S3•E7 Emerging Patterns in Design Leadership 2026
This Is A Prototype
Host Doug Powell joins six graduate students from Washington University in St. Louis to discuss their research report, 'Emerging Patterns: Design
Key takeaways
- 93% of surveyed design leaders expect significant changes to their design toolstack within the next five and years.
- The rise of agentic AI tools is blurring the traditional distinction between individual contributors (ICs) and management tracks.
Main topics
- Evolution of the Design Toolstack
- AI and Agentic Tools in Design
Notable quotes
Design really isn't about the function, the job function of design. It's about a way of thinking, it's about a way of working, a way of leading.
Conclusion
The episode highlights that while technological disruption is inevitab
Transcript preview
Speaker 7 (0:01) It got me thinking, a lot of our discussions in class have been about how design really isn't about the function, the job function of design. It's about a way of thinking, it's about a way of working, a way of leading. Speaker 3 (0:13) Hello, I'm Doug Powell. Welcome to This is a Prototype, the design leadership podcast. It's been a while since I've posted new episodes of this series, and I'm excited to share some new material with you in the months ahead. Part of what's kept me busy during this hiatus has been teaching. In addition to the online course for mid-career design leaders that I teach in partnership with IF Design Academy, I'm also on the faculty of two universities in the U.S. Duke University, where I teach in the Pratt School of Engineering, and Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach in the Sam Fox School of Design. and last spring I spent a full semester on campus at Wash U teaching a seminar on design leadership as part of the newly launched Master of Design or MDes graduate program. A central component of this seminar was a semester-long research project in which the students and I examined the emerging persona of the designer as leader in this current era of the profession. We were curious about the paths that brought today's design leaders into these roles, the experiences that shaped them along the way, and the patterns that might help us understand how design leadership will continue to evolve in the years ahead. The students surveyed nearly 120 design leaders globally across a variety of positions and roles and conducted 11 in-depth interviews. Additionally, we had discussions with the authors of three of the best books on design leadership. Maria Jadis, co-author of Changemakers, How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Rama Girawo, author of Creative Leadership Born from Design. And Phil Gilbert, author of Irresistible Change, a Blueprint for Earning Buy-in and Breakout Success. The output of this project is a newly published report we've called Emerging Patterns, Design Leadership in 2026. A link to this report is included in the show notes for this episode. Six of the 10 students in the Design Leadership Seminar joined me for a conversation to reflect on our semester together and the findings of the Emerging Patterns Research Study. I'm joined in this episode by Matt Grossman, Andrew Pangy, Ashley Jiang, Jude Licea, Tejas Garg, and Jillian Jackson. We open our discussion hearing from Matt Grossman. Speaker 7 (2:55) My name is Matt. I'm Speaker 3 (2:57) a Speaker 7 (2:57) graduating senior from Baltimore, Maryland, and I'll be graduating with a BA in communication design and a second major in math and computer science. Professionally, I'm mostly interested in creative tooling, but also interested in civic technology and designing for virtual and augmented reality. And after graduation, I'll be moving to San Francisco to work at Adobe as an associate product designer on the Acrobat team. Speaker 3 (3:21) So, so much of what we've been talking about here, Matt, you know, kind of feeds into this immediate future path that you have for yourself. And I imagine a lot of the conversations we had, the conversations you were having as you, as you got into the research in the, you know, you had a little, some thought bubbles, right? As, as you were envisioning. your own future and holding it up against what you're hearing from the design leaders we were interacting with, right? Speaker 7 (3:52) Yeah, totally. And it feels like a lot of the findings that we had throughout our research, and I'm sure we'll talk about this once we get into the findings, was about creative tooling and kind of the future of what that will look like. And so it was really exciting to be doing this research throughout the semester. I'm getting ready to head off to San Francisco in about three months. Speaker 3 (4:10) Well, let's jump into that tooling insight because that was one of the big ideas that came out of the project that kind of caught the attention of all of us as we scanned and synthesized the quantitative survey. Matt, you want to kind of give us a quick summary of what we heard from nearly 120? design leaders about tooling? Speaker 7 (4:40) Yeah, so probably by far the most interesting result of the quantitative survey that we did was that 93 % of the respondents said that they're expecting the design tool stack to change pretty significantly over the next five years. And that was 66 % saying five out of five on the Likert scale. And so we were really kind of shocked. at the unanimity of like all of the design leaders. There wasn't a single person that said that they didn't expect the tool stack to change at all. And when we talked about it as a class, we talked about the fact that this tool change isn't really something that's new to design, that design has always been changing the tools that we use, and it really hasn't ever been about the tools. It's been Sketch, it's been Photoshop, it's been Dreamweaver and Flash in the early days of the internet. And so it's not surprising that the tool stack is going to change, but obviously kind of in the moment that we're in right now with artificial intelligence and generative AI, along with some other like... non-AI industry forces that are pushing the tooling around. It is really setting us up for kind of a drastic change in the way that we use our tools in the next five years. The interviews we did really focused on... coding and how designers are going to be expected to be building working prototypes in code. And that was probably the biggest tool shift that we're expecting. But there were some other ones like these free professional tools that are popping up, UC Canvas, Affinity, being made available to anybody for free. And that's like kind of a professional replacement to Creative Cloud software. Lots of exciting things happening in the world of creative tooling and should be exciting to see what happens in the next few years as we get further into this. Speaker 3 (6:25) Yeah. You know, in many ways, I think it's an expected finding. If you ask the question the way we did, you know, do you expect your tool stack to change in the next three to five years? I mean, we're bound to get a very affirmative set of answers. And yet it was just so emphatic. And for me, it also opened up a whole bunch of questions that hang off of that. particular insight, which is, you know, for instance, if the tool stack is changing, then what else is going to change? You know, we also, there are implications for team composition, for organization, for operations, for metrics, all of these different aspects of how design leaders are functioning and what they're accountable for could be. also changing in that same dramatic way. Great. Thank you, Matt, for that. We'll circle back with you in a moment here. But who would like to go next and introduce themselves and share some insights? Speaker 5 (7:40) Yeah, I'll go next. Hey, everyone. I'm Andrew Panji, current master's in design student in human-computer interaction and emerging technology from Jakarta, Indonesia. After graduating my undergrad back in 2016, I kind of had my start in brand and graphic design. And a big kind of focus, especially in my early, early career, was this emphasis on communication and storytelling. I kind of ran a small motion graphic shop with a buddy of mine that could bring videos for everything from social media to investor pitches for a lot of early stage startups. Eventually kind of shifted more towards the UX and product design spaces. That was sort of picking up. And I'm kind of back in school, really excited to dig my teeth into my particular interest in digital interfaces that do not distract, do not kind of extract, but rather serve as conduits for grounding and presence. Yeah, one thing that kind of responding to that, the comment on tooling, even in my work, kind of noticing how we spoke about IC and management as being two different. ways that designers function and how a lot of these agentic tools sort of start to demand ICs to act in more managerial ways and perhaps managers to act in more craft-oriented ways. Even in my work with tools like Cursor and Replit and the like, for example, in interface design where kind of writing context markdown files is sort of like training a junior counterpart or chatting is sort of like coaching. And tweaking things in code together is sort of like a co-design session. So I think there was another insight, the flip to the, what, 93 % expect tooling to change. We had more mixed responses to how the industry will change. So it seems like we're in this. moment of it's yes the tools are changing but we're not sure how it's going to do so um i'm really excited to kind of be part of that next next 2.0 evolution of the project to to look into that yeah Speaker 3 (9:39) that uh and that that career um career ladder that you referenced earlier, the IC versus the management track was something that we, especially early in the semester, as we were kind of making sense of what a design leader is and how that career journey maps out in many sort of scaled organizations. There's a fairly established now sort of career framework that has leaders at a certain point in their journey, kind of splitting between an individual contributor and