Not every generation of designers is made equal.
The Bauhaus movement, born in the political tension of interwar Europe, gave us the first modern design revolution. It was minimalism with ideology - clarity as an act of resistance. After the war, as economies recovered and optimism returned, abstraction and pop-art replaced propaganda. The designer’s task shifted from persuasion to aspiration.
By the time our parents were “keeping up with the Joneses,” design had become the language of desire. Posters sold dreams. Packaging sold status. Media multiplied. The role of design expanded from craft to culture.
Then the internet arrived - and with it, to put it frankly, chaos.
In the late 1990s, most people weren’t ready for digital interfaces. Websites were labyrinths of novelty and frustration. Slow dial-up speeds and bad usability turned curiosity into abandonment.
This failure was also our opportunity. Out of it came an obsession with usability, accessibility, and human-computer interaction. The term user experience began to take shape.
Suddenly, design wasn’t just about how things looked; it was about how they worked.
During the dot-com boom, the industry professionalised overnight. The single title “designer” splintered into a dozen: UI, UX, IA, IxD, prototyper, creative technologist. The design studio became a microcosm of the organisation itself - a network of specialists instead of a single creative brain.
But with scale came fragmentation.
Digital aesthetics evolved quickly: simpler layouts, readable screens, fewer distractions. Designers traded decorative flair for functional focus. Yet every technological advance brought new complexity. Flash promised interactivity but broke accessibility. The director dazzled but failed to scale.
We learned the same lesson over and over again: novelty doesn’t equal progress.
When broadband arrived, businesses discovered that websites weren’t marketing accessories - they were storefronts. Brand consistency across every digital touchpoint became the new holy grail. Out of that need, design systems were born.
They were meant to unite. To create coherence at speed.
But somewhere along the way, “scale” became a vanity metric. Companies equated size with success - the more designers, the better the design. Rockefeller would have smiled at the logic: growth for growth’s sake.
Design was never supposed to be about headcount. It was supposed to be about alignment.
The modern UX industry, for all its frameworks and empathy maps, often confuses collaboration with clarity. Teams grow larger but not smarter. Titles multiply faster than outcomes. The more we try to structure creativity, the less creative we become.
We’ve turned design into a factory line. This, ironically, the very model it once sought to escape.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting influence or specialisation. But when the field fractures into functions - UX, UI, research, service design, ops - we also risk losing the whole picture. Design stops being a point of view and becomes a process chart.
So, let’s be honest: “cool” isn’t working.
Cool makes us look busy. Cool fills portfolios and decks. But cool rarely changes the system.
Real impact comes from the unglamorous work of integration. The quiet discipline of connecting dots across messy organisations. Scale, after all, isn’t about how many people you have. It’s about how well they move together.
