DX Perspective: Notes From The Future, Quiet Tech, and Leading With Context
Exploring notes from the future of design, examining why quiet tech may look more like Dune than Marvel, and diving into the lessons from Atlassian’s AI journey on leading with context.
Hi all —
Here’s your weekly dose of DX Perspective: what I’m noticing, saving, and thinking about as design (and leadership) gets rewired for an AI-native world. If something here makes you pause, forward it to a friend and tell them why.
kw picks
The Future Worth Building Is Human — Artificial intelligence can do more every day, but deciding what it should do is up to us: individuals, organizations, humanity as a whole.
Notes from the future of design — A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending a small gathering of design leaders in San Francisco to discuss how AI is reshaping the design industry.
The AI Productivity Paradox — We’ve been writing a lot lately about product teams that are clearly leveraging AI to deliver faster, yet their outcomes are not improving.
Netflix wants ‘AI fluency’ from everyone, but craft is still scarce — When Elizabeth Stone talks about the future of work at Netflix, she keeps circling back to a phrase that is easy to say and hard to pin down.
Building AI-Native Teams — How do we think about balancing mature products and customers who rely on stability with teams who are constantly experimenting and building the tools of the future? What happens when those worlds collide?
Design Org Dimensions: The Hidden Architecture — Welcome to Design Org Dimensions, a kind of living digital book, incorporating not just writing, but the actual tools and references Peter Merholz has created in his work shaping design organizations.
What I’m watching + listening to
Design Engineering Night 8: Brand Engineering with Daniel Linthwaite — Design Engineering Night 8: Brand Engineering with Daniel Linthwaite.
Quiet Tech: Why the Future May Look More Like Dune Than Marvel — “We all crave more humanity, more tactility, more contact with the real world. And AI done in the right way can be agentic and behind the scenes and be this kind of laid intelligence that sits underneath everything but doesn’t need to shout for your attention.”
Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era — Elizabeth Stone is the Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Netflix, where she oversees Engineering, Product, and Design.
Pixel Debate: Design in every team kills design — Pixel Debate: Design in every team kills design.
What I’m reading
Code is a Design Material — AI-driven tools grant us an undeniable superpower: the ability to spin up high-fidelity prototypes faster than we could previously imagine.
The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet — Matt Ström-Awn, an independent designer, works mostly with startups in their early stages.
Go Full Stack or Die — Coding is, by far, the killer use case for LLMs.
Siri AI is now Apple’s everything tool — Apple’s revamped Siri is more than a voice assistant; it’s now the backbone of the iPhone user experience.
Designs On the Future — Scholars from the Royal College of Art are rethinking design for the age of AI and its asymmetries of imagination.
Designing with futures: Research on the purposes and practices of engaging with the future in strategic design — The marriage between futures and design has expanded both fields. Besides adopting the methods and tools of futures studies, designers facilitate experiential and speculative futures through designing artefacts, stories and experiences.
Inside Letterform Archive with Rob Saunders — Curator and executive director Rob Saunders founded Letterform Archive in 2015 with typography, calligraphy, lettering, and graphic design artifacts that he’d been collecting for 40 years.
Emerging Tech
Autonomous Agents: Artists on Human–Machine Interaction — “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” This statement, made by Sol LeWitt in 1967, offers a link to the present moment.
How agents are transforming work — Agentic AI changes the unit of knowledge work from single interactions to delegated, long-horizon tasks.
The Future of Discovery — What happens when discovery shifts from something we actively pursue to something that increasingly happens to us?
Open Weights and American AI Leadership — In the 1980s, early open-source software pioneers challenged the prevailing belief that software would advance only if companies kept tight control over their code. This movement pushed for a transparent ecosystem where developers around the world could study, modify, and improve software.
3 Questions: Neural transparency and the future of AI design — Millions of people are now designing their own personalized artificial intelligence companions, yet most have little idea how those creations will actually behave.
Tools and Resources
Astryx Design System — An open source design system that’sfully customizable and agent ready.
Wondering — Bite-sized lessons, structured roadmaps, visuals and exercises all personalized to you.
Cavalry — Professional, real-time animation software.
Devouring Details — Devouring Details is an interactive reference manual for interaction-curious designers, containing 20 chapters with 20 downloadable React components.
Pattern 01 — Design for the System, Not the Surface — “Freed capacity is not value in itself; it is a leadership decision waiting to be made.” — with Cindy Chastain, former Mastercard executive.
Design system doc spec 0.15.2 — This standard puts design system docs in one shared format that any tool can read.
4 Types of Loops You Can Create in Claude Code — When we interact with Claude Code, we typically go through repeated cycles when completing a task, also known as loops.
Leading with Context: Lessons from Atlassian’s AI Journey — How CHROs and HR leaders can elevate AI adoption to workforce transformation as AI transforms work across departments.
My recent articles
🔈 Design Leadership at Scale
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I built a new 1-day intensive around the question I keep hearing from senior leaders: my role is evolving faster than I can keep up with. What’s the plan?
This is that plan. One day, a personal playbook you build in real time, and the honest conversation most design leaders aren’t having yet, about what to own, what to let go of, and how to make yourself undeniable.
DLS: Executive — Cohort 08, October 5–15
The flagship. Two weeks on building and leading a design organization at scale: strategy, influence, structure, and career. Designed from the ground up for Senior Directors, VPs, SVPs, and CDOs. Not retrofitted from general management. Built for you.
Ask My AI
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And please give me feedback. Which content is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a great weekend.
Rachel