Design has firmly established itself as a key driver of competitive differentiation, even in industries that historically placed little emphasis on it. Its influence spans many verticals, reinforcing design's essential role in shaping excellence and enabling broad transformation. This discussion explores the evolving state of design leadership and the deepening synergy between technology and creativity. An intersection that continues to redefine how we live, work, and connect. We also examine the current wave of organizational transformation, where long-term strategies are increasingly being replaced by agile, outcome-driven approaches focused on rapid delivery and measurable impact.

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Loft: Design seems to be at a crossroads, some even say the golden age of design is coming to an end. I keep seeing quotes like “Design is dead!” What’s your take on that? Is design truly losing its relevance, or is it simply evolving into something new?

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Design is dead, at least a certain kind of design is. And in truth, it's been dead for a while

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José Manuel Dos Santos: Design is dead, at least a certain kind of design is. And in truth, it's been dead for a while. If you're in the 'design is dead' camp, it’s worth tracing that idea back. I recently watched a conversation between Jony Ive and the CEO of Stripe. I admire him and the work he’s done, but much of what he represents is a kind of design that's no longer at the forefront: iconic hardware, tactile refinement, the design culture of the Italian masters, or people like Philippe Starck and Ross Lovegrove. The golden age of object-centric, form-driven design has faded, specifically in larger corporations. The shift began with the rise of the web. When I started doing web design, it was already clear that design was changing. It became a team effort, expanding into new domains: UX, code, and systems. As digital platforms grew more complex, the old paradigm of design centered on physical products started to decline. Then came service design—really, systems design, which began to dismantle traditional boundaries. And while we haven’t fully entered the age of service design yet, it’s already transformed what 'design' means today. I’m a classically trained industrial designer, I still love beautifully crafted physical products. But I can also admit I’m something of a relic in that sense. And that’s okay. When people say 'design is dead,' what they often mean is that a specific, legacy form of design is no longer leading. And I agree with that."

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Loft: Over the past five years, we've seen a noticeable shift in how design functions are structured within organizations. During the Apple era peak, many companies had centralized, in-house design teams that operated under strong design leadership, often at the C-suite level, and were not tied to individual business units.

But that model seems to be fading. Companies like 3M, Philips, and others that once had sizable, centralized design functions are increasingly folding those teams into business verticals. Design is being decentralized, and leadership roles are being diluted or eliminated. How can today’s design leaders advocate for a more strategic, holistic design function, one that aligns with long-term vision and user-centered goals, rather than being reduced to a support role within business units focused solely on short-term outcomes?

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Why aren’t more trained designers part of the C-suite? When I started in 2017, only three trained designers sat on the executive teams of Fortune 50 companies, and by the time I finished in 2020, even those few had left.

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José Manuel Dos Santos: This is something I explored in depth during my PhD on design management in large corporations. My research began with a simple but telling question: Why aren’t more trained designers part of the C-suite? When I started in 2017, only three trained designers sat on the executive teams of Fortune 50 companies, and by the time I finished in 2020, even those few had left. So yes, centralized design as we once knew it has largely disappeared. But it’s important to understand this in the broader context of corporate cycles. Organizational structures, whether centralized or decentralized, often mirror the waves of mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing, and insourcing. Design is not immune to this. What’s changed, though, is that the model of an autonomous, centralized design function has broken down, largely because it failed to consistently integrate with the business and deliver at a level that aligned with their expectations. Most large organizations are focused on short-term delivery—quarterly results, revenue goals, and near-term problem-solving. That’s not just sales; it’s sales enablement, operations, product all working toward immediate outcomes. Within that, there used to be a space for long-term thinking: futurists, researchers, innovation teams, and yes, design. But what ultimately failed was what I call the "stretch”, the handoff between the long-term “leap” vision and the short-term "step" work. That middle ground, the translation of vision into strategic, tangible action, didn’t hold. Design teams often excelled at either execution or vision.

But without systems, processes, and organizational buy-in to bridge that middle ground, design leadership struggled to prove value. I know of entire design teams being dissolved, not because the work wasn’t good, but because leadership felt overwhelmed by it. One CEO even told their CDO, “You filled our pipeline for five years—we just can’t absorb any more.” In essence: great work, but no clear path to implementation. So yes, design lost its seat at the table not just because of external forces, but because we collectively failed to consistently deliver in the stretch. Reclaiming that space will require design leaders to rethink how they align vision with execution in a way that’s digestible, strategic, and tied to measurable business outcomes.

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Loft: Would you agree that part of what’s changed is the broader narrative around design itself? It’s no longer the IDEO-era mystique, where design was seen as this almost magical differentiator. There's a sense now that the "emperor has no clothes" the illusion has faded, and clients and companies are more skeptical or pragmatic. Do you think that shift in perception has influenced how design is valued and integrated within organizations today

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José Manuel Dos Santos: True. IDEO thrived during a specific period when its model was being widely emulated, and then acquired. One by one, the major consulting firms: McKinsey, Accenture, BCG, and others began buying design firms to bolster their own offerings. But their goal wasn’t to champion design thinking or creative leadership. They integrated design into their delivery models to support their own agendas. If you look at reports from McKinsey Design, for example, you’ll notice the focus is largely on integrating designers into delivery teams. Because these firms wanted control not just of execution, but also of strategic direction. And in many ways, they sidelined design’s more visionary aspects: future thinking, speculative work, long-horizon strategy. Historically, their consulting model was already under strain. Clients were pushing back: “You give us expensive reports, and we can’t implement them.” So to protect their model, they brought design in as a way to deliver more tangible outcomes: prototypes, MVPs, early-stage execution. But design was used to serve the consulting framework, not to lead. They were tasked with making the first leg of delivery happen, not shaping the entire roadmap. In hindsight, many of us in design saw this coming, but we lacked a unified, mature voice to address it.

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It wasn’t an intentional surrender, but it was, in some ways, a failure to anticipate, organize, and assert the long-term value of design beyond execution

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Designers don’t often organize in a way that allows us to debate big-picture impacts, about utopia versus dystopia (like Steffano Marzano says), systemic shifts, or the erosion of creative leadership. As a result, this transformation played out quietly, and design’s strategic role got gradually diminished. It wasn’t an intentional surrender, but it was, in some ways, a failure to anticipate, organize, and assert the long-term value of design beyond execution.

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Loft: Would you say this shift is part of a broader business narrative not just something that impacted design specifically? In other words, is design just one of many disciplines being reshaped by larger organizational and economic forces?

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José Manuel Dos Santos: This isn’t just about design. Everything changed. When design began to shift, it reflected broader transformations across business as a whole. Take branding, for example. It’s not dead, but a certain kind of branding is. I know companies where they have three people focused on branding, where they used to have 25 or 30. That says a lot. This shift is driven by deeper changes in the market: evolving competition, changing corporate priorities, and the breakdown of traditional levers, whether those were around quality, pricing, or margin. What once were seen as pillars of strategic differentiation became unstable or irrelevant in a digital-first world. And in some cases, the disruption was dramatic. So yes, if we say “design is dead,” we have to acknowledge that it’s part of a much bigger story. A whole era of business thinking and control mechanisms has been disrupted. Design just happens to be one of the most visible casualties

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Loft: We’re clearly at a crossroads where AI and data science are fundamentally  changing how we think about products and how solutions are delivered. In many organizations, the business conversation is increasingly centered around these technologies, but design often feels left out of that dialogue. How can design leaders play a more active role in shaping the AI and data-driven narrative, especially when it comes to foundational business solutions, not just efficiency tools? And how can disciplines like service design and systems design assert their relevance in this new context. Is this shift is part of a broader business narrative, not just something that impacted design specifically? In other words, is design just one of many disciplines being reshaped by larger organizational and economic forces?

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José Manuel Dos Santos: In many ways, design missed the first wave of this transformation: the data-driven revolution. With some exceptions, design never really became integrated into the data systems of large organizations. It’s not that designers didn’t want to engage with data; it's that the data teams never opened access. Even basic customer data, like insights from call centers, rarely made its way to design teams in a usable form. And we also have to be honest: 80% of corporate data is low-quality. My wife’s a data scientist, and she jokes that she’s more of a data janitor, because so much of the work is just cleaning and organizing it before it can be used. So, design wasn’t part of the data wave in any significant way. And now, with AI, we’re facing another shift, one that’s both exciting and deeply challenging. Most designers never learned to “speak machine” as John Maeda put it. We didn’t deeply engage with code, and now we’re mostly entering this next phase as AI “users”, not AI “builders”. The power users, the ones building LLMs, developing frameworks, shaping foundational tools, are largely the same technical groups as before. So yes, designers can use AI tools, generate prompts, prototype quickly, or create content. But those aren't inherently “design-exclusive” capabilities. Prompting and curation aren’t design’s exclusive domain; anyone can get good at that. Which brings us to the real challenge: if AI enables “everyone” in an organization to "design" something, be it a slide deck, product mockup, or customer journey, what then is the unique role of design leadership? Previously, we dealt with everyone having an opinion about design. But now, they can materialize those opinions, even generate high-fidelity visualizations or interactive concepts without us. That’s a fundamental shift. Anybody can now present a complete vision with photorealistic imagery and narrative built by AI, the old gatekeeping of prototyping and visualization is gone.

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That leaves us with a real question: if prompting and prototyping are now democratized, where does design add value?

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That leaves us with a real question: if prompting and prototyping are now democratized, where does design add value? My belief is that the next frontier for design is in “reduction”, “abstraction”, and “focus”. In a world flooded with possibilities, designers will be the ones who know how to edit, to identify the signal in the noise, to pull the one meaningful idea from a sea of generative outputs and refine it into something powerful. It’s about judgment, discernment what some might call taste. The future of design may be less about creating from scratch and more about identifying what truly matters, articulating the “why,” and shaping clarity from abundance. That’s the space I believe design can and must own.

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Loft: Would you say this brings design back to its editorial roots, where the real value lies in curating, distilling, and shaping meaning from a sea of possibilities?

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José Manuel Dos Santos: Exactly! And there’s a lot wrapped up in that. Because making those kinds of choices requires actual design work. We're not talking about some innate talent or instinct, like someone who, at six years old, could walk into a room and spot the perfect object. What we’re talking about is training, experience, judgment, and prioritization. Things like taste, context, timing, and nuance. These are soft skills, but incredibly complex ones. They’re not easily replicable by systems or AI. And they become even more critical when you're not just selecting something for yourself, but curating something meaningful for others. It’s one thing to say, “I love this.” It’s another to say, “This is the right thing for these 100, 1.000, 1M people,” and then craft the delivery so it resonates, so it lands in a memorable, effective way. That’s the art. And I believe it’s going to return in a big way. But as it does, the landscape of who participates in that process will change. Many people who don’t currently identify as designers will step into that space, and conversely, some who do call themselves designers today may struggle to stay relevant if they’re not engaging in that deeper, curatorial, and strategic layer of the work.

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Loft: Do you think we're seeing a broader paradigm shift across all creative industries, like film, graphic design, and illustration, where visual communication itself is being redefined? And is that what makes this moment in time feel so uniquely transformative?

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José Manuel Dos Santos: I have a bit of a radical theory about this. I think we’re on the verge of rediscovering the value of “hallucination”, and not just in the technological sense. Right now, we’re constantly frustrated when AI "hallucinates," when it generates outputs that don’t align with fact. But the truth is, human beings hallucinate, too. We imagine, we dream, we see patterns and make connections that aren’t always logical. Our history is filled with mad genius people and attempts to control or suppress that, whether it's through science, systems, or even substance regulation, but at its core, hallucination is also the birthplace of creativity. The machines hallucinate due to flawed data and loose correlations. But we hallucinate as a way to envision the unimaginable, to dream beyond boundaries. And as AI becomes increasingly predictable, standardized, and generalized, I think humans will instinctively lean into the opposite: strangeness, unpredictability, uniqueness. We’ll start to value weirdness again. We'll crave the imperfect, the poetic, the absurd because that’s what makes us feel human in a world increasingly polished by machines. Language, art, and expression, they’ll all begin to bend again. I believe poetry, speculative fiction, experimental design, all of it, will have a renaissance. Because when humans are pushed to the edge, we respond with reinvention. That’s the hopeful part: rediscovering tenderness, individuality, and the messy beauty of being human.

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Loft: Certainly! That’s a fascinating insight. In the evolution of design and creativity more broadly, the role of error and randomness has been undervalued? After all, many major breakthroughs, whether in design, music, or art seem to emerge from mistakes or unexpected accidents. Could embracing imperfection be essential to the next phase of creative evolution?

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José Manuel Dos Santos: Yes, I think that entire space will thrive because it’s part of a natural pendulum swing. The further we go in one direction toward hyper-efficiency, automation, and polished outputs the stronger the counter-movement becomes. It's the classic dynamic of trend and counter-trend. As someone who’s very human-centered, I find this exciting. I embrace imperfection, ambiguity, and all the messiness that comes with human creativity. While some people may be anxious about where things are headed, I see real opportunity here. I believe we’ll see a resurgence of design that leans into those qualities design that explores unpredictability, emotion, and the unexpected. And in that process, the definition of design and of who is considered a designer is going to shift. Those boundaries will blur. It’s going to be an expansive and transformative moment for the field.

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Loft: Which leads me perfectly to my last question. How can we, as designers and design leaders, leverage our unique perspective to expand our influence, not just within organizations, but across society more broadly?

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José Manuel Dos Santos: The first thing, I believe, is that designers need to get their hands dirty. Too often, there’s been a tendency, especially in recent years, for designers to stay tucked away in studios, working remotely, isolated from the real world. Contrary to popular belief, designers haven’t always been great collaborators or communicators. Many haven’t made the effort to step outside the studio, engage with real people, and immerse themselves in the messy, complex realities of life. But now, more than ever, that needs to change. As generative AI, tools like Figma, and other design platforms evolve, the designer's true value won’t come from staying behind the screen, it will come from showing up. From being in the field, understanding context, navigating ambiguity, and building human connection. Reality isn’t getting simpler, it’s getting more complex. The gap between what’s presented and what’s real, what’s shared publicly and what’s experienced privately, is growing.

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Designers need to live in that complexity to remain relevant. So, the question becomes: how do we train and lead designers to do that? It’s not enough to rely on “natural talent".

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Designers need to live in that complexity to remain relevant. So, the question becomes: how do we train and lead designers to do that? It’s not enough to rely on “natural talent.” Sure, there are prodigies, but most designers need to be trained to recognize what matters. We need to develop that ability to sift through 100 ideas and choose the one that’s worth pursuing and to know why. That takes more than instinct. It takes language, presence, influence, and a framework for decision-making. So if we want to expand our influence as designers and design leaders, we need to do two things: Push ourselves and our teams to engage with the world actively, physically, emotionally. Build educational models and leadership practices that train designers not just to make, but to discern, communicate, and lead.

That’s the challenge, and the opportunity.

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Loft: Thank you, this has been a truly engaging and thought-provoking conversation. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on where design is headed, the challenges we face, and the opportunities that lie ahead. These kinds of dialogues are exactly what we need to keep pushing our practice forward.

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