It’s over. UX design — the field I’ve worked in for the last three decades — isn’t long for this world, at least not in its current form. Most people in the field haven’t realized it yet, but generative AI will utterly transform knowledge work, and this includes UX and interaction design.

Will these disciplines disappear? Of course not. Few things ever go away completely. That’s good: earlier mental models help us navigate new spaces and we need conscientious people designing human-centered experiences. But much of the craft will look radically different. There will also be far fewer jobs.

So what do you do if you expect to have a career in this space? I tell students to look to things that are unlikely to change. Here, I’ll highlight three that are likely to stand the test of time. Obviously they’re not the only ones, but they’re top of mind for me.

Human Psychology

The earliest examples of writing — cuneiform clay tablets — are almost five thousand years old. Many represent inventories and contracts: a testament to basic features of human psychology. You and I share key attributes with ancient Sumerians; it’s likely our descendants will share them too.

  • People have similar sensemaking abilities. Most of us have similar senses and process signals in similar ways. The ground is below, the sky is above — up, down. We perceive events unfolding in time. We extend our cognitive capacities by manipulating our environments.

  • People aren’t fully present. Instead, much of our behavior is based on abstractions (models) of how we expect the world to work. Sometimes models map accurately to reality, but some don’t. This is because…

  • People are subject to cognitive biases. Our models are often wrong in either small or big ways; we misunderstand things and believe what we want to believe. (Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”)

  • People are driven by motivations. We don’t act randomly. Instead, we have goals. It could be providing for the family and group; it could be securing precious resources. Striving toward goals alters behavior: you can predict people’s behaviors by understanding their motivations.

  • People are social creatures. We can collaborate when motivations align and fight when motivations conflict. It’s not a coincidence that many of those clay tablets are business contracts: formalizing agreements saves lots of trouble.

These characteristics of human psychology are foundational. As with all previous technologies, generative AI amplifies our abilities, for good or ill. But it’s ahistorical to assume it’ll change our nature.

Basic Economics

Again, look at those Sumerian tablets: many of them are business records. As social creatures, people transact: one person has a surfeit of what another needs; they exchange goods and services and make each other better off.

  • Markets are ecosystems. Some people provide goods and services, others consume goods and services, and still others provide infrastructure (legal, informational, etc.) that allows for orderly transacting.

  • Healthy markets enable orderly emergence. The ideal is a dynamic interplay between supply and demand. Consumers often don’t know what they want; providers often don’t know which offerings will work. It’s an infinite game: the ultimate goal isn’t “winning” but keeping the game going.

  • Competition spurs innovation. Providers aim to “beat” other providers; differentiated offerings stand out. Diversity waxes and wanes from the bottom-up. But unchecked, markets can produce monopolies or monopsonies, endstates that destroy dynamism.

  • Profit is a key motivator. Often, the most dynamic actors are those driven to enrich themselves or their groups. They introduce disruptions that fundamentally change things. Ignore them — and the profit motive — at your peril.

  • Consumers are irrational actors. Few transactions are driven by careful consideration of facts. Instead, people are driven by FOMO, paranoia, peer pressure, and all sorts of other “illogical” reasons. (See the section on cognitive biases above.)

Notice how many of these axioms are based on psychology. Human dynamics! Again, technology will amplify rather than eliminate these things.

Systems Thinking

This subject is the dearest to me, since it’s the one I teach at CCA. The basic idea is understanding the big picture in any situation: it’s essential to grok trees, but it’s also possible to know and steward forests.

  • Systems are collections of interrelated parts. Parts make up wholes; you can’t understand the whole without taking in the parts. Structure matters: you can lay out the components of a 3-Series BMW on the floor, but only by assembling them in a particular way will the car move you at 120 KPH.

  • Systems can be understood to have purposes. Notice I didn’t say that they have purposes: these are subjective assessments. The purpose of that BMW may be to get you to your job on time or to impress a potential mate. Those aren’t the same; both are valid.

  • Systems are dynamic. You can monitor and control the flow of certain stocks through the system as it operates. The BMW needs a source of energy to get it moving in a coherent direction: a reservoir inside the vehicle holds chemical or electrical energy until the system transforms it into kinetic energy.

  • System boundaries are subjective. Where do you draw a line between a system and its environment? It depends. When designing a vehicle with an internal combustion engine, you can take the network of gasoline pumping stations for granted — but not if you’re designing a hydrogen-powered vehicle.

  • Systems can exhibit emergent behavior. Complex systems can behave unpredictably. Second- and third-order effects can have a large impact on people, societies, and the environment. Modeling is essential when designing (or intervening in) complex systems. Mind Chesterton’s fence.

Specialization and reductionism were essential characteristics of — and desirable career attributes in — the industrial age. But now, grokking the big picture is more important than wallowing in minutiae.

Lindy in Effect

In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about what he called the Lindy effect: the idea that the life expectancy of some things is proportional to their age. That is, the older something is, the longer you can expect it to stick around.

When living through radical technological change, look to things and ideas that have stood the test of time. It’s safe to assume new technologies will be in service to — rather than upend — these long-lived things.

Markets are systems driven by human psychology. At a high level, the question isn’t whether such structures will continue but what form they will take and toward what ends. At lower levels, the key question is how to create value and improve the human condition within these structures.

Designers who understand this and find new ways to create value within long-standing constraints will likely be busy — even if their day-to-day work looks quite different. Sadly, I expect many will resist the change and be swept away by the market — as it does, implacably, by design.