Leonardo De La Rocha describes his takeaways from Design Futures Assembly, a remarkable gathering of the tech industry’s top design leaders. It was a small-ish invite list, just 60 of us including Veronika and me. The heads of design were there from companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft AI, Google Search, Adobe, Figma, Expedia, Pinterest, Meta, and on and on.
Jeff Veen brought this group together to consider nothing less than the future of design: how AI is changing the tools, process, and material of our work. The conversations were frank, vulnerable, and curious.
Leonardo does a terrific job of synthesizing the themes that came out of the day, and I recommend that you take a moment to digest his piece. And please forgive me for indulging in this passage about our book Sentient Design, advance copies of which were floating around the room:
There was a book that surfaced in the corners of conversation throughout the day, and which I have ordered enough copies of to embarrass anyone in my immediate professional vicinity. It is called Sentient Design, by Josh Clark [and Veronika Kindred], and the framing it offers (treating AI as a design material rather than as a feature or a tool) is the most useful conceptual move I have seen for this moment. I will not summarize it here, because I would rather you read it. I will say that the design leaders in the room who had already read it carried themselves slightly differently from the design leaders who had not, in a way that was hard to put my finger on at the time and that I think I now understand. They had a vocabulary. The rest of us were borrowing one as we went.
This passage makes my heart sing because it perfectly encapsulates why we wrote the book in the first place: to shift perspective, to inspire action, and to provide shared context and language. To find the book and our ideas doing that work in a room of this caliber was incredibly heartening. Thank you, Leonardo.
