John Weiss

If your personas describe users in isolation, you’re limiting impact. Real work is collaborative, constrained, and increasingly shaped by automated systems. Our design artifacts need to reflect that reality. This piece explores what it means to expand personas beyond the single user, and why relationships between actors matter just as much as the actors themselves. https://lnkd.in/g4dxrrHx #designexcellence #designleadership #userpersona #AIintegration

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I had the chance to explore a question close to my heart: How do we weave what’s human into AI patterns? For me, intelligence is more than computation—it’s empathy, creativity, and ethics. As designers and leaders, we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to shape AI in ways that honor humanity, not just efficiency. Hear why design culture matters more than ever in the age of AI, and share your perspective: What values should we insist on weaving into the future of AI?

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Leadership isn’t about control, it’s about care. In a great essay for MassArt Design Innovation, Peilan Liang writes: “We need your presence, not just your plans.” Her piece is a gentle call for a new model of design leadership, one grounded in listening, co-creation, and trust. For anyone starting out and navigating complex, fast-moving teams, this one’s worth reading. https://lnkd.in/eKMMHnPh #DesignLeadership #MassArtMDES #PsychologicalSafety #LeadWithCare #HumanFirstLeadershi

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Design is evolving fast. We’re no longer just shipping artifacts, rather, we’re shaping intelligent systems that learn, adapt, and co-create with us. This next era asks more of us:
more judgment, orchestration, contextual intelligence, and the ability to guide systems that won’t stay static. Our work now is to design conditions for emergence and to keep humanity in the loop. Here’s my take on what’s ahead: https://lnkd.in/gjbey3nZ #designexcellence #designleadership #humancentereddesign #designingwithAI #enterprisedesign

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Now that there have been over 170 presentations at CDFAM - Computational Design Symposium events I have put together a searchable index of all the recordings available so that it is a little bit easier to find relevant content. https://lnkd.in/gRMyXSAD The tag indexing is not perfect, AI generated based on the, AI generated transcript from Youtube, but better than trying to use the site search, google or youtube as a search engine. If you would like to contribute, submissions are open to present next year in Barcelona, NYC and Tokyo. https://lnkd.in/e_UeJQ3A

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This is what investing in AI in design looks like. As with many other job families, the design industry focuses on what might the impact of AI be: will it lower the quality with slop? Will it replace humans? Etc But I don't see much focus on to understand and really capitalise on the potential AI brings to design. We are largely treating it as any other tool: a way to get incrementally better. At best it's a short course for the designers, at worst it's expecting designers to already know how to use it. But AI has the potential for making radical shifts and leaps. I'd love to hear, and learn, from anyone who is making significant strides to drive AI transformation in design.

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With no affiliation, sharing this as I know it will be good. Peter Merholz's ideas have been instrumental in my shaping of design teams. As iF Design point out here - the right environment around the design team is key to producing a successful team. The role of the leader is to create that environment.

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1n5ide the JSON Cockpit — But Would It Fly? I skipped Figma and went straight to text generation. . A few hundred lines of JSON told VEO3 what to render: – monochrome glass-pane HUD – rectilinear 3-D route corridor – parallax map grid that tilts as the craft banks – glowing meters, 80-ms panel slides, even a reduced-motion mode. . The result: a sci-fi dashboard that looks ready for take-off. . But would it fly? 🛫 . #JSONPrompt #CinematicUI #CockpitHUD #VEO3 #GenerativeDesign #FutureOfInterface #Suno5

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Had a blast reflecting on Figma's recent milestones and exploring the future of design on Fast Company's By Design podcast. We dug into big questions: * What role does design play in a world where anyone can turn an idea into a product—especially with tools like Figma Make? * What might the future of interfaces look like? * And how are we, as toolmakers, evolving Figma to help usher in this new era? Huge thanks to Mark Wilson and Liz Stinson for the thoughtful conversation—and for continuing to champion the power of design.

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Couldn't agree more. We've seen firsthand how early human validation turns uncertainty into clarity—and skepticism into trust. In healthcare, that's not just good design practice, it's a requirement.

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Healthcare continues to advance in what it can do, but the experience of moving through it hasn’t evolved at the same pace. Patients still navigate fragmented systems, unclear information, and processes that require interpretation instead of offering clarity. That gap is structural. I wrote about where this shows up, why it happens, and what it means for the future of healthcare design. If you’re thinking about the intersection of design, technology, and care, this is something we need to address. #HealthcareDesign #DigitalHealth #UX #HealthTech #PatientExperience

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The future of usability isn’t just clickable—it’s conversational I am revisiting classic usability heuristics—not to rewrite them, but to reinterpret them respectfully through the lens of GenAI and chatbot design. Because while Nielsen’s principles still offer solid ground, they weren’t made for systems that talk back, quite literally. We now have the responsibility to design for ambiguity, adaptivity, and emotion. To let language be the interface—without losing clarity. #ConversationalUX #UXHeuristics #ChatbotDesign #ResponsibleAI #DesignWithAI #GenerativeAI #UXResearch

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NEW EPISODE Tomorrow! The Design Thinking 101 podcast features Jon Fukuda, co-founder of Limina.co! Discover how design operations drives team excellence, prevents burnout, and elevates both human-centered practices and business innovation. Listen now: https://buff.ly/VnjlZRg #DesignOps

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Yesterday at Big Design, I spoke about a reality many of us are feeling: Teams are leaner. Timelines are tighter. And while AI is accelerating delivery, design’s strategic voice has opportunities to grow. This post captures that tension well, and more importantly, the opportunity in front of us. Design isn’t disappearing, but it is evolving. Those who lead through this shift can’t do it by clinging to old definitions and competencies of what design used to be. They’ll do it by stepping forward and building trust across functions by driving clarity, speaking in terms of business value and using AI as a force multiplier. We can only gain influence by showing up differently than we have been. If this conversation resonates, or if your team’s in the middle of this shift too, I’d love to talk. As a community, we're all in this together. Let's lead through it. I believe we're best positioned to.

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Had a great time interviewing Erika Hall for our journal! She discusses misconceptions about design research and what it takes for organizations to learn and make better decisions. Should be a good primer on design research: https://lnkd.in/dUck-QXD

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My take on year three of Anomali by Design: three quick stories (and a thank you). Navigating small business ownership—particularly as a designer—has been a whole thing in and of itself for me. How I've perceived, and framed, the administration side of the operations (re: any time I'm not creating, collaborating, or strategizing) as "drudgery," when in fact it's a privilege to assume. I very transparently spoke about that with Kristina Driskill DMA, SEAC, CBC on her new podcast's first episode, in fact, which you can view here (https://lnkd.in/gDr3KD5e). In any case, three for year three: First: fulfillment. Beyond having the opportunity to collaborate with those who inspire me, there’s joy in the small wins: the follow-up factory floor observation that reframes a product decision, the prototype that saves weeks of rework, the photo or short film that finally tells why a maker spends the hours they do. Those moments don’t scale easily, but they change outcomes. Second: responsibility. Running a studio means stewarding culture and craft. We care about making design durable—not just fast. Putting all that "design is 'connection' made manifest" stuff I talk about into actual practice, with actual people, in actual engagements. Third: gratitude. To the clients who trusted us to do the full job (research through launch), to the collaborators who continue to show up with vulnerability and curiosity, and to those who engage with what we continue to create: thank you. Particularly in the era of AI, organizations prize speed. Speed for speed's sake, without rigor and intention, comes at a cost (largely: the human one—for all its respective connotations). For me, year three has been about leaning into that tension: bringing disciplined, repeatable ways of working and refusing to let them eclipse the making itself. If you’ve ever started something small and felt the weight and the joy of guiding it forward, you’ll know this feeling. And if you’re curious about how we pair strategy with maker-level attention, I’d love to connect. #design #hcd #AI #productdesign #designagency #chicago #business

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In many organizations, UX has always existed in a delicate tension, navigating the space between creating value and being fully recognized. Our work spans research, design, iteration, and strategy, yet these practices have long struggled to find a consistent place. UX often sits at the intersection of multiple teams and processes, where different roles believe they have it covered, leading to gaps where user insights and experience issues are missed. Stakeholders control budgets, timelines, and priorities, and even when UX adds value, it can feel optional or marginalized. Adoption has been uneven, with some teams embracing research and testing while others skip it entirely, which reinforces a pattern where UX is seen as nice-to-have rather than essential. Even when products launch without deliberate UX involvement, some of them turn out "fine", which reinforces the perception that careful research, testing, and design might not be essential. These patterns highlight how difficult it has been for UX to secure a consistent, central role in product creation. Quantitative UX methods, such as metrics, analytics, and A/B tests, are often adopted first because they feel objective and easy to integrate. Qualitative methods, like interviews, discovery, and concept validation testing, are harder to sell, even though they uncover insights early and guide better decisions. When most products do not fully fail, it can be hard to demonstrate the value of these practices, even if we believe they matter. We try to take every opportunity to show what UX is and why it matters, but it often has not been fully realized. Some organizations have co-cultivated a UX culture, but in many places it remains on the sidelines. Perhaps the challenge is not just how we share our work, but that UX has never fully found its place in the way products are built and decisions are made. And lately, I wonder if I am advocating for a practice that never fully took root. Did UX fail to reach its full potential because there was no opportunity for the level of disruption needed to realize it fully? Other factors, like the rapid influx of new practitioners, inconsistent practices, or limited integration into decision-making, may have contributed, but the real barrier may have been the lack of disruption at the scale required. Maybe we have just been waiting for AI to flip the table? So far, we are mostly teaching ourselves new tools to do what we have always done, but if UX is going to truly take root, we need to think about how to craft a practice that fits this new reality and develop new ways to make the case for its value. Are we ready for that shift, or will we face the same challenges again? Can we make it survive this transition, or will it shift into something different as the field evolves? #UX #UserExperience #UXResearch #DesignLeadership #ProductDesign #UXStrategy

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