Why now

I started out as a product and service designer. I've spent most of my career trying to make the complicated things — banking, government — feel simple enough that nobody has to think about them. That was always the dream of service design: understand what someone's actually trying to do, then build the thing that gets them there, invisibly.

For a long time, that dream ran into the same wall. Good service design costs money, takes time, and needs rare people. You could design the ideal journey and still watch it die in a backlog, because building it properly was expensive and slow.

AI changes that. For the first time, the thing that made service design hard — the sheer cost of building something genuinely good — is coming down. Which means the dream is finally buildable. That's why this feels like the most important moment for design thinking in a generation, not the least. The constraint that held it back is disappearing.

There's a version of this story where AI makes design less necessary. I think it's the opposite. As the tools get better, the thing that separates a good outcome from a mediocre one stops being execution and starts being taste — knowing what's worth building, what a person actually needs, when to stop. Those have always been design skills. AI doesn't replace them. It puts them within reach of far more people, which means design's job now is to lead the technology, not stand next to it hoping to be consulted.

I spent years applying that thinking to customers. These days I spend it on colleagues — the people inside organisations, not the people buying from them. It's been one of the more unexpected joys of my career. Work is where most of us spend the majority of our waking life, and it has, for the most part, been designed badly: siloed, bureaucratic, built for the org chart rather than the person navigating it. Getting to bring real design thinking to that world, at the exact moment AI makes it possible to fix, feels like one of the genuinely exciting places to be right now.

None of this is only a technical or commercial question, either. How organisations benefit from AI, how they govern it, whether it makes work better or just faster and thinner — none of that happens by accident. It gets designed, by someone, on purpose, or it gets left to chance. I'd rather it be the former. That's the philosophical thread underneath everything on this site: AI's impact on how we work is a design problem before it's anything else, and design has a responsibility to show up for it.

This site is where I'll keep dropping thoughts on all of this as they develop. If any of it lands, or you disagree, or you just want to talk it through — get in touch below.