UX design
fromMedium
2 hours agoThe erosion of design authority, burnout problems, invisible customers
Vibe coding is reshaping design authority by bridging the gap between description and interaction.
Studio NEiDA operates at the intersection of architectural practice, research, and curatorial work, focusing on how buildings emerge from the material and cultural conditions of a place.
I got a degree from Douglas College in programming and business management. I understood the business side more and was better at that than at being a coder.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife is one of the most idyllic cities in the Canary Islands. At its heart stands the jewel - the Auditorio. It's a place where talent from both worlds, New and Old, comes together. A theatre, opera, dance, and music heaven.
The blank canvas wasn't a hurdle; it was an invitation. An invitation to think, to wrestle, to connect disparate dots until a clear, compelling strategy emerged. Today, that invitation often comes in the form of a blinking cursor in a prompt box. The promise is seductive: speed, efficiency, and democratized creativity.
Capacity Planning is the process of right-sizing the 'Total Project Demand' with the forecasted Team Capacity. Most UX teams have no idea what their capacity is. Fewer still have a process for calculating it and using it during quarterly planning activities with their counterparts in Product Management & Engineering to ensure teams don't commit to more work than they can handle.
Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.
The normative form for interacting with what we think of as "AI" is something like this: there's a chat you type a question you wait for a few seconds you start seeing an answer. you start reading it you read or scan some more tens of seconds longer, while the rest of the response appears you maybe study the response in more detail you respond the loop continues
This article won't start out well, because I'm sort of at rock bottom in my career and it seems that I'm projecting my frustrations of the industry out in the open. But I promise you, my rants are merely neutral observations and opinions. I love talking to people, and over the last 2 months of unemployment (I am now employed), I called upon designer friends all in Asia and Europe to get their opinion on the current state of Design leadership and how it has impacted our careers.
Today we are at the cusp of revolutions in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, renewable energy, and biotechnology. Each brings extraordinary promise, but each introduces more complexity, more interdependence, and more latent pathways to failure. This elevates prudence to be critical. Good design recognizes what cannot be foreseen. It acknowledges the limits of prediction and control. It builds not merely for performance, but for recovery.
AI is disrupting more than the software industry, and is doing so at a breakneck speed. Not long ago, designers were deep in Figma variables and pixel-perfect mockups. Now, tools like v0, Lovable, and Cursor are enabling instant, vibe-based prototyping that makes old methods feel almost quaint. What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead.