How Can Designers Prepare for the Future?

I recently had the opportunity to attend CSS Day in Amsterdam, a two-day event that brought together product designers, developers, and thinkers from across the industry. The first day focused on the intersection of user interface and development, while the second dove deep into technical CSS topics. Across all the sessions, one question kept surfacing: As technology evolves at a rapid pace, are we truly ready to design for a world driven by automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence?

How Automation Changes the Designer’s Role

It’s hard to find a product team today that hasn’t automated at least part of their process. Automation often removes repetitive work, giving designers more space to focus on meaningful, creative problem-solving. But as more of the work is handled by machines, we need to think carefully about how we interact with those results.

Josh Clark, founder of the design studio Big Medium, explored this in his talk, "AI is Your New Design Material." He pointed out that some of the most impressive advancements we’ve seen—like facial recognition, predictive text, and image search—are all powered by machine learning. These tools can feel precise, but at the core, they are still just logic-based systems.

When these technologies fail, our instinct is to think the system is broken. But is it really? According to Josh, we need to reconsider what failure means in this context. Machines don’t work based on human emotions or expectations. They simply process information and return answers. If the outcome doesn’t meet our expectations, it doesn’t necessarily mean the technology is flawed. It might just mean our expectations need to shift.

Machine learning is not here to take over the entire creative process. It’s meant to support us, to help us arrive at better answers faster. The true value comes when we understand how these systems reach their conclusions, not just when we focus on the final result.

Even small breakthroughs, like a computer learning to walk on its own, push us to ask why and how those solutions formed. That’s where the real design work begins.

Designing for the Future While Building for Today

Jared Spool, Co-Founder of UIE, posed a simple but powerful question: What did you learn yesterday, and how will it shape your work tomorrow?

Designers always carry the challenge of building products for the future while solving present-day problems. It’s not easy. The pace of change over the past decade makes this even harder.

Jared encourages us to look at how our design mindset has evolved. There was a time when user experience wasn’t even part of the conversation. Back then, Jared worked with companies that were just beginning to understand why UX mattered. That shift didn’t happen overnight, but over time, organizations started to move toward what he calls "The UX Tipping Point." This is the moment when a company fully integrates user experience into every layer of decision-making.

For designers today, reaching that tipping point still takes deliberate effort. Even now, many teams are not starting from a place where UX is fully valued. Part of the work is making sure the user experience continues to grow as a core part of the product and company vision.

Are We Really Designing for Users?

One of the most important challenges in product design is figuring out whether we are truly building for the user, or for ourselves.

Joe Leech, a UX psychologist, captured this perfectly when he said, "People want more choices, but can’t handle them." What people say they want doesn’t always match what actually drives their behavior.

A well-known study from the early 2000s helps illustrate this. Researchers Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper ran an experiment at a supermarket. One week, they offered six types of jam. The next week, they offered thirty. More jam was sold when there were only six options, but when customers were asked which experience they preferred, they said they liked having thirty options. What people preferred and what they acted on were not aligned.

Joe’s point is clear: A designer who ignores psychology is likely to miss key insights. In the same way an architect can’t ignore physics.

This is why solid user research matters. Talking to more people, gathering more data points, and testing at scale helps teams get closer to what users actually need, not just what they say they want. It’s more work, but it’s the foundation for building products that solve real problems.