Identity loss

Have you noticed, at some point in the last five years, a specific kind of professional vertigo? If you are lucky enough, your job title, deliverables, and even the pay, stayed the same. Yet something in the room shifted nevertheless. You could tell that the values you thought were shared universally turned out to be not so shared after all. Or they meant something different to the people across the table. You have been a professional for so long that the work stopped feeling like a job and started feeling like a way of processing the world. This sensemaking, not a skill in a narrow sense of a technical specialization, has formed cognitive habits built over years of deliberate attention towards systems. And hence, now, you find yourself in a liminal space. With a feeling of... being stuck

If we need an anchor point for this condition, I'd suggest we choose October 2023. At that time, IDEO had laid off a third of its staff, closed two offices, and reported that revenue had fallen sharply. The collapse was covered as a business story (which, of course, in principle it was), but it was also a story of identity. IDEO had spent thirty years as one of the most visible institutional arguments that design was a discipline with something specific and valuable to offer. That offer was a methodology for understanding the world through abductive and modular thinking. Of course, the firm was not shy about monetizing this methodology past the point of relevance (alas, this is a subject for another rant). As Natasha Jen, a partner at Pentagram, said publicly sometime in 2019, design thinking had become "business speak" detached from any real making or judgment. And she was right. The Post-it notes had become a parody of the process they were supposed to represent.

Design thinking was a theatre, a spectacle of the critical and empathetic practice it so claimed to represent, produced at scale, distributed through business schools, performed in corporate workshops, generating the feeling of meaningful work while systematically evacuating its content of purpose. The designers who spent careers inside that theatre were not naive. Many of them knew something was wrong. But the simulation was good enough, and the alternatives sufficiently sucked, that the knowing did not easily translate into an exit.

The market's cruel and corrective adjustments in 2023 did not separate the parts worth keeping from the parts that may have deserved to go at IDEO. And that is where the identity question begins: with the disappearance of a space that, even in its compromised form, had kept a particular version of design visible, credible, and nameable. That news landed harshly if you have been a seasoned designer, in a profession that was already struggling to hold onto the parts of itself that IDEO, for all its faults, at least pretended to represent and champion.

1. Capture

In the wake of the 2022–2023 tech layoffs, the phrase "return to the craft" began to surface in design circles, usually as a call to refocus on hands‑on practice, after years of abstraction and over‑indexing on 'design thinking'. It sounded like a way out. Like something valuable was being reclaimed. Returning to design fundamentals. Form and function. The good ol' days.

Design thinking, for all the legitimate criticisms, had contained within its bureaucratic form a visibility that showcased designers brought something to the table beyond execution. It was a mode of inquiry and a set of judgments about what problems were worth solving and how. When companies told their design teams to go back to craft, they were removing the claim to judgment. The designer who executes a brief without questioning its premise is significantly more manageable than the designer who reads a product requirement and asks what it is actually optimizing for.

The cognitariat (to borrow a term from Franco Berardi) – a term for workers whose primary output is semiotic – does not experience exploitation primarily as physical exhaustion. The exploitation is attentional as it operates through the capture of the cognitive capacity that makes their work possible. What "return to craft" accomplished, at a managerial level, was a re-specification of what that attention was allowed to notice. Designers were told to develop stronger visual systems, better interaction patterns, and more precise component libraries.

This new designer reality was intensified by AI, specifically because the tools that AI has been deployed to automate first were precisely the tools that had been positioned as the residual core of design competence in the first place (visual design, copywriting, rapid prototyping, after strategic judgment had already been removed). Microsoft's investment in OpenAI exceeded $13 billion by 2023. When Anthropic published "The way of code" in 2025 (authored by Rick Rubin), a rewrite of the Tao Te Ching presented as a philosophy of AI-assisted work, what made visible was a process designed to make the extraction feel meaningful. The sequencing of these acts reads like a coherent strategy: first, take away the capacity for judgment, then automate the execution part.

2. Acceleration

The layoffs that restructured the design profession between 2022 and 2024 are frequently framed with the AI prism. This framing is partially accurate but mostly it's a convenience narrative. Meta laid off approximately 11,000 employees in November 2022, before generative AI tools had been deployed at any meaningful scale in product teams (they are about to lay off 11,000 more likely). Google announced 12,000 redundancies in January 2023. Salesforce cut 8,000 positions the same month. These decisions were made primarily because technology companies had overhired during the pandemic-era growth period, and because rising interest rates had changed investor expectations about the timeline to profitability. The designers who lost their positions in those rounds were not replaced by algorithms. They were removed because the capital structure of their employers required different profit and loss statements.

AI has since provided a more convenient narrative. It allows companies to frame reductions as technological inevitability rather than choices made in service of shareholder returns. It also lowers the cost of the next round, because the tools genuinely do reduce the hours required to produce certain categories of design output. Of course, both things are true: the immediate layoffs were about the growth imperative, and the medium-term reduction in design headcount is being enabled by AI. Naming both is significant because conflating them allows the growth imperative to disappear from the analysis entirely.

The current discourse about how designers should respond to this situation tends to focus on adaptation: smaller teams, more fluid roles, greater tolerance for ambiguity. Writing in February 2026 about what he calls the end of role clarity, Clay Parker Jones argues that AI-enabled productivity means organizations will increasingly consist of small, trust-based teams where formal role definitions become unnecessary. It is a serious piece of organizational thinking. However, it does not once mention the worker who was laid off before the smaller, more efficient team was assembled. It does not ask who benefits from the increased output that fewer people are now producing. It treats the absorptive capacity problem, the gap between how fast teams can now build and how fast organizations can process what they build, as a design challenge.

CircleCI's 2026 state of software delivery report found that daily workflow runs increased 59% year over year, driven by AI code generation. Feature production accelerated. Wages did not. Okay, we know how to organize smaller teams more effectively, but who is capturing the value those smaller teams are producing?

3. Depletion

The designer who remains employed after the restructuring of the last few years now works inside a specific arrangement, in fewer in number, responsible for more surface area, equipped with tools that generate output at a rate that exceeds any single person's capacity to evaluate it critically. Brian Eno described this arrangement in 2025: the dominant activity becomes not making but preventing the system from producing something mediocre. "You really feel the pull of the averaging effect of AI", Eno said. The cognitive load of continuous resistance, the ongoing work of refusing what the model offers and substituting it with something better, is not lighter than the load of making. It is the same load, applied to a larger volume of material, with less support.

Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins developed standpoint epistemology, the argument that knowledge is always produced from a specific social position, and that the position of those who do the labor of a system grants them particular insight into how that system actually operates. The designer who built the interfaces through which millions of people navigate their digital lives knows, from the inside, what the decisions were. They know what was pushed, what was deprioritized, what "user-centered" meant in the room where it was decided, what the A/B test actually measured, and where users convert and churn. That knowledge may be inconvenient.

The instruction to return to craft was, in part, an instruction to stop knowing these parts. Harry Braverman documented this process in manufacturing in 1974 as: separating the conception from execution; transferring of judgment from workers to managers; reducing skilled practices to deliverables that can be specified from above and evaluated against metrics. The designer who once owned the full arc of a problem now typically owns a segment of a process defined by OKRs set by people who do not use the tools and have never inhabited the standpoint. AI accelerates this separation by providing a technical way out. The model handles conception; the human handles quality assurance.

In the process, we have lost a specific form of knowledge that practice produces over time, knowledge held collectively rather than individually, that accumulates through repeated encounter with other practitioners, through disagreement in crits, through publications that assume a reader who shares enough of your reference points. A culture has disagreements, hierarchies, and blind spots. But it has a recognizable shape. You could walk into a crit and know what kind of conversation was expected. The collective is the condition under which individual judgment becomes possible at all. Without it, the knowledge begins to dissolve.

4. Reconstruction

The history that underpins this dissolving is not a story of a golden era now lost. The Ulm School of Design treated visual communication as inseparable from ethics and politics, and was closed by the state of Baden-Württemberg in 1968 after years of political pressure. Victor Papanek published "Design for the Real World" in 1971, and he was heavily criticized and “savagely attacked” by peers, and pressured to resign from the Industrial Designers Society of America for it. Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby spent decades building critical design at the Royal College of Art. The Design Interactions program, which Dunne directed from 1999 to 2015, no longer exists in the form he built. The tradition of a strong and ethical design was always there, but was always marginal. What changed now is that it became more invisible through the noise of constant changes.

Marginality and invisibility are not the same. A marginal practice can still constitute a reference point. People can know it exists, locate themselves in relation to it, and choose to engage with it or ignore it. When a practice becomes invisible within the mainstream professional category, the values it carried stop registering as options. The designer who enters the field now does not encounter critical design as a position to reject. They do not encounter it at all!

Mark Fisher's concept of capitalist realism tells us that the system does not argue that alternatives are wrong. It makes them imperceptible. Depressive hedonia, his term for the state of being unable to want anything beyond what the system currently offers, is not a personal failure but the predictable outcome of sustained exposure to a system that has become very effective at exhausting the capacity for alternative desire before it can form into anything actionable.

AI intensifies this different manner, since earlier tools for accelerating design output still required the practitioner to initiate the process, to hold the problem before the first move was made. The current model removes that requirement. It is always faster to accept what it produces than to refuse it. The path of least resistance is now also the path that most completely surrenders judgment.

I want to be precise about what reconstruction means under these conditions, because the word can carry a false confidence. The critical tradition in design is not waiting to be recovered. The institutions that sustained it have been defunded, restructured, or absorbed. The community of practitioners who shared enough of the same reference points to disagree productively has been dispersed by precarity. What remains is held individually, inside people who learned it before the conditions changed, and who have practiced mostly alone since.

What reconstruction requires is harder to state. Should we talk about institutions not organized around the growth imperative, communities of practice not hosted on platforms owned by the companies doing the restructuring, forms of education that treat the political economy of design as a core subject rather than an optional provocation? None of these exist at scale. The places where something like this is attempted, small cooperatives, independent publishing, self-organized learning communities, signal groups, obscure chatrooms, operate at a scale that is deliberately excluded from the public eye.

The fact that this is difficult to imagine is not evidence that it is impossible. It is evidence of how successful the current arrangement has become at foreclosing the imagination required to attempt it. The role clarity discourse, the optimistic literature on small teams and trust and absorptive capacity, offers a version of design's future in which the growth imperative is a given and the question is only how to work within it, more humanely - if possible. That is a reasonable question. And a question of survival in many cases. It is also the question the system wants you to be asking, because it leaves the system intact. Recognizing that as a system default condition rather than a personal failure of vision is not necessarily a solution. But it is the minimum condition for beginning to think beyond it. The infrastructure for doing so does not currently exist, so it has to be built. The conditions for building it are bad. And this is where we are. This is our liminal space.

The identity loss is real and it deserves to be named as a loss, not managed into a learning opportunity or sublimated into a pivot to a new and shiny role. We do not mourn a romantic self-image of our designer self. We mourn a specific collective arrangement: shared reference points, legible disagreements, communities of practice that could hold critical values not as personal commitments but as collective facts. That arrangement is dispersed enough that its absence is functionally the same as it being gone. The more completely the tech world reduces design to execution, the more sharply the distinction becomes visible between that practice and what it has lost. Gregory Bateson's concept of schismogenesis, the process by which two groups progressively differentiate themselves from each other through escalating contrast, is useful for us as a way forward.

Schismogenesis does not produce a resolution. It produces a hard split. The grief belongs to the side of the split that remembers what the practice was supposed to be. The differentiation also belongs to the same side. Something that was blurred for decades, the difference between designing as a civic and critical argument and designing as conversion optimization, is now legible in a way it was not when IDEO could still claim to hold both together. The mourning and the possibility are the same event, seen from different focal points in time. What comes next will be smaller, more deliberate, less institutionally legible, and produced under conditions that are specifically hostile to it. There is clarity in that. And we have a choice to make.