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Mark Wilson: Fast Company's Global Design Editor on design's defining moments in 2025
00:42:23
Today, we’re looking back at 2025 with Mark Wilson to understand not just what happened, but what it all means. We’ll explore the biggest moments in design and business, and tackle the uncomfortable questions about AI—are we in a bubble? Is it actually making us more productive? And what does the future hold for designers in an automated world?
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- [00:02]
A
If there's one silver lining to AI automation, it's that hopefully it does bring us back to the handcrafted world, which is just a joyful way to work. In my heart of hearts, I do hope it's a long term, not just a pendulum swing, right, but a rewind to the way we were for thousands of years, really, until probably the last 20 to 30. I hope we can take the best of it in that way.
- [00:25]
B
As 2025 draws to a close, it's time to pause and take stock of what's been a transform year in design. From Figma's landmark IPO to the rise of AI across pretty much every category of product to major brand evolutions at Nike, Netflix and the New York Times, this year has been defined by what our guest today calls mass acceleration. Mark Wilson is the Global Design Editor at Fast Company, where he's been tracking these seismic shifts, reporting on everything from the architecture of data centers to the comeback of wired headphones. He's the kind of journalist who straddles multiple worlds, covering the design industry and now co hosting the By Design podcast. He's someone who can explain why Labubus became an unlikely cultural phenomenon, and why your kids might be more interested in building something with a thing called the chomp saw than staring at a screen.
- [01:25]
C
Today we're looking back at 2025 with Mark to understand not just what happened, but but what it all means. We'll explore the biggest moment in design and business and tackle the uncomfortable questions about AI. Are we in a bubble? Is it actually making us more productive? And what does the future hold for designers in an automated world? We'll also dig into the design industry's blind spots, the problems that aren't getting solved because they're not sexy or VC fundable, and why there's a growing hunger for physical craft and working with our hands in a world increasingly mediated by screenshots. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [02:01]
B
And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber atdesign better podcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale learn more@wix.com studio and now back to the show. Hey, Mark Wilson. Welcome to DesignBetter.
- [03:04]
A
Oh, thanks for having me, Mark.
- [03:06]
B
We got to hang out in New York for a special event at the Automatic offices for Wert & Company's 30th anniversary. Listeners who might have missed that episode. There was a video version of it that's on designbetterpodcast.com and the audio version, of course. But you were on there with Pat Paola Antonelli, which was great, looking back at the last 30 years of.
- [03:27]
A
Design. Yeah. Not intimidating at all to sit next to Paola and have to break that.
- [03:31]
B
Down. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. For those who don't know who Paola is, she's the curator, senior curator of Architecture and design at MoMA. So she knows a thing or two about design history. But you held your own and then some. We were looking back then. Today we kind of want to change the timescale and just look at 2025. We're rolling into the end of the year and thinking about what's next. I love this time of year to just pause and reflect. There was a lot that happened this year. It was a rather transformational year in many respects in the design world. Curious. What themes, like, if we were just to get started, what themes come to mind for what 2025 was all.
- [04:14]
A
About? Oh, gosh, there is so much. And I do agree, you know, every year, we obviously prep a lot of sort of end of year stories, look back, forwards, and at first people ask for lists, and it's just like, this is overwhelming. And then you start actually going through the stories, like, thank God. Because otherwise it's all a blur. I think we saw a number of sort of interesting developments. If I were to gloss over them now. I mean, we look at AI, you can't ignore that. We're seeing the data center becoming sort of the architecture of our time. We continue to see collaborations with companies and collabs and sort of the evolution of that. We had labubu. Right? Like, who can forget the little wonderful, terrible, ugly guys that my daughters resisted and until, like, two weeks ago, Somehow we have this really, in some ways traditional mix between pop culture, technology and everything else. But overall, I feel like this is just a time of mass acceleration. I don't know how you two are looking at it, but for as rickety as this whole ship feels right now, it does feel like we're, you know, just increasing the GS a little bit every.
- [05:15]
C
Day. Maybe we could talk through some of these big moments in 2025. I don't know how to connect this to design, but did 6, 7 make the list at all? And apologizing to any parents out there that just heard that and their kids are going nuts. But apart from 6, 7, maybe things like Figma's IPO, because that was certainly a big one this.
- [05:30]
A
Year. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you look at figma's IPO and this is really the biggest IPO in sort of the design world in a really long time. And it went well. Figma's business, when they opened the books, looked pretty good. What's kind of exciting about watching Figma, to me and you know, all these companies, I don't know about you guys, I don't really have a horse in the race as a journalist. I don't own individual stocks, I don't own any coins. My money's in 401ks. And so, you know, it affects me a little bit, but not overall. But you know what's interesting to me about figma right now is you have figma, but then you also have Canva, you have Adobe, you have these companies that are really all elbowing with AI in the same space with a lot of increasingly overlapping capabilities. It's been really actually like, as a popcorn eater, really fun to watch them duke it out and to watch them release new feature after new features. Nothing that happened this year gives me any signal that's slowing down. The Figma ipo, I think, launched in a relatively ideal way for figma and probably for the greater sort of.
- [06:35]
B
Design services industry also as part of figma's changes. So there was config and lots of new features, lots of AI like building websites and so forth. I mean, there's a lot of really cool new features that people got excited about internally, kind of inside baseball. Figma hired a chief design officer as well, which we don't have a whole lot of intel about what's happening internally, but presumably there's going to be some shifts there and we're going to have her on in the not so distant future as well. And then the stock, it opened at about 1:15, peaked at 1:22 bucks a share. And these days we're recording it December 10th, it looks like it's around 39, 40.
- [07:17]
A
Bucks. So bit of fall off there. A bit more fall off perhaps than sort of your typical ipo. But there was a lot, there was a lot of excitement at that launch.
- [07:25]
C
Yeah. Let's shift on to some other notable things in 2025. One of them is Just some branding changes amongst design LED or design forward.
- [07:33]
A
Companies. Is this about Cracker Barrel.
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C
Eli? Cracker.
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B
Barrel?
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C
Yeah. I didn't know quite how to.
- [07:37]
A
Frame it, but oh my gosh, the outrage around Cracker Barrel ditching. Oh my gosh, I can't remember the guy's name, the mascot's name that nobody knew until they got rid of him to sort of modernize the Cracker Barrel.
- [07:48]
C
Brand. We don't have them in our area, so I'm a little distant from the story. But Aaron, there's probably some in your.
- [07:52]
B
Necklace. We have.
- [07:53]
A
Them. We do. Look, Cracker Barrels is just an awful restaurant. I don't know how to begin with it. So this is one of those stories that's been tough to watch. But look, it's one of many politically divided brand and marketing launches of this year. We saw similar things around American Eagle with Sydney Sweeney having great jeans. Cracker Barrel isn't perfect in this place, but we've covered this more general trend this year of rage bait advertising. And one of our writers, Grace Nelling, wrote a really wonderful piece on this. But you see that with American Eagle a bit and this sort of denial, oh, we're not really talking about jeans. We're talking about jeans and whatever. We all know, like it was meant to piss people off and it worked. It got attention. We saw this with the friend AI pendant 2, which they did a complete buyout of the New York City metro system. And as they told us, they designed it to be covered with graffiti. They wanted to sort of upset the public, to engage them. It worked. It became international news. I was absolutely shocked having covered Friend in the past and things like that. But I'd say overall, the role of advertising, you know, beyond this sort of clear political division when anything is viewed today, is that marketers kind of leaned into pissing us off. And they did it by certain measures of roi, just earned media engagement. Right? Very, very, very successfully. Our interpretation is that that just comes down to the amount of noise there is, that we are just completely oversaturated. There are really too many stories, there are too many products. There's too much of everything right now. But the more something pisses us off, sort of the better it works. And that maps right from brand right back to politics. And we see that, like, nasty sort of whirlpool that it's been in.
- [09:31]
B
2025. Let's talk about a couple companies who have been in some trouble and how they're trying to rethink a few things. Nike, for one. Folks who have been at Nike. There's some pearl clutching about how their market share is being eaten up by Hoka on and various other brands. And Nike is going back to the drawing board. Lots of kind of new experimental things. There's like an exoskeleton shoe, there's a shoe that's supposed to stimulate your brain. All these kind of interesting things. Where does Nike stand today and what big moves did they make this.
- [10:08]
A
Year? You know, I wrote a cover story on Nike last year going into the Summer Olympics about their attempted turnaround under their previous CEO. He was since axed. And then I ended up at Nike, what a month or two ago now under the new CEO Elliot Hill, who was an old Nike veteran. He worked there since he was an intern essentially. A lot of people thought he should have gotten the job the last time. So he's back. And yes, Nike put on a really pretty incredible show in my perspective of a lot of their new innovations. So to rewind, under their last CEO, they did a lot of retro releases during COVID They really maximized releasing dunks in a hundred different colors because they made a lot of money doing it. Until they didn't. And Aaron, to your point, we saw them lose the running market to sort of Brooks to hoka. But all these players, to be fair about that narrative, work in the billions of dollars, right? Nike is just so, so, so much larger and they have to serve so many different markets and all at the same time globally that it's almost a different game for them versus anybody else. The story has been that sort of Nike lost touch with innovation and that was the criticism of a lot of ex employees I talked to. The company had been restructured to serve marketing and men's women's kids rather than sort of the innovation pipelines that made Nike great, right? Like serving the basketball player, serving the soccer player, et cetera. So they are back now to serving basketball, whatever sports you want to talk about. And yes, they are pushing these new innovations. I tried them. I was really impressed by them. I've tried a bunch of exoskeletons. Project Amplify is supposed to come out in 2026 sometime. It slips on with just a little bit more difficulty than a shoe. It's an artificial Achilles tendon. I found it a little weird to run in. But I also just. You look at that industrial design, you look what they're doing. They do some algorithm tuning. They're going to get that thing great. If they do it right. It could be the first sort of really consumer friendly exoskeleton. There is the impact that could have to future mobility and the aging population is absolutely incredible. So I'm really hot on that. You know their neuroscience stuff. Nike mind you mentioned, it's a shoe you savant and it stimulates you. It's kind of similar to meditation in that way. If you do a FMRI like, you'll see it activates similar parts of the brain. I think it's interesting, it's novel. I don't need to tell you guys that the neuroscience of design is a really hot topic, but this is really early days. It's a kind of a signal of where it could go. So look, I thought Nike had a good year. We're going to see how it goes next year. The revenue is relatively flat still. They basically have to make $500 million a year to grow 1%. That's a lot of money. You start getting in a few percentage points and that's all of your brooks, that's all of your hoka. So again, different game. Interesting company. Curious though. Curious how you guys are feeling about Nike.
- [12:54]
B
Too. I mean, Nike still is an aspirational brand. It's still cool. Michael Jordan has been retired for what, 28 years or.
- [13:04]
A
More? Never in my heart.
- [13:05]
B
Though. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's still cool and amazing. So I think that they still have a lot to build on and they're still a part of the cool side of culture and that's a very hard place to occupy. So I think there's a lot of possibilities, but they are getting their lunch eaten in some.
- [13:24]
C
Verticals. I wanted to ask about another company that used to be known for its innovation and is now pissing people off. But I don't think in an intentional marketing type of way, which is Apple just can't seem to wrap its head around or wrap its teams around this idea of implementation of AI in a productive way. I mean, I can't believe I can try to start a timer on my watch. Siri set us two minute timer. Okay? Two hours 37 minutes. I'm like, you can't get that.
- [13:50]
B
Right? Like, call my wife. Who's your.
- [13:53]
A
Wife? I had an alarm that woke me up at like 3am the other day. The old a.m. p.m. Swap. And it's like, this isn't. You don't even need an LLM for this, right? Like, how is this still messed up? Oh my gosh. Apple had a tough year. I would say Apple had a tough year just from the talent grab across the company. I would need a list to Run through it. But right, like leads of AI, as of recording this, they may lose their head of chips, which would be a really big loss because Apple builds great mobile chips. It's really keeping them in the fight. And then obviously you have Alan Dye, who is leading design at Apple, who just announced leaving for Meta. Obviously a really kind of shocking announcement in that people would imagine that's like a life position. Where else do you sort of aspire to work other than Apple? Obviously Meta's throwing a lot of money at people, a whole lot of money at people. But still, it's Apple in theory the dream job that touches so many people. So yeah, what can I say about Apple other than they're in a tough spot. I want to see where they are in three to six more months. If there is a silver lining to it all, they have a chance for a fresh start here. They have a chance to reboot. We have Tim Cook sort of on the way out as a CEO and things do feel precarious in that way. Regarding their biggest sort of design launch of the year, Apple Glass, obviously built under dai, heavily criticized, not simply by myself, but by a lot of people for sort of core usability issues. Really at its best, peak Apple aesthetics, but at its worst, confounding bits of ux. So I think we're going to still see that ironed out. I am very curious though, in 18 months, are we going to see a reversal? Of course there now that design leadership and sort of leadership in general is really shifting so much at Apple. Regarding your point about AI, just absolutely a missed opportunity, them cutting a deal with Google to sort of build a, you know, a custom LLM that will become Apple's new Siri. All public to me, very smart. With AI companies, what we're really seeing is that the models are becoming really rapidly commoditized. People predicted this for years and we've really seen it in 2025. We saw it when Deepseek showed up from China and ate OpenAI's lunch for a hot second. We saw it when Google clapped back on everyone with the latest Nano banana and it's like, whoa, this does crazy stuff. We didn't think you could do the new cloud 4. 5. Some people are saying is AGI, it's not. But look, it's really good. You know, Apple's longer term strategy they made of saying we're not going to just invest hundreds of billions of dollars into training AI models. I don't think that was necessarily the wrong move, but they should have cut some of these deals earlier. Right. They promised it, they didn't deliver it. And I've actually been a little surprised how much consumer sentiment has been against them and actually how some of the tech press has kind of pressed them on it, because for everything great AI does, no one's really proven it out in sort of a mobile context of how it will change our.
- [16:41]
B
Lives. I think it's interesting, Apple is a company that I've found fascinating. Been buying their products for years. I've spent a ton of money on Apple products. I'm currently on multiple Apple products while we're recording this, and it just feels like they've lost the script. Managing screen time requires a college degree, maybe a PhD because I have multiple college degrees and I still don't know how to keep it in check with my kids. So, I mean, there's so many fundamental issues with what Apple's doing right now, and I'm cheering for them to pull up from the nosedive. One more brand I want to talk about, and that is the New York Times, because they have been going through a steady evolution over the past few years as they've tried to build the subscription model games. The acquisition of wordle, which I don't know off the top of my head if that was two years ago or a year and a half, something like that. They've built out games significantly and then they have built in a video platform. Now that's part of the New York Times. The mobile app relaunched and it was generally seen as like a huge triumph. I'm curious your take on the direction they're.
- [17:54]
A
Headed. I've been lucky enough to interview various members of the design development leadership teams there for a number of years. I think they do consistently great work. There is a reason that they are leading beyond their name. They've lived up to it in a lot of ways. I think it's fair to say that they're really doing some peak publishing design right now. What they're juggling in terms of various story styles, to your point, really going bigger into vertical video, which is absolutely the right call. But just every day you load their app, you see how well their design juggles between headlines, rich graphic stories, video, long features, and then it has recipes, games and everything else. They've baked it all in really well together and they're making a lot of money. And I think what makes me nervous, though, about the situation is actually not the talent of the design teams or sort of that execution. Earlier this year, though, we saw them kill their New York Times kids section that was a section in the paper. It was a story. We were the first to cover it. That was a handful of people who kept that going. And it was a really great resource to families, to young people who might get into journalism or just high quality journalism for young people, which is pretty rare today. New York Times makes enough money they can float that it was a great design product. It was a great physical design product. They just weren't marketing it right or there wasn't enough ROI on it. So the business sort of implications of what's going on at the Times right now still really upset me. For everything they do great in editorial, I do think they undermine themselves through design, through their opinion pages. That is people's biggest problem with the New York Times, that they say they are covering all sides when in fact I think it's deeply upsetting people. But I can't say anything bad about the design. I think they've done great work and I don't see any reason they will stop. They've had some talent changes there, but overall they have a lot of investment. They think about the data. Right. One other little criticism because I'm terrible though, is we are seeing more ads on it. I don't know if you've noticed this since this sort of app relaunch. We're seeing a lot more integration of ads. That concerns me. And then the final thing that concerns me is journalism leaning on games as a platform overall. Even Fast Company launched crosswords earlier this year. A lot of people probably don't know that, you know, you don't necessarily think of Fast Company as a place you do a crossword. I think that's very fair. But games are engagement and journalism is after engagement to drive the business. My concern is there is very little real journalism left with these larger organizations. For them to pool resources into drawing readers, the readers they have toward games feels a little antithetical to the purpose. My wife and daughter rip through the New York Times games every day, so I can't judge it. But that concerns me as a journalist longer.
- [20:35]
B
Term. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. DesignBetter is supported by MasterClass. We're lifelong learners here at DesignBetter. Eli and I are always reading, expanding our skills or pursuing new interests. And given that you're listening to this podcast, you're probably the same. The best way to expand your knowledge is with Masterclass, which lets you learn from the best to become your best. Masterclass is the only streaming platform where you can learn from over 200 of the world's best and brightest. I'm talking about people like David Sedaris, Ryan Holiday, Anna Wintour, Shonda Rhimes, Martin Scorsese, and the late Jane Goodall. I learned a ton about business strategy from Bob Iger's Masterclass and Eli is a big fan of Neil Gaiman's Masterclass on storytelling. You can turn your commute or your workout into a classroom with audio mode. You can listen to Masterclass lessons anytime, anywhere, and this makes a wonderful gift at the holidays. Masterclass always has great offers this time of year. Sometimes up to as much as half off. So you should head over to masterclass.com designbetter for their current offer. That's up to half off@masterclass.com designbetter masterclass.com designbetter. And now back to the.
- [22:07]
C
Show. Let's shift it back over to AI and look back at this year. But also kind of put on our prognosticator hats and think about what might happen in 2026. So continues to be a big story. I mean, it's a big story in 2024, 2023, it's been changing the stock market. There are some fears of a bubble. We know people who have lost their roles and you can't maybe blame it directly in AI, but there's no question there's some influence there as to how companies are viewing their teams and organizations. So maybe we could talk a little bit about what happened in 2025 and what you think might happen this coming.
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A
Year. Yeah, I mean, scientifically, advancement wise, whatever. I think a lot of people are critical about AI and saying like, we've hit peak LLM and sort of all these other things. I'm not really worried about that. I do think we of course, might be in a bubble. I think that bubble would be a two to five year bubble, but I don't think it's a 10 to 20 year bubble. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you look back to the sort of original.com crash, there's a lot of things in common. There was a ton of investments, a ton of private capital going into it, but you have things crash at 2000. By 2005, people were hiring again. And then shortly after that, you just had everything be rebuilt, made anew, and you had this incredible thriving sort of ecosystem in the ashes of it. You know, I even think Back to in 2007, YouTube sells to Google, 1.65 billion. And people were so pissed. Like in the investment community, they're like, this is the new Bubble. We're at a bubble again and today it's worth roughly, if you estimate, about half a trillion dollars. I see really similar things happening right now. We do live in sort of the era of AI architecture. We're seeing the data center again become sort of the most important object of our time. And I think that the investment in data centers though that's going on right now will do a lot to prevent a bubble. As we would think about it, there's a lot more interdependency essentially right now than there was in 2000. You know, we recently talked to the co CEO of Gensler. Something he mentioned to me was their projects, right, in architecture go five years in advance, maybe 10. Sometimes we cover 33 different fields. And right now they're all investing, all of them are investing in AI infrastructure. They might not be meta investing in this giant thing, but they're investing in sort of smaller things for their company or their own services. So I think that sort of argues for some more health of this industry. There's also a lot of interdependent investing, right? A little Ouroboros investing where you have Nvidia pumping a lot of money into OpenAI but then OpenAI agrees to buy those Nvidia chips back. You know, I'd be a little more worried about that if Nvidia weren't again allowed to sort of mail chips to China. And the truth is I don't see China backing off on AI. So anyway, all these reasons just to address the bubble aspect itself. It is absolutely disquieting to see the AI is basically the only part of the economy doing well. I absolutely think middle Americans are being left behind. We are losing water and energy resources and that's going to really kick our butts if we don't lock that down with some level of regulation. But as for a bubble or not, I am very bullish on AI, I think in the medium to long term for.
- [25:26]
B
Sure. What about consolidation? That's one thing that I'm sort of curious about. There are a number of AI startups out there and then there's the bigger ones. There's OpenAI, there's anthropic perplexity, et cetera. We just talked about Apple. They have this huge Achilles heel that's visible that they are missing out on the transition to AI and it would be an essential service to their products. Do you see some sort of consolidation or acquisitions happening in 2026 either by Apple or.
- [26:00]
A
Others? To me, consolidation for somebody like an Apple doesn't make sense, because AI service is really a buyer's market. There are so many different platforms offering it. I do think a lot of those sub platforms, yeah, maybe they'll consolidate, maybe some of them will burn out. A lot of that won't come through. But I do think we underestimate just how much AI is already baked into sort of all of the software we're using today. And this gets back to that weird Ouroboros where, you know, you have OpenAI just launching apps now, right? They're launching apps within ChatGPT where you can talk and it'll pop up Canva or Figma or whatever to sort of actually do work for you, pop up a little GUI and things like that. But what's weird is if you do that with canva or Figma, for instance, and you say you want to make a slide deck or something, it then queries Canva. And canva's built itself to be queryable by AI. Right. There's a whole great systems and platforms to do that, but then to actually do it Technically, Canva's using models including OpenAI's, to sort of answer that question, answer that query, and then they serve it back to OpenAI. So there's this whole interdependent circle of AI services happening right now. And I think that applies to your apples. I think that applies to really anybody offering software. All I know is that I think it's good for developers and I think it's probably ultimately really challenging for AI companies. And yeah, I wish I had the crystal ball to know how that'll work out.
- [27:27]
B
Better. Yeah. Well, you brought up a really interesting theme of 2025. I remember April of this year. The word that we heard over and over again was agent Agentic. You know, like that AI is going to have agency to be able to do things for you and things like OpenAI. They did launch these agents that can do exactly what you described. And there are some other companies, ServiceNow and others that really focused on agents. Maybe Google as well. Like there's some agent stuff that's happening that maybe I haven't played with yet. Did that promise play out as we expected? Or like, is that changing the game for.
- [28:08]
A
People? I don't think we've seen the compelling agent use case as we've been promised at all yet. And especially that agent as digital twin sort of idea where, you know, you had even people like Rabbit with the R1 launching that saying how you'll be able to train all these individual agents that would do all these different things. For you, long and short. No, I don't think we've seen sort of agents arise that way. What we're seeing is more to that earlier OpenAI example where suddenly Figma or Canva is an agent for OpenAI and so the apps are essentially becoming agents, talking to agents, rather than sort of our doppelgangers who go do our jobs for us. And that seems like the more solid and predictable path based upon the way software works. It's essentially like a new API and parts of it are API and parts of it actually aren't. But that's how I look at it and I think it's really comfortable for the software development community and it doesn't require some new UX to sort of explain or also train something to like crawl the web and do all this stuff for.
- [29:07]
C
You. I've been trying personally to think up use cases for agentic AI, and Aaron and I occasionally have to do tedious things like insert a bunch of links in this document and copy and paste between different platforms. And it's been useful for things like that. But then I was talking with a friend who I've been running these AI workshops with, and we've both sort of designed our lives and careers so we don't have to do too much of that kind of stuff. I mean, we get to do more interesting things, hopefully, like talking to you, Mark, or, you know, talking to Austin Kleon yesterday. And those are things. I don't want AI to take that away from me. So, yes, there's certainly tons of jobs out there. And this actually lead into my next question where you can maybe offload some of the drudgery to these agents. But then there's another thing to be said for, like, there's creative work that I want to hold onto and I don't want agents to do it. So if you are creative, if you are a designer right now, if you're lucky, and you still have a role at a tech company, what should you be focusing on as far as broadening your skill set or what facets of AI should you be leaning into to make sure your job continues to be.
- [30:12]
A
Relevant? I don't think any creative dreams of being an AI manager. I'm a journalist, but really that's a creative job. You have to be a dynamic thinker. And to me that's in many ways the darkest path, because I don't enjoy it. I don't really enjoy a lot of vibe coding. When I've tried it, if it worked perfectly, perhaps I would. I'm not saying I won't in a year or two, but when you have to micromanage it, it's like when you hire an intern and you regret it because it's more work. It's more work than just doing it yourself. I guess my advice would be to avoid work you don't want to do as much as you can because it brings no joy. It's not like the best sort of advice moving forward. But I also think that AI management and prompt engineering won't really be what the future is, sort of long term anyway. To me, in its best articulation, AI, it'll be a lot like what we saw happen with hip hop. You know, hip hop sampled the world's music and created a new art form. And I think we had AI sample the world's knowledge, basically sampled the web, but we haven't really seen that new art form generated from that data set yet. And I think that if I were a designer working today, and I actually want to challenge myself to do this more too, it is like, what is the unique thing you build from that, from that sampling, from that new synthesizer, from whatever else? And I don't think any of that future has been written yet. A lot of people say, like, AI can't be creative. Honestly, I think that's like a fairy tale we tell ourselves. I think it, like, it gets into a really weird semiotics and I don't really know. But the bottom line is I think they can create things that are creative enough that, like, I don't want to tell myself that, but could I do something I can't even dream of with this technology? Like, that still excites me, and I hope it excites designers working.
- [31:55]
B
Today. I'm curious about the problems that we choose to solve. I am super excited about the promises that it has and already, like, you know, for us running design better, it's in everything we do. You know, we scrub our audio. We just had an interview last week in Miami with the head of design, the chief design officer at Rivian, and we had three jackhammers in the background, and we knocked all that out with AI. So AI is solving some cool problems, some practical problems, but ultimately, is it solving the right problems? And more broadly, is technology solving the right problems? For so long, we had lots of companies trying to help us figure out how to split our check at the sushi restaurant. I think that's not exactly a serious problem. So what design problems are getting ignored because they're not sexy or VC.
- [32:52]
A
Fundable? I think if we look just at AI and sort of the problems AI is choosing to solve or not. Obviously we're over indexing on LLMs themselves right now. We have a lot more miles to gain out of them. I think. I'm not an LLM hater. I think they're absolutely magical. I think there's a lot more we can do. But what excites me that I've seen in terms of problems that I think design focused engineers are pursuing sometimes, and sometimes just engineers, is our sort of newer world models are using AI to understand actual physics in the world, to actually predict things that will happen next in known environments like factories and sometimes unknown environments, AI systems can actually now determine the swing of a pendulum which to do that mathematically is downright hard to impossible. But AI systems are so good at correlation that they can take raw data and sort of understand what would happen next. I see things like physics, there's a big AR startup that just solved unsolvable math problems. What can we do when we can do math we could never do before as humans? That's really exciting to me. How could designers leverage that in products? Who knows what engineering possibilities that'll open up. I also continue to think that services like healthcare and other human services are really important. We saw OpenAI this year basically say, hey, you can't use our platform anymore for medical advice or legal advice. And arguably those are the two most important things for most people. To be able to talk to a system that's pretty good most of the time about, you know, where one door closes, perhaps another one opens. But it's really frustrating for me to hear companies like Microsoft talk about AI for just this reason because Microsoft used to talk about inclusive design and now what they're talking about is how one middle manager could write another middle manager a summary of questions that will be answered by another AI. Summary of questions. And it's just two AIs talking to two AIs. That mentality is probably why Microsoft fired a lot of their middle management in the last year. That's how they view the jobs and that's how they view the technology. So that's a depressing end to me. But I do think there are so many signs of AI designers who have basically looked at companies like Meta and said, hey, that's not the direction I want to go. I have a lot of talent, I have limited time on this earth and I'm going to break new ground here. Rather than sort of make a Model 5, 10% more efficient, continuing on.
- [35:04]
C
The sort of more Positive note here. And thinking about it's hard on.
- [35:08]
A
Me. I know it's hard to get to that.
- [35:09]
C
Point. No, it's good. Let's talk about kind of design education or even at an early stage for our kids. And one of your Featured products for 2025 was this Chomp saw, which is a cool little device that you can use to cut cardboard with for kids safely. And I just mentioned, we talked to Austin Kleon, who is the author of Steal like an Artist, and he talked a lot about the importance of working with your hands and working with physical objects. And I think we're seeing this in our students at Stanford, where for many years the pendulum swing was toward, oh, I want to build digital products because that's where all the jobs are. But now, especially since COVID where everybody was trapped on the screen for years, they want to use their hands, build something physical. So, yeah, maybe we just touch a little bit on like this idea of connecting with our world a bit more, doing things that only for now humans can do, working with our hands, et.
- [35:58]
A
Cetera. If there's one silver lining to AI automation, it's that hopefully it does bring us back to the handcrafted world, which is just a joyful way to work. It's so wonderful to work with your hands. I discovered it really late in life. I didn't really start sketching till I was probably like 40. It's like absolutely remarkable to take one step back. I've been talking to a lot of sort of like brand experts about what they anticipate in 2026. And I'd say let's talk to a few different ideas and we'll put something larger together. And you probably hear this too. Everybody's like a return to physical, a return to craft, like a return to all of these things happening in brand. We've seen it in a couple Apple commercials already, which is, we could say, a little bit ironic for a company that sells screens, but really pushing the handcraft idea. And in my heart of hearts, I do hope it's a long term. Not just a pendulum swing. Right. But a rewind to the way we were for thousands of years, really, until probably the last 20 to 30. I hope we can take the best of it in that way. You brought up chomsa. I don't know if anybody's tried it. Have you guys tried.
- [36:56]
B
Chomsaw? Not.
- [36:57]
A
Yet. I mean, it's so great. It's essentially a jigsaw, like that would cut wood, but instead it cuts cardboard. And because it doesn't have an actual saw. It's actually like the tip of like an electric screwdriver, more or less is what it was invented.
- [37:10]
B
From. It looks like a router table or.
- [37:11]
A
Something. Yeah, yeah, very much looks like that. And when my daughter dove in to use the chop saw to just slide cardboard through it, I remember just being like, whoa, she's fearless with this. And if we were in a wood shop right now, I would be terrified. I would be like, don't lose a finger, don't lose a finger. Like, we chop carrots. And I'm terrified. It's like, line it up. Use your knuckles as a guard. But what a wonderful, joyful sort of product in that way. And, you know, wired headphones have made a comeback. Is that because of.
- [37:38]
B
Y2K?
- [37:39]
A
Yeah. Right. Is that Y2K resurgence? Is that going to be something we see longer term? I'm kind of curious about that. And it's almost along the lines of like, we saw this pushback to dumb phones, right? And like, is everybody use a dumb phone now? I don't really think that's what's going to be longer term, but like, is there a halfway evolution that we're going to land on? So anyway, look, I'm super hot on this too. And my last point would just be that one thing that Adobe did this year that kind of depressed me was something that would have blown me away a decade ago, which was taking kids drawings and then like using AI to make them look real or whatever. And the technology is amazing. The UX looks fantastic. It's like pretty flawless. And I'm just like, I want my son and daughter to look at what they draw on that piece of paper as the thing. Be pleased with your own hand. Learn that it's like a part of self acceptance, the way you sketch and things. It's just, it's part of us. And I'm not saying it's better than technology, whatever, but I do think it's intrinsic to us. And that's an ethos that I do hope survives. I think it's gonna. I think that this year is kind of signaling that to us. To your point, Eli, and what you're hearing from students, I hope it holds.
- [38:39]
B
Out. Mark, thinking back on this year, things you read, you watched, you listened to, experienced, what stood.
- [38:47]
A
Out? I mean, Pluribus was really good. Pluribus launch, I don't know if I watched that. It's good.
- [38:52]
B
Work. Apple haven't watched it yet, but I keep hearing good.
- [38:55]
A
Things. Talking about physical design the last couple of years. I've got deeply into the manga One Piece. It is absolutely amazing to see somebody who's worked to this point about craft, worked on one story for 30 years, imagined everything with ink and a pen and imagined whole worlds like that. And now you have revolutions happening globally and people are flying the One Piece flag, the pirate flag from this manga some people might call silly. That's taken sort of a lot of my free time. I've gotten into, like, all sorts of sketch. I got into Gunpla this year building Gundam with my son. I've never enjoyed model building, and I don't know how long I'll stick with it, but that's what I've been into. I've realized I've spent more and more time, like, actively off my phone, except for I would just give one little plug and. Sorry, this is really deep hobby stuff. Marvel Rivals, I think, is maybe the greatest squad video game shooter ever made. I'm really into that as well. So it's all about balance.
- [39:52]
C
Guys. Mark, you recently started a podcast with your colleague Liz Stitson. Tell us a little bit about that and where people can find.
- [39:59]
A
It. Yeah, our podcast is by design, kind of a horribly used phrase because it's used a little bit everywhere, but by design, it's on Apple and Spotify, and I think that's about it. It's been fun. You know, I would just say this about it's really fast. I didn't want to launch a design podcast because podcasts like yours existed. People listen to a lot of design podcasts already. I think there are good ones out there. We do things a tiny bit differently, I like to think. Right. Like, and I could plug all the ways why, but by design, it's kind of.
- [40:27]
B
Fun. And where can people learn more about you and just follow the work that you're.
- [40:30]
A
Doing? Absolutely. Fast company. I'm a global design editor there. My byline shows up frequently. I'm also just very findable on Instagram and LinkedIn. I run my mouth quite a bit too much on LinkedIn, I would.
- [40:42]
B
Say. Mark, this was so fun to look back on the year with you, especially given your perspective at Fast Company. Thanks for being on Design.
- [40:50]
A
Better. No, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
- [40:52]
B
Guys. This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows or simply drop a link to the show. In your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next.