On design literacy in the age of intelligent automation

A wonderful piece I read recently and wanted to share. By Willem Van Lancker.

"Designing is not a profession but an attitude"

– László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion 1947

Ask someone to define design, and they’ll likely describe what designers make—architects draft buildings, graphic designers create logos, industrial designers shape products, and software designers make apps. This is how we typically understand design, by its outputs. The weight of these definitions grows heavier over time. The older the craft, the more its history constrains what seems possible, what is acceptable, and what defines “good design.”

My parents are both designers—though they never used the word “design,” my father built boats and my mother made art. Growing up, their worlds of design engineering and artistic expression seemed to barely intersect. But over time, I discovered they were practicing the same fundamental methods of design. To each of them, design transcends output—it’s a way of thinking, seeing, and bringing ideas to life.

The distinction between design as mindset versus output matters more than ever—whether you are a designer or not. As AI reshapes how we create, we face uncertainty about which human capabilities will endure and which will transform.

This new ease of creation would seem to imply that products made with AI will soon not fall short of perfect. Despite this, something is still missing. The designer’s ingenuity, their eye for beauty, their vision of the whole, their understanding of the why and when something must exist will take on new meaning.

Product success will largely be determined by intention and vision—before anything is built, before AI or humans begin creation. As engineering becomes focused on pushing the AI frontier, design's role shifts to making these powerful but complex tools intuitive, accessible, and desired. Just as users choose products for their value rather than their infrastructure, they'll choose AI products for what they enable, not their underlying technology. This requires cultivating a new intelligence: one that combines craft and intuition with strategic thinking and execution.

Design and the profession of the designer must transform from a specialist function pushing pixels into a universal attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness. We move beyond asking if designers should code to embracing design as a universal capability. This mindset adapts to any medium and isn’t focused on acquiring technical skills, tools, or reserved for specific roles.

This primal way of design exists in how early humans shaped tools & rituals, how children imaginatively arrange toys, and how investors rely on taste to back early companies. I see this type of design everywhere in my work with founders, engineers, salespeople, and investors—they are all designers in their own right. It is innate—it just needs to be unlocked.

Design as curiosity

My time at RISD and Brown transformed and formalized my understanding of design and its intersecting qualities. RISD taught rigorous craft, critique, and experimentation: the path to proficiency takes hard work. Trying and failing were essential to growth, forging a mindset that embraced complexity and ambiguity. Brown expanded this by showing how design as a methodology could apply to other fields—economics, entrepreneurship, engineering, media studies.

But at the time, I questioned this approach. Why study semiotics when I could be building a portfolio site? Why pull all-nighters just to endure brutal critiques—tossing the work away and starting over? But the process—thinking, making, critique—proved transformative. The school wasn’t teaching design as ornamentation or styling. Instead, it was an intense course in principled thinking and creating connections between fields of art and making. It forced you to depart from your comfort zone and expertise as an artist and then return to apply it with new knowledge. I recall working with materials like wood (not my specialty) and coming away with an appreciation for reading grain, understanding structural forces, and anticipating how pieces will be used and age. These skills translate surprisingly well to software design & development. The same careful attention to functional properties and respect for inherent constraints and possibilities applies whether you’re crafting joinery or designing apps. It’s not about superficially copying patterns from one domain to another but about developing an intuition for how fundamental principles—modularity, use, resilience, elegance—manifest across different mediums.

In retrospect, I find it ironic that at RISD and Brown, two schools which oppose the idea of professional training, gave me such invaluable tools for my work. You must learn the ground truth to know how to manipulate it. You can’t transform what you don’t understand. And you can’t know what you haven’t touched, haven’t built, haven’t broken.

Design as curation

These academic experiences taught me that design education isn’t just about mastering tools—it’s about developing an eye for what matters and what you like. This curatorial instinct, first honed in art history classes and cross-disciplinary projects, becomes essential when following your curiosity into diverse realms.

The richest insights are found in overlooked sources and connections that are beyond the reach of the internet and the incentives of its curatorial algorithms. My inspiration comes from unexpected places: the yellowed pages of out-of-print software books, modern science fiction essays, the writings of early religious leaders, and unique items in maritime consignment stores. Even DIY projects shape my perspective, like building a traditional sauna or making bookcases for my kids inspired by Dutch canal houses.

The journey of curation requires experimentation, and experimentation takes time. Each discovery reveals your preferences and how they fit together to comprise personal style and taste.

Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will curate sources and ideas and let AI handle execution or assembly. Honing an ability to curate and arrange these sources will cultivate depth and meaning in your work—tuning the machine to your specific eye.

Design as conviction

Curiosity and curation train you to form principles as well as personal opinions, confidence, and a sense of “feel” around what is good. My mother, a painter and art teacher, taught me that good design—like art—draws from personal experience and perspective. She created a conduit for her feelings, ideas, and beliefs. It flowed through her natively.

Conviction often stands in opposition to market trends. To have conviction before validation may make you seem weird or delusional, but it defines great artists—the ability to appreciate what others overlook or even fight against. To borrow YC parlance, they pursue “low-status things.” Maintaining this vision requires courage, especially when it seems complicated or insurmountable. As all artists (and founders) know, this process is a fight, requiring persistence and relentless effort, particularly when others doubt or ignore your ideas.

This intrinsic motivation—creation for its own sake, the pursuit of “better than good”—is rare. When deeply held opinions drive your work, they shine through in their expression and are unique to you—in art, design, product, or company.

Design as obsession

My father embodies design to the fullest extent. He says, “It’s a lifestyle, not a job.” He brings the same intensity to everything—whether solving engineering problems, crafting sales messages, or building side projects. He brings opinion. He is a polymath maniacal about every aspect his work touches. He is obsessed.

When he built boats, he wasn’t selling fiberglass and chrome—he was selling performance, adventure, and freedom. Many customers wanted a piece of this world, drawn in by his passionate, authentic vision of what boating could be. My favorite of his taglines captures this energy: “The ultimate off-road vehicle.” The t-shirt featured a gleaming sportfishing boat outfitted with massive offroading tires cutting through the surf. He was obsessed with both the product and its distribution—the same energy that went into perfecting hull designs went into crafting the perfect story and sales.

His gift was communicating this vision with infectious enthusiasm while maintaining craft in every detail. He spent hours equally on factory floors and at sales shows—examining the technical through to the tactile. This isn’t just perfectionism that AI could replicate; it was a distinctly human integration of engineering pragmatism, market understanding, and relationship building. He didn’t just perfect hull designs—he understood how materials, shapes, and experiences made people feel and how technical details could translate into human aspiration.

This fusion of obsession and insight made him more than a boat builder. Every detail served a larger vision—he was a designer of both products and the company that brought them to life. 

Design as orchestration 

The designer must see the core as well as the periphery, the immediate and the ultimate. If obsession fuels this work, orchestration makes it productive.

My father’s single-minded attention to both detail and experience mirrors the approach of the best founders I’ve worked with. At Thrive and now Terrain, working with founders at the formation of their businesses, I saw how they designed products and entire systems—teams, workflows, and frameworks that scale.

These founders recognize that company design goes beyond playbooks, case studies, or podcasts. Consider how modern startups approach product development: A technically proficient team might build perfect features, but design-literate founders create experiences that make users feel something when using the product. Notion succeeded not through technical superiority but by understanding how modularity & collaboration could transform how teams work. Stripe won by treating documentation and developer experience as a first-class product—showing how design can elevate infrastructure often regarded as an afterthought.

Often, we see this brilliance in early versions of products—born from founder-built brute force and passion—only to see it fade with scale. Ultimately, you are only as good as your team, so you better craft it intentionally and with heart. The company becomes your great work. The best designed of these organizations become durable as they scale and create self-improving systems—from leaders developed within. This manifests in frameworks that scale while maintaining autonomy (Spotify’s squads), protocols that efficiently align expectations (Amazon’s memos), and systems that balance creativity with quality (Pixar’s Braintrust).

As AI democratizes individual capability, making it easier for anyone to create and build, this orchestration skill becomes even more essential for teams to set themselves apart. Orchestration creates conditions where talented people navigate complexity together, evolving beyond traditional management.

Design as literacy

Just as the printing press proliferated printed text and commodified knowledge and communication, AI is accelerating the speed of inference and democratizing access to intelligence — commoditizing creation and transforming technical competence.

While AI can generate endless “perfect” outputs, the crucial design decisions are innately human: which questions to ask, guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and aligning execution against context and strategy. AI might generate hundreds of landing page variants, but it takes design sensibility to know which will genuinely resonate with users and fulfill their needs.

This human element of design literacy will become as important as verbal literacy, not only in understanding culture and aesthetics but also in forming and expressing new ideas. It’s a new type of intelligence and design that will separate those who thrive from those who fade into the noise.

Startups are the ideal canvas for applying design literacy. They require continuous iteration, not static perfection, in order to succeed. They are not timeless; they exist and succeed in their moment alone. They cannot rely on distribution or incumbency, only original thinking, relentless iteration and, for those persistent enough, transformative growth.

What happens next?

Advanced AI presents two paths: one democratizing creativity and distribution like the printing press and internet before it, leading towards a new golden age of original creation. The other leads to algorithmic homogenization—where we succumb to efficiency—technical perfection masking constrained thinking and corporate sameness. In the latter, we slide fully into a world where intelligent automation reduces the art of what we make to refined outputs of the machine—lacking any semblance of the uniqueness or sacredness, erased completely for performance and scale.

In either, the undeniable fact is that we are working in a world of more as a result of AI: more content, more noise, more distractions competing for our attention. The challenge is consistent — how do you cut through and create meaning? 

The winning path is clear: design literacy as a cultivated mindset, not another acquired skill—embedded in every role from engineering to sales. Teams that embrace this will take risks to build cultures where authentic expression outweighs safe choices, conviction beats consensus, and craft is prioritized more than algorithmic smoothness. This does not mean you turn away from the tools of the future. AI becomes a tool for developing this way of seeing—helping us iterate faster, recognize subtle patterns, and explore more possibilities than ever before.

I want to partner with founders who embrace this worldview. Like the best designers, these founders understand that in a world where anyone can build, what sets them apart is having the confidence to know what to build, who to serve, and why their products must exist.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”

– Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 1935