Deep Dive: Andy Budd on the Future of the Design Industry

Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. Andy argues we hit "peak designer" around 2021–22, and that we're now in an era of Schrödinger's design and nobody has opened the box. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org.

We talk about taste of course, but Andy points out that everyone thinks they have taste. He also revisits his poker-versus-chess framing — designers study the board and hate mistakes while their peers just want to play every hand. We end on a genuinely unsettled note about the industry itself. How are your house painting skills?

LINKS

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/07/bull-and-bear-case-digital-design-age-ai/

The Six Levels of Adaptive Software
https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/06/the-six-levels-of-adaptive-software

AI and the Mangrove Problem
https://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problem

The Growth Equation book
https://www.andybudd.com/book/

design + AI Summit — Brighton Dome, 24–25 September 2026
https://designplusaisummit.com/

Andy Budd's blog
https://www.andybudd.com/

Smilla’s Sense of Snow book
https://amzn.to/4znTIPt

Pattern Recognition book
https://amzn.to/4znk9F5