In a recent article on a16z’s blog entitled Software is Automating Design. What Does that Mean for Designers?, content designer Carly Ayres (@carlyayres) points out how consumer-friendly, cloud-based tools like Squarespace, Webflow, Figma, Miro, and Loom have added so much accessibility to digital design over the past decade.

Now that so many design tasks can be done by anyone, anywhere... what’s a designer these days, anyway?

Ayres points out that while tools have empowered the basic tasks of design, technology needs strategic design more than ever.

Why?

• Digital transformation brought about a wave of self-service that creates a technological separation between companies and their customers. Designers and researchers are the intermediaries that look out for how our real, human users experience our brands (or the systems we program to represent our brands).

• Design systems. The designs we create are no longer one-off in nature; they are nodes in interconnected, multi-channel systems. This multiplies the challenge of designing them well.

• Collaboration. Our source files used to sit idle on our computers in our cubicles while slick PDFs were presented in the conference room. They are now the center of collaboration, and the executives’ mouse cursors are often fluttering by while teams work. This requires a new level of agility and facilitation.

I share Ayres’ optimism about our field, as I discussed in my 2021 piece, State of UX: Forecast Partly Sunny.

Like Ayres, I believe that the role of the designers has expanded to require more thoughtfulness, complexity and facilitation than ever before. We’re at the front lines of humanity, bringing ethics and personality to the machines.