin to understand why good design works at such a deep level. It’s not just about making things look nice — it’s about speaking fluently in a language that predates words, tapping into patterns of perception that feel as natural as breathing.

Composition is a fundamental visual language. I had never thought of it that way and yet it feels right.

The whole thing is great. Please go read it.

I am a huge Severance fan (as evidenced by my Outie fact generator). Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the “Lumon Listens” animated sequence from the premiere of season two came together.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by how television shows and movies are made. I remember the specials ABC broadcast about the making of The Empire Strikes Back and other Lucasfilm movies like the Indiana Jones series. More recently—especially with the advent of podcasts—I’ve loved listening to how show runners think about writing their shows. For example, as soon as an episode of Battlestar Galactica aired, I would rewatch it with Ronald D. Moore’s commentary. These days, I‘m really enjoying the official The Last of Us podcast because it features commentary from both Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann.

Anyway, thinking about personas as characters from TV shows and movies and using screenwriting techniques is right up my alley. Laia Tremosa for the IxDF:

Hollywood spends millions to bring characters to life. UX design teams sometimes spend weeks… only to make personas no one ever looks at again. So don’t aim for personas that look impressive in a slide deck. Aim for personas that get used—in design reviews, product decisions, and testing plans.

Be the screenwriter. Be the director. Be the casting agent.

Dan Maccarone:

If users don’t trust the systems we design, that’s not a PM problem. It’s a design failure. And if we don’t fix it, someone else will, probably with worse instincts, fewer ethics, and a much louder bullhorn.

UX is supposed to be the human layer of technology. It’s also supposed to be the place where strategy and empathy actually talk to each other. If we can’t reclaim that space, can’t build products people understand, trust, and want to return to, then what exactly are we doing here?

It is a long read but well worth it.

Elliot Vredenburg writing for Fast Company:

Which is why creative direction matters more now than ever. If designers are no longer the makers, they must become the orchestrators. This isn’t without precedent. Rick Rubin doesn’t read music or play instruments. Virgil Abloh was more interested in recontextualizing than inventing. Their value lies not in original execution but in framing, curation, and translation. The same is true now for brand designers. Creative direction is about synthesizing abstract ideas into aesthetic systems—shaping meaning through how things feel, not just how they look.

Haiyan Zhang gives us another way of thinking about AI—as material, like clay, paint, or plywood—instead of a tool. I like that because it invites exploration:

When we treat AI as a design material, prototyping becomes less about refining known ideas — and more about expanding the space of what’s possible. It’s messy, surprising, sometimes frustrating — but that’s what working with any material feels like in its early days.

Clay resists. Wood splinters. AI misinterprets.

But in that material friction, design happens.

The challenge ahead isn’t just to use AI more efficiently — it’s to foster a culture of design experimentation around it. Like any great material, AI won’t reveal its potential through control, but through play, feedback, and iteration.

I love this metaphor. It’s freeing.