Most software today is concieved by humans. Even when it contains variations like different checkout flows by country, onboarding paths by customer type, consent screens by regulation, or payment options by market, those variations are anticipated, designed, tested and maintained by people. Adaptive software changes that relationship.
The calls for Keir Starmer to resign are understandable. Labour has taken a serious beating in the local elections. The government looks exhausted less than two years after winning a landslide. Reform is pulling voters away on the right. The Greens are pulling voters away on the left. Starmer’s personal authority is badly damaged, and recent polling suggests the electorate has fragmented in a way that should terrify anybody hoping for a straightforward Labour recovery.
So the obvious response is to change the leader. I think that would be a mistake.
There’s a familiar libertarian story about Europe: too much bureaucracy, too many regulations, too many worker protections, too much privacy law, and too many rules about what companies can and can’t do. This, we’re told, is why Europe doesn’t produce as many world-beating technology companies as the US.
A friend recently sent me a post from "the bad place" that broke product designers down into four types.
The language was intentionally provocative. Some of it was needlessly mean-spirited. In places it was openly contemptuous. Certain designers were described as effectively worthless. Others were framed as self-important, disingenuous, or fundamentally unserious about the business.
And yet, beneath the aggression, I think there is a real, painful truth in there.
I don't think that AI is going to "kill design" in the next few years (as some pundits are claiming). However I do think we reached "peak designer" several years ago, and the volume of designers needed over the next 10 years will be less than the previous 10. (This is as much to do with the rise of design systems leading to the industrialisation of design, and the power shift of decision making, as it is AI)
There was a time when design was slow, considered and informed. This was not simply a matter of culture or temperament. It reflected the economics of software at the time. Development used to be slow, expensive and risky. If you built the wrong thing, the cost of fixing it could be enormous, so product teams created space to think before they made.