Running Render Weekly and teaching through Offsite, and now with about a decade of professional experience under my belt, I’ve had a front-row seat to how design is evolving. Between client work, community projects, and helping junior designers level up, you start to notice patterns. You see where people struggle, where the industry is shifting, and where AI is starting to play a real role.

So, with all the noise around AI right now, I’ll say this upfront: I’m generally optimistic.

A lot of what excites me is how these tools are broadening what a single designer can do. It’s like having a team of very capable interns working for you 24/7. They might not always get it right on the first try, but they can crank out iterations, explore variations, and generally lighten the load. For solo designers or small teams, that’s a game-changer.

Of course, there are concerns about energy use and resource efficiency with AI. But we’ve seen this story before. Early computing wasn’t exactly eco-friendly, and yet, through innovation, we’ve made huge strides in efficiency. I think AI will follow a similar path. There’s even a case to be made that AI will optimize itself.

One of the biggest shifts is how AI is transforming the designer’s role. It’s moving us from being executioners to authors, directors, and curators. For some, that might feel like a loss. The craft of making things with your own hands is fulfilling. Especially in industrial design, where so much of the value comes from creating tangible, physical experiences.

But that execution role isn’t going away entirely. What I do see happening is a pendulum swing. As AI-generated content floods our screens and the digital space becomes oversaturated, people will crave real, physical experiences again. Products you can touch. Spaces you can walk through. Information you can witness with your own eyes. In a world where digital content can be faked, the real stuff gets more valuable.

That’s where strong design fundamentals come back into play. AI can move pixels around, but it doesn’t understand materials. It doesn’t know manufacturing constraints. It doesn’t know how people actually use physical products. You only learn that by getting your hands dirty and spending time understanding how things are made.

That’s the part junior designers can’t skip. There’s a real risk of newer designers leaning too hard on AI before they’ve had the chance to build that foundation. If they’re not learning form, proportion, materials, how things physically come together, they’ll miss the fundamentals. They’ll get stuck pulling the slot machine lever on image generators, hoping for good results, but not really knowing what makes a design good.

The best AI-assisted work we’re seeing today comes from people who already know how to design. People who can sketch, model, and communicate their ideas. AI helps them work faster, but it’s building on what they already understand.

That’s the balance. AI is amazing for pattern recognition, for synthesizing research, for speeding up heavy workflows. You’d be foolish to ignore it. But when it comes to concept development and form, we have to make sure junior designers are still learning how to think critically and communicate their ideas clearly, without skipping steps.

Zooming out a bit, I do think it’s a good thing that more seasoned designers are exploring these tools.

It’s generally been good for the industry when new tools and processes come along. Sure, there’s always a learning curve, always pushback about how it’s going to affect how we work and fears about people getting lazy.

But that’s been true every single time a new tool shows up.

The Adobe Suite replaced typesetting. Rendering replaced hand-drawing everything. 3D printing changed how we prototype. None of these erased the craft. They just accelerated parts of the process. AI is no different. It’s just another layer of acceleration.

Take Vizcom, for example. Tools like that aren’t replacing anything in our toolbox. I’m still going to build out final CAD and still put together a full render package when I need precise control and have to communicate exact design intent. But what Vizcom is doing is bridging this awkward gap between early sketching and full-on CAD renders, the in-between concept level work that used to take hours or even days to get polished enough to share, but not so polished that it stops feeling like a concept. That’s a huge value-add.

Now, onto the concerns that come with this. The conversation around AI and authorship is important. I don’t think designers need to show every step of how they’re using AI, but the work they put out should feel original. That’s always been the case, even before AI.

As soon as you publish a design, you’re putting it out into the public conversation. People will see it, be inspired by it, and remix it in their heads. Whether we like it or not, we’re all intelligence models, taking in information and forming new ideas from it. That’s not a new phenomenon.

The real issue is when someone takes your idea and copies it too closely. That’s always been the line. If you make something that feels like a one-to-one ripoff of my work, I’m going to be annoyed. But if you build on it, evolve it, make it your own, that’s what keeps the industry moving forward. That’s what makes design interesting.

With AI, this dynamic hasn’t changed. The tools might be new, but the responsibility is still on the designer to make sure their output is unique. Tools don’t plagiarize. People do.

You can give AI tools to anyone, but without the discipline of industrial design - understanding how to optimize mass manufacturing processes and how to create emotional connections through physical products, the results will always fall flat.

Industrial design isn’t going anywhere. Craft might evolve, some hands-on skills might fade, but as long as we live in a world where things are made and sold, the theory and discipline behind industrial design will stay relevant. The designers with strong opinions, trained judgment, and a sharp eye for quality will continue to stand out. AI doesn’t change that.

At the end of the day, the cream rises to the top.

Good design was never about the tool. It’s about thoughtful implementation, an understanding of process, and how to marry that with culture. And at least for now, I don’t think that’s going anywhere.