The Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech recently released a report titled “Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI: The 2024 Institute of Design Report.” The program also hosted an online discussion with senior design leaders Kevin Bethune, Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, Katrina Alcorn of Accenture Song, and Robert Fabricant, Co-Founder and Partner of Dalberg Design.

ID is one of the oldest design schools in the United States. It offers master’s, Ph.D., and professional education programs and serves a diverse student body across many disciplines. I teach at ID, and the school has been discussing the use of AI by students and its application within student projects. ID has a history of generating knowledge capital on design by faculty such as Jay Doblin, Patrick Whitney, Chuck Owen, John Heskett, and others. The institution’s overall objective is to move designers upstream to be at the executive table of organizations to maximize the purpose and value of design. 

The report was informed by interviews with 29 design leaders, who identified five key challenges that other design leaders need to address for the field to remain relevant and effective. The online ID event with Kevin Bethune, Katrina Alcorn, and Robert Fabricant also underscored the pressing nature of these challenges and the opportunities for keeping design leadership growing in an age of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. 

While the ID report offered many insightful points, a key omission was the seismic shift that machine learning has impacted how companies think about and deliver enhanced products and services. These changes are making processes more automated and generating options historically associated with the design function. The rapid adoption and the accelerated sophistication of machine learning and generative AI could automate many established design activities. This has understandably caused apprehension in the design community, akin to writers’ concerns during the recent Writers Guild of America strike that machine learning that machine learning would be trained on copyrighted information and would automate scripts and displace writers in creating original content.

Having read the ID report and attended the online discussion,  I was left with a diffused series of thoughts and many more questions than answers. While the discussion highlighted a series of issues and interesting conceptual discussions, there seemed to be little shared alignment on how design leaders can be influential at the C-level and how they will be able to shape the rapid adoption of machine learning in every aspect of an organization and the markets they serve. With the rapid adoption of AI in very limited utilitarian use cases like basic chat, generative image AI, and some light automations, the cost of integrating AI is expensive to justify market fit versus cost. 

Attempts to move design up-stream since World War II

ID has spent much of its history moving design from craft to educating designers to be thought leaders and impact organizational change. The current focus of graduates is to get into middle management and then move upwards to key leadership positions. 

There have been many attempts to move design up the macroeconomic ladder since World War II. The Design Methods movement of the 1960s recognized that design could not work in isolation and had to collaborate with other disciplines to reinvigorate a historically craft-centric view into a systems approach to problem-solving and problem-seeking. In the 1970s, design management shifted the focus to corporate leaders to adopt and manage design capabilities within their organizations.

Thirty years later, Design Thinking emphasized using divergent and convergent methods bound by the double diamond framework to explore, reframe, create, and catalyze value with designers co-creating with organizational functions, subject matter experts, and users living the problem with a better and more achievable outcome. John Maeda has been articulating that design is balancing three epochs at the same time and that the future of the profession will be in computational design. 

Many in the C-suite are still struggling to understand what a Chief Design Officer does with many possible answers on what they should be accountable for.

Another challenge to design leadership has been the rise of product management as the gateway to design. Product management has come a long way since it managed packaged goods in the 1980s. It is now the tip of the spear to markets, trends, competition, business models, value proposition creation, and product/service roadmaps and priorities. The role of design supports product managers by using design research and various human-centered methods to validate product management assumptions and then concept and build products and services.

While a cadre of designers, as well as other professions that have embraced design, have moved into middle-management and senior design leadership roles where “. . . 40 of the top 100 companies hired a chief design officer”, acceptance of design at these levels have been uneven.  has led to uneven integration and results. Many in the C-suite are still struggling to understand what a Chief Design Officer does with many possible answers on what they should be accountable for. Due to the pandemic and shifts in organizational priorities, some Chief Design Officers report to the Chief Product Officer, and there has been a decrease in executive  design officer roles. Product management then monitors the adoption and success of releases and content updates on a product/service roadmap. Some of what product management does, could be considered what design leaders do. In the C-Suite, product management is more likely to have a seat at the table than a chief design officer. 

In today’s competitive market, design plays a crucial role in enhancing the usability and value of products and services. By incorporating human-centered design methods, service design frameworks, user experience models, and design pattern libraries, companies can create coherent and distinctive outcomes that set them apart. Yet, design leadership is too often connected to UI/UX, the “Figmaization” of design activities, and the creation of the production aspect of building products and services. For decades, design focused on the qualitative value of ” . . . user experience, emotional connection, and long-term brand loyalty” and found it much more difficult to quantify design’s impact in terms of revenue generation, market growth, and loyalty. This qualitative focus has also constrained design leadership to the operations of design capabilities rather than design executives having the responsibility to inform and impact organizational purpose, priorities, and objectives.

Key points from the ID Report

The ID report highlighted several key issues facing design leadership. From its interviews with 29 design leaders ” . . . about the state of design in their organizations and the challenges that designers are best suited to address,” all recognized the challenged organizational and market landscapes that design leaders have to contend with. Starting with C-Suite confidence in design as an executive function where ” . . . the corporate love affair with design is over . . .” with varying levels of difficulty in ” . . . navigate complex, interconnected landscapes to ensure thoughtful and appropriate evolutions in . . .  offerings.”

A key factor has been the lightning-speed adoption of machine learning and the automation and expediting of a world of new microservices within products and services. The pressure to integrate machine learning and the increased use of generative AI has put design capabilities in an awkward position to defend their involvement as capabilities in functions they have been associated with—namely, UX and UI which are increasingly being automated.

There is little precedent for managing commercialized AI, and design leadership seems to be caught off-guard in responding to a revised role of design leadership through ” . . . sophisticated design practice . . .” The report does highlight five urgent organizational challenges that impact any organization and a design capability: 

• Organizations need to work at speed
• Organizations need systems thinkers
• Organizations need facilitators
• Organizations need new metrics
• Organizations need to demonstrate their values

The report lists how design impacts organizations by questioning established norms and seeking new configurations to support value criteria, evidence-based decision-making, iterative problem-solving through diverse teams, and making the intangible tangible through holistic solutions. In an interesting suggestion, the report pivots the focus of business metrics to “outcomes metrics.” Measuring desired outcomes is important because specific outcomes could map back to business goals and objectives of revenue generation, market growth, and loyalty. 

Three points of view in many directions

At an online ID event, Mark Jones from the Institute of Design interviewed Kevin Bethune, Katrina Alcorn, and Robert Fabricant. I hoped they would connect the report’s key points to their lived experience as design leaders and provide critical insights on how current and future design leaders can be more effective at the executive level. 

Mark asked each participant about their design challenges, eliciting diverse responses. Kevin shed light on the struggle to identify design’s role in economic uncertainty and the ongoing debate about its value within organizations. Katrina focused on the alignment issues that often lead to the failure of design projects. On the other hand, Robert took a macro view, discussing the translation of design into organizational policy to drive systemic change.

Mark’s question about the role of AI in the age of design prompted another insightful response from Katrina. She highlighted that designers can set the parameters, and machine learning and generative AI can create iterations. These iterations, she explained, are curated and refined by designers, effectively supercharging their creative power. 

The report highlighted that organizations need to work at speed. In response, organizations are compressing value cycles into shorter periods. How can design work at speed rather than being viewed as slowing organizations down? Katrina highlighted that being obsessed with speed to market usually ends up releasing something nobody wants. Framing the right problem and developing a hypothesis to attain speed to impact is critical in an age of reduced resources. Intentional speed is better at doing the right work and providing value. 

Mark’s question about the role of AI in the age of design prompted another insightful response from Katrina. She highlighted that designers can set the parameters, and machine learning and generative AI can create iterations. These iterations, she explained, are curated and refined by designers, effectively supercharging their creative power. 

However, Robert rightly stated that AI is becoming a proxy for framing issues and options, and there are big questions and decisions on what AI will influence, impact on whom, and, more importantly, impact “choice architecture to adequately interrogate AI outcomes.” What is missing is data on attitudes and motivations and opening the conversation aperture beyond a target consumer to other actors in an emerging value chain. What happens when value criteria shift, and how does this impact organizational purpose?

This led to Mark asking about the role of bias and the need for diversity in people’s lived experiences. Robert rightly identified that individual power dynamics distort outcomes. Kevin discussed the need for people of color to be at levels of authority to impact discussions of purpose and investments. This may mean moving past credentialed degrees toward achievements in lived experience. Allowing many types of people to do richer iterative learning works for teams and organizations.  

Mark finally asked what advice they would share with future design leaders. All stated that leadership is on a spectrum, but before one can lead, one must develop trust. Robert noted that design leaders need to get political and not be afraid to play with power structures to protect the status quo or to change it. It is not enough to be a facilitator; one has to have strong negotiation skills to bend the organizational arc to a more just and humanity-centered focus that impacts organizational policy, priorities, and outcomes. 

The critical points offered by Kevin, Katrina, and Robert were complementary. They created a richer picture and were left with good individual points, but no mapping back to the five urgent organizational challenges that the report highlighted. The report posed a vital issue where design leadership has to “measure the impact of design requires a delicate balance between aligning with business objectives and serving the genuine needs of users.” 

Design leaders in the C-Suite have to connect these two factors when management connects purpose and competitive advantage through market value. They need to be more effective in understanding the levers of power and how to effectively use them in influencing and shaping organizational goals and objectives. Unless these leaders move from being facilitators who bring people together for alignment to effectively leading by negotiating with organizational functions, their abilities  will be relegated to more tactical functions. 

Addressing the conundrum of uncertainty impacting design leadership

The ID report aimed to highlight design leadership’s challenges and frame five key trends that design leadership should focus on. It addressed how to reframe design as focusing on organizational velocity by informing purpose with values as an integrated system and facilitating new types of measurement. This will require a much more sophisticated form of design leadership than currently exists. Many design leaders need more lived experiences and leadership skills to navigate organizations’ complex, interconnected landscapes. 

While “sophisticated design practice” was not defined by the report (but is defined in the She Ji Design Journal) or the participants, a major challenge is that many aspiring design leaders do not convincingly understand the fundamentals. These include leadership, operations, business and metrics accountability, and negotiation skills that the executive suite demands from all its C-Suite representatives. Graduate design programs like ID do offer dual design/MBA degrees to address some of these gaps.

In his book “Design and the Creation of Value,” the late John Heskett identified the confusion between value and values. “Value is primarily defined in monetary terms . . . The point, however, is that sole focusing on financial measures or share price can ignore the means by which they are achieved and defined – or how and why they are established, enlarged and maintained.” The report’s suggestion of moving to “outcomes metrics” could focus on practical innovation that creates new types of value that organizations and markets desire. 

It would have been helpful if the report and the guest speakers had provided more specific insights on managing risk. Organizations are risk averse because they view risk as unknowns that cause unwanted exposure. However, Heskett’s view was ” . . . design can use proven procedures within stable market conditions; uncertain where design can be used as an exploratory process within uncertain market conditions; and unknown where design can be used as a trial-and-error process within unknown market conditions.”  This perspective can motivate design leaders to address how risk can be an opportunity for innovation and that negative exposure can be reduced or recognized as a gamble worth taking. 

In his recently published article “Design doesn’t need to end like this“ John Voss connects the fundamental changes coming for design as AI expands. Design leaders will need to redefine the craft of design from expression to production to a revitalized experience design/AI dyad. “The context in which designers work, what they do, and where they are in their careers will influence how AI impacts them . . . Educating stakeholders about the business value of design seems to be the most trusted failsafe against AI job loss.” It will also be about design and computation, creating new experiences, artifacts, and value.

Artificial Intelligence and generative AI will fundamentally shift design knowledge, skills, and capabilities. It is very early to be proscriptive on what these shifts will entail as we are in a trial-and-error period. Clashing closed and open AI platforms vie for use, and most are simple AI microservices that can do a few things. However, designers will have to become much more knowledgeable about computation and how different levels of AI will automate or create new experiences that move beyond the pervasive window, icons, mouse, and pointer model designers have used for over thirty years. Many design capabilities will go away and may force design education and practice to move towards new types of sophisticated design practice. 

While ID identified five key trends from its interviews with design leaders, two stand out: systems thinkers who work at speed. Facilitation is not enough; new metrics will be needed to create value from new archetypes of physical/digital integrations. 

The ID report provided valuable insights, though it could have more directly explored the idea of design leadership as more than just systems thinking. Robert highlighted that design leadership is also about leveraging the art of power to shape organizational purpose. While facilitation is important, effective negotiation is crucial for achieving what matters most—gaining a competitive edge through human-centered products and services. Design leaders will need to be systems thinkers who can work quickly and:

• Understand business fundamentals that drive executive behavior to influence and negotiate short-term thinking for longer-term planning, which affects organizational priorities and policies.
• Improve accountability, quality & impact that is informed by important portfolio planning priorities to balance reliability vs. viability and market advantage
• Create efficient processes to support outcomes, connect utilization to demand, and automate design processes wherever possible.
• Grow, upskill, and evolve design teams to deliver greater quality and higher-order design capabilities. This focus on continuous improvement keep teams relevant to address the ever-evolving needs of physical and digital products and services.
• Understanding the fundamentals of computational design, microservices, and generative systems 
• Be involved with discussions of the purpose and delivery of general artificial intelligence and multi-modal intellegence, which will be able to perform a wide variety of tasks and become a seamless collaborator with users. 
• Engage with discussions on open vs. closed AI models and how each would impact stakeholder engagement, security and value.

Don Norman, in his book “Design for a Better World” highlights why design is uniquely positioned to address complex problems of addressing the issues and benefits of artificial intelligence. ” . . . design is unique in the breadth of its coverage, especially with its interest in optimizing for the benefit of the people . . . and in proceeding through prototypes, tests, trials, and modifications based on early results.” A significant challenge to this statement is that society’s view of design is still rooted in an expression-to-production view of design or that design is about ungrounded innovation. 

Any new technology, and one that is as transformational as artificial intelligence, has so much volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that defining with any confidence leading and lagging indicators of any recommendation is fraught with uncertainty. Even with these large headwinds, design, and designers can positively contribute to a more ethical, positive, utilitarian human/computer dyad. This would not be “design-led,” but Don Norman suggests “a pluralverse of approaches, of styles, of methods. No single disciple can solve these problems : all disciplines are necessary.”

Heskett spent much of his career linking design to policy and what design leadership needed to do to inform, impact, and implement policy into practice. Transforming design capabilities from low-level creative implementation to a strategic activity that defines policy by rationalizing the purpose, structure, and delivery of products and services could create value, generate breakthroughs that open new markets or fundamentally redefine existing ones, and subsequently sustaining and extending them is a continual evolving process. This potential for design to shape the future market landscape should inspire optimism in design leaders.

Design has to shape the macro leadership topics that impact micro implementations. Historically, design was associated with the latter while trying to influence and move into the former. This is the conundrum that faces design and design leadership when creating a sophisticated design practice based on strategy, objectives, policy, and specific outcomes. Can design leadership break through the middle management ceiling and into the C-suite sustainably in the age of AI?