Nicole Alexandra Michaelis

Building things has become cheap. Prototyping a flow, generating a hundred copy variants, standing up a working interface: all of that used to be the expensive part and now it costs almost nothing. What that exposes is that the expensive part was never the making. It was the deciding. It was having the right people in the room feeling safe enough to have hard conversations. 

So the craft is moving. Less time spent producing the artifact, more time spent on the judgement calls around it: what deserves to exist, who it is for, what happens when it is wrong, what we are willing to be accountable for. Designers who only knew how to produce are in trouble. Designers who know how to decide are suddenly the most useful people in the building.

And: design has expanded. We're moving beyond app and web as interfaces into designing so much more: conversations, entire experiences, verdicts, teams. It's clearer than ever that every part of building and running a successful company is about design now.

The innovation that changes my work most directly is agents as a new user type. We have spent twenty years designing for humans looking at screens. Now a meaningful share of our traffic is a model acting on someone's behalf, and it needs different things: structure over polish, honesty about uncertainty, clear boundaries on what it may do without asking. Designing the interface between a person, their agent, and their money is a new problem space.

I think it even goes beyond that problem space: how will human consmption of products change as they rely more on agents? How will it affect our cognition, communication, what we like and want? How will we build connection?

So many dramatic deeply human questions to answer and design for.

I am also watching what this does to European product work specifically. There is a real pull towards importing whatever the American playbook says this quarter. I think local grounding, regulation, language, how an industry actually works in each market, is a competitive advantage rather than a constraint.