The value of design in an age beyond pixel-pushing
The future of design is strategic and deeply human
I’ve been a designer long enough to remember when people used to introduce me as “the person who makes things look nice.” Sometimes they’d even whisper it, as if revealing a secret. Fast forward to today, and design has shapeshifted into something far bigger: strategy, systems thinking, research, innovation, and occasionally drawing boxes around more boxes. And with AI now able to produce screens faster than I can find the Figma plugin menu, the role of design is clearer than ever: it was never really about the pixels.
Design is about thinking. About understanding. About shaping complexity into clarity. It’s about asking the right questions before anyone even starts wondering about colour palettes. It’s about figuring out what problem needs solving, for whom, and why it matters. Design, at its core, is strategic.
Take a look at any design-led company — Apple, Airbnb, or even newer startups making waves in fintech or health. They don’t just win because their products are aesthetically pleasing; they win because their design work starts upstream. It begins with understanding people deeply, translating that insight into opportunity, and guiding the organisation toward solutions that actually matter. As Ravi Sawhney and Deepa Prahalad have observed, great designers explore the psychology of consumers, translating the value of business ideas into experiences that resonate.
Design isn’t decoration; it’s direction. Norio Ohga, former Chairman of Sony, said it best: “Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another.” Most companies today use similar tech stacks, tools, and features. What sets one apart from another is the experience, the story, and the emotional resonance. It’s why people willingly queue for coffee, pay more for a phone, or feel a sense of tribal belonging to a brand. Design creates meaning, not just visuals.
And here’s the kicker: while AI can generate UI components and churn out dozens of mockups in a few minutes, it cannot yet do what designers excel at — framing the right problem, understanding organisational politics, noticing cultural nuance, or weighing ethical implications. It can’t facilitate alignment between seventeen slightly different stakeholders, or spot that the person nodding the most in a workshop is actually the one most confused. That’s the value of design in a nutshell: sensemaking, framing, and guiding.
Design also thrives in collaboration. Dieter Rams once said, “We designers don’t work in a vacuum. We need business people.” He was right. Design is about making invisible ideas tangible and aligning diverse perspectives toward a shared goal. Workshops, prototypes, and iterative testing aren’t just processes — they are spaces where clarity emerges, where ambiguity resolves, and where people who speak different “languages” can actually understand one another. This is where the magic happens. Not in a perfectly kerning a headline or tweaking a button.
If you still need convincing that design drives real value, the data doesn’t lie. The Design Council found that every £100 spent on design returns £225. Design-led companies outperform the stock market by 200%, and rapidly growing businesses are six times more likely to value design. That’s not soft, fluffy theory — that’s tangible impact on revenue, market share, and growth.
The most exciting part, at least for me, is that AI is forcing this shift to happen faster. When the craft of production is automated, designers are freed to focus on the parts of the work that truly matter: problem framing, strategy, ethical guidance, and human understanding. It’s a liberation, not a threat. The future of design isn’t about screens or colours; it’s about shaping better systems, better experiences, and better outcomes.
In my own work — whether helping a bank simplify complex journeys, partnering with communities to tackle inequity, or improving maternal health experiences in London — I see how design thinking and research uncover what truly matters. The insights, frameworks, and strategic guidance that come out of this work are what allow organisations to innovate responsibly and effectively. Design becomes the bridge between possibility and action.
Ultimately, design’s value isn’t in the artefacts it produces; it’s in what it enables. It’s in turning complexity into clarity, ideas into reality, and abstract inspiration into something tangible and meaningful. Pixel-pushing may be automated, but understanding people, systems, and opportunity spaces — and guiding organisations to create things that genuinely matter — will always require human designers.
Design is no longer about making things pretty. It’s about making things possible, making sense of the world, and helping others make it better. And in an era where AI handles speed and scale, that’s exactly where designers’ true superpowers lie.
