Design was never the bottleneck

In Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel Solaris, a crew of scientists is stationed above an alien ocean that covers an entire planet. The ocean is vast, some sort of an entity that appears to be alive, and it is possibly intelligent (in the way that humans perceive intelligence). For decades, researchers have aimed increasingly sophisticated instruments at it while the ocean responds by producing forms and shapes that seem to mirror the scientists' own psychological interiors back at them. The researchers take this as progress, so they refine their instruments and build more elaborate frameworks. They spend years building Solaristics (the fictional scientific field dedicated to studying the mysterious, living ocean) with comprehensive and elaborate theories.

But the ocean never once responds on their terms. All human methods fail to produce genuine mutual understanding, and instead, the ocean returns something that looks like a response but functions as a reflection. The scientists are trying to study the ocean, but they ultimately are studying themselves, through an increasingly expensive and sophisticated apparatus.

I have been thinking about Lem's ocean a lot lately, because the pattern it describes keeps showing up in the way design is responding to business-as-usual, especially within our current socio-economic predicament. The more I look at the state of tech, the more I recognize a specific structure operating in two distinct ways: the way business absorbs design's attempts at strategic influence, and the way AI tools absorb designers' labor while promising to liberate it.

The first interpretation has been unfolding for over a decade with designers building operating structures (see DesignOps), maturity models, business cases, and strategic frameworks. They learned the language of stakeholders. They aligned to OKRs, mapped outcomes to revenue, and developed ROI narratives for the discipline. In return, the organization absorbed all of it. "User-centered design", once a disciplinary claim, became "customer centricity", a term owned by product and marketing with no particular debt to the people who developed the underlying initial methods. The frameworks were indeed accepted, but the institution took those design 'instruments' and returned something that looked like recognition.

In the second interpretation, AI tools are now handed to designers and knowledge workers with a specific promise: use these, expand your capacity, prove your value through output, and the organization will reciprocate with the thing you actually want. The tools absorb your effort, and they return something that feels like capability. You prompt it during lunch, during meetings, before leaving your desk, maybe even a little bit after work. What's the harm? It's just a chat interface. It mirrors your intentions back at you in a form that feels like progress. The contact you seek, the part where expanded capacity translates into professional freedom, however, never arrives. The system has its own motives, and they are indifferent to yours.

I should be clear here, that I am not suggesting that a business or AI are intelligence in any meaningful sense. Lem's ocean is useful as a metaphor because it describes a system that produces responses without comprehension. The ocean does not understand the scientists. It processes their inputs according to its own internal logic and returns outputs that the scientists misread as communication. Business does the same with design's strategic frameworks. AI does the same with user prompts. Neither is 'listening', but both are processing. The pattern Lem identified is one of absorption, and it is that pattern, not the question of intelligence, that I want to trace through the current state of the discipline.

The ocean in Lem's novel is not malicious by default, it simply operates according to its own logic, one that is fundamentally incommensurable with what the scientists are trying to achieve. The system that designers have been trying to influence for the past two decades works similarly. The business is organized around profit extraction, cost reduction, and executive control over the labor process. These are its motives, and they are not hidden if you look closely. They are visible in every org chart, professional ladder, salary range, budget cycle, headcount decision... The executives set the terms under which work is valued, and those terms are not negotiable through better frameworks or more persuasive decks.

When designers try to influence the system by learning its language, the system does what Lem's ocean does: it absorbs the input and continues operating according to its own logic. The vocabulary gets adopted, but the power structure does not move. This is not a communication failure per se, but a structural relationship (a transaction, if you may) between a class that sets the terms of work and a class that performs it. Understanding this changes the understanding of what the last decade of design professionalization actually achieved.

The design maturity model was the discipline's most sustained attempt to bridge that structural gap, and its failure is the clearest evidence that the gap cannot be bridged on the system's terms. It was a reasonable wager, nevertheless. Translate design tasks to business outcomes, demonstrate ROI, align to OKRs, and map design outcomes to revenue metrics, and the discipline would earn its seat. This is a pattern that Alan Cooper identified years ago when he argued that ROI is a manager's term, that tracking it is a manager's job, and that when managers ask practitioners about it, they are not seeking information. They are building a case against the discipline. And practitioners take the bait every time.

Any sort of pivot, like the current professional advice circulating through design leadership circles, conferences, and LinkedIn think pieces, follows the same dependency structure. Learn to decode stakeholder politics, ship work within constrained environments, influence without authority, and you will get there (somewhere). These are genuinely difficult skills. The designer who can navigate an organization that does not grant them autonomy and still produces meaningful work is doing something admirable. But the skill being developed is the skill of operating within someone else's terms. It feels like agency but functions as accommodation.

The expanding vessel

Design's position within business follows a logic that extends well beyond design. The work that designers do (labor), understood as a political-economic relation rather than a finite task list, will fill whatever vessel it is placed inside. This is a basic insight from political economy that most professional discourse actively ignores. The dominant assumption, in design and other fields of practice, is that work is a finite pool. If you can do it faster or more efficiently, you get to the end sooner, because you become efficient. You free up time for the meaningful, creative, autonomous work you actually trained to do. You get to do the design you love.

Alas, that is not how work works... Labor is unbounded. Expand the vessel through new and generative tools, through broader skill sets, through maturity frameworks that make design legible to business metrics, and the volume of expected labor expands to match. The designer who learned business strategy did not get more autonomy, they just got more strategy work. The designer who learned to code did not get more creative latitude, they are expected to code. Every new capacity becomes the new floor.

Recent large-scale research on AI adoption in the workplace confirms this dynamic with unusual clarity. Quantitative studies covering hundreds of thousands of workers across more than a thousand employers show that AI intensifies activity across nearly every work category. Time spent on email, messaging, and administrative tools more than doubles. Focused, uninterrupted work, the kind required for complex problem-solving and creative production, and the actual work that brings value to a company, declines. Qualitative research embedded inside technology companies for months at a time finds the same pattern: workers take on broader scope, work at faster pace, and extend work into more hours of the day. The conversational interface of AI tools softens the boundary between work and non-work until prompting during lunch and evenings becomes habitual and downtime stops feeling restorative.

What makes this legible as a systemic condition rather than a professional grievance is the way it connects to the broader logic of contemporary capitalism. Ajay Singh Chaudhary's analysis of what he calls the extractive circuit describes a global system in which, at every node, inputs are extracted and exhausted: ecological, political, social, individual. Value is produced through speed, the shifting of risk to whatever actor is structurally least able to absorb it, and the transformation of every moment of life into something productive and profitable.

The white-collar worker (the congitariat - see designer, developer, etc) in this system works harder and longer to maintain what Chaudhary describes an artificially futile level of production. Their real wages have stagnated while their lifestyle is supported by an ever-increasing financialized debt. They must continuously innovate and diversify their "human capital". The services and technologies presented as making their life easier are facilitating the conditions that make their life harder, shifting time and energy to the needs of a system that creates the very crises these services claim to resolve.

This is the tech worker being told to adopt and leverage this moment with their skills. It is the designer absorbing the cognitive load of AI-generated outputs that need review, correction, and contextualization. It is the developer whose expanded remit now includes work that might previously have justified additional headcount. Research on AI adoption documents this precisely: as workers use AI to take on tasks outside their formal role, engineers end up spending increasing time reviewing and coaching colleagues who are producing AI-assisted work they do not fully understand. The technology generates a feeling of individual empowerment while producing deeper informal dependence. You feel more capable, yet you are truly more depending than ever.

Nonexistent-yet structures

Every serious study of AI's effects on work arrives at the same impasse. The empirical findings point clearly toward intensification, expanded scope without expanded autonomy, cognitive overload, erosion of focused work, and blurred boundaries between work and rest. But the recommended responses never follow the findings to their conclusion. The researchers propose formal "AI practices", sets of norms and protocols like decision pauses, or no-prompting zones in the cafeteria. These recommendations present the problem as inevitability while being prevented from naming its cause. The conclusion that would follow from the analysis, that the integration of these tools under existing conditions is producing the opposite of what was promised, is inadmissible within the institutional frame that commissions the analysis.

Design leadership discourse operates under the same constraint. The analysis can get remarkably close to identifying the structural problem. It can document the absorption of design's strategic vocabulary by business. It can acknowledge that influence without authority is a precarious and exhausting mode of professional existence. It can observe that designers are burning out and leaving. But it cannot follow these observations to the conclusion they demand, which is that the institutional arrangements within which design operates are configured to extract design's value while withholding design's autonomy and authority, and that no amount of individual skill development will change the configuration.

The golden path, the right ratio of AI to human work, the correct leverage strategy, the optimal maturity framework, they are all searches for a way to make the existing arrangement produce outcomes that are levees built against an invisible source we never get to examine.

Design's actual disciplinary power is the capacity to imagine something that does not yet exist and to make it concrete. It's a change mechanism. It is a way of intervening in the world by proposing that the world could be organized differently. That capacity has been redirected toward making existing products marginally more usable, or translating business requirements into interface decisions, or proving and re-proving value to organizations that have already decided what design is worth in the first place.

The essay so far has argued that existing institutions cannot be reformed into granting design autonomy because they are configured to do the opposite. The logical next step is not to keep refining strategies for influencing those institutions, but to build new ones. This is not as dramatic as it sounds, because the history of professions gaining autonomy is a history of building institutional infrastructure outside the organizations that employ them. Professional autonomy was not primarily a managerial gift, it was rather historically constructed through self-governing institutions that professions organized to control training, licensing, ethics, and authority (agency). Employers may have determined workload, budgets, and reporting lines, but they usually inherited the profession’s legitimacy frameworks rather than authored them.

Design skipped this step. It went directly from craft to corporate employment without building the intermediary structures that would have given the discipline some form of independent standing. Design lacked the institutional infrastructure that traditionally anchors professional autonomy, so corporate-facing frameworks like maturity models tried to earn legitimacy within employers’ terms instead of establishing a separate disciplinary frame. In that sense, they addressed recognition, not sovereignty. They were treating the symptom.

What would it mean to contest this framing now? Not through individual acts of resistance or career pivots, but through the deliberate construction of spaces where design's terms of reference are set by practitioners rather than by the organizations that purchase their labor? This could take many forms. Cooperative studios where designers own their own conditions of work. Research collectives that produce knowledge about design's material conditions rather than business cases for design's existence. Educational spaces that prepare practitioners to build alternative organizational forms rather than to compete for positions within existing ones. Professional bodies oriented not toward networking and career development but toward establishing shared standards of practice that practitioners themselves define and maintain.

None of this can happen at the individual level. What makes change is collective action: practitioners identifying shared conditions, developing shared analysis of those conditions, and building shared institutions that embody a different set of terms.

The first step is the one that Mark Fisher would have recognized as consciousness raising. The collective identification of the material conditions that have been successfully disguised as personal failures. The recognition that your burnout, your lack of influence, your sense that the discipline has lost its way are not evidence of your individual shortcomings but symptoms of a system working exactly as it is designed to work. Technically speaking, this is where something like design conferences become important. Not as venues for professional development advice, but as a space where that collective recognition can begin to form and where the conversation can shift from how do I survive within these conditions to what institutions do we need to build so that these conditions no longer define us.

Design knows how to make things that do not yet exist. It has spent decades applying that capacity to products and services for other people's organizations. We have failed in applying this to our own profession. How might we design the structures that would make design's autonomy a material reality rather than a perpetual aspiration? That work cannot begin inside the ocean that is indifferent to us. It begins on new ground, that we build and fully understand ourselves, together.