John Maeda

We're at this era where design will be further commoditized and automated.

so that a new kind of design emerges.

I think that's what is the next wave that'll happen because of this.

And the design and tech report I give every year for Software Southwest, I've been pushing moving from UX to AX, agentic experience.

And agentic experience is non-visual.

It is the world of robots.txt, it's loms.txt, it's command line dash dash help.

It's a world where we're designing for agentic affordances instead of just visual affordances.

That forced multiplication will occur once we can retire more of UX, I believe.

but it'll require this sort of surge of automated design solutions that cover 80% of those cases.

So 20% can be spent by real humans, but the humans will move on to AX, I believe.

Oh, well, the thing that every designer knows eventually is that, and actually there was a famous typographer, Eric Spiekerman,

who designed a very popular sans serif typeface called Meta.

This is before Meta became a company name.

And his company in San Francisco was called Meta Design.

At the time, one of the top design firms in the world.

Meta Design speaks to the fact that design can either be the application of craft or the abstraction of craft.

And so I think of the abstraction of craft is, at the moment, what is the best way to design things?

There was a time where being a design craftsman meant you could take a picture of Helvetica, cut it with an X-Acto knife, put rubber cement on the back, and you were amazing.

We moved to different higher-level primitives of the page, et cetera, with desktop publishing.

Now, I think we're going to move even more meta.