Dear friends,

What is the most important skill for the designer of the future?

It may not be typography. It may not be software. It may not even be the ability to generate brilliant ideas.

It may be the ability to make another person believe in them.

As AI makes the production of competent creative work faster, cheaper and increasingly accessible, the designer's value begins to move somewhere else. Towards judgement. Towards persuasion. Towards the ability to explain why one possibility deserves attention over another.

That means storytelling and pitching are no longer secondary professional skills. They are becoming design skills.

A designer may have only five minutes in a room to change the way somebody sees a problem. Can you make them understand what you have seen? Can you make them care? Can you hold their attention long enough for an unfamiliar idea to become imaginable?

The work does not sell itself. It never really did.

But in a world overflowing with images, concepts, presentations and generated possibilities, the ability to create meaning around an idea may become considerably more valuable than the ability to produce another polished artefact.

This also changes what we should be teaching in design schools.

Students need opportunities to stand behind their work, speak without hiding behind the presentation, explain their decisions, respond to difficult questions, read a room, tell a story and persuade another human being.

Because the designer of the future will not simply make things.

They will need to make people see differently.

I have written an article exploring this idea and what it could mean for design education.

I would love to know what you think.

Lefteris

The New Art School
Design Education Talks