Designing and Being Human
THIS PAST YEAR CHANGED ME.
I shipped some of the best work of my career — building systems, making accessibility real, and stepping into a Principal role at SoFi. At the same time, I made another human. That kind of thing doesn't just add to your life — it restructures it entirely.
Bobbi Rose, 5 months
While I have been restructuring, so has the design industry. The rapid rise of AI tooling hit like a tidal wave and shows no sign of receding. I don't think about design the same way anymore. Too much has changed, too quickly. And like most relentless forces, this one is catalyzing a metamorphosis — across the industry, across job functions, and more consequentially, across human lives and identities.
“I don’t think about design the same way anymore. Too much has changed, too quickly. And like most relentless forces, this one is catalyzing a metamorphosis — across the industry, across job functions, and more consequentially, across human lives and identities.”
I'm not the first person to write about this, and I certainly won't be the last. But it's worth restating: this is genuinely new terrain. The assumptions we built our practice on are being renegotiated in real time, and it can feel impossible to locate our role as makers within it.
I won't minimize the uncertainty — I'm not confident our jobs will be unaffected. What I do believe is that if you became a designer for the reasons I did, the answer is the same as it has always been: Keep solving problems. Keep making things. Keep being human.
As I return from maternity leave — a season largely devoted to keeping a baby fed, clean, and alive — I've had more time than usual to sit with big questions. Not on purpose. You don't get to be intentional with a newborn. But the questions found me anyway.
What does it mean to do good work right now? What does the design role actually look like in two years? What do I want to protect, and what am I willing to let go of?
I don't have complete answers. But I've landed on six principles I'm carrying back into the work with me. I'll be sharing one at a time over the next few weeks.
Not a framework. Not a playbook. Just how I'm thinking about this — honestly, and in progress.