From a privileged vantage point in the driving seat of the design team of some of Europe’s fastest growing companies, I have borne witness to a monumental shift in the responsibility shared by designers, and their business value in a world that is endlessly mutating — into one of more complexity and intersectionality, one of changing expectations for the role of any creator or builder, and one of eroding authorship and trust.

As much as the mechanisation of work has separated most individuals from the experience of witnessing its creation, new digital media from the internet to instant communication and film-making have continued to separate us from direct contact with the information and services we consume. Modernity worked to push apart the hands of the creator and consumer in every possible way — the writer became detached from the printing press, and the printing press became detached from the reader. Digitisation as a consequence of post-modernity has only served to compound this shift.

If the last half century of culture was defined by the information age — our accessibility to, and abundance of information with which to create — then the next half will surely be defined by the age of communication. The defining aesthetic of the late twentieth century was of streams of data, interactive interfaces, and ticker tapes of constant updates — building upon the design characteristics of early twentieth century’s Bauhaus movement through a flattening of cultural patterns and decoration in a way that displays information all-at-once; accessible and understandable, but devoid of character, or opinion.

Almost every piece of UI you’ve interacted with in the last decade is in some way a downstream consequence of this success of Bauhaus and designed modernism-at-large. And the next decade of UI may feel completely alien to it — because of what is happening both culturally; in the spread of misinformation, deepfakes, and post-truth politics, and what is happening technologically; through new generative technologies, artificial “intelligence”, and exponential digitisation.

As we move into the next quarter-century, designers are faced at a crossroads — what does it mean to design, truthfully, and what separates our business value from any other creative or non-creative mind in a reality where the cost of creating has dropped to nothing?

In my last decade, I’ve watched visual culture shift from the static to the interactive, from the crafted to the generated — from artefacts shaped exclusively by human hands to systems that generate and evolve independent of a single creator. My practice has grown alongside this transition, shaped as much by the tools I’ve used as by the questions those tools have raised.

My own practice reflects this belief; equal parts multi-disciplinary, equal parts inquisitive, scrutinising, and radical. And yours should be too.

Because business demands it, much of my work sits at this intersection of technology and meaning: designing products that are rarely touched, brands that exist primarily as signals, and experiences that unfold entirely through screens. This has made me increasingly conscious not just of how things are made, but of what is lost in the distance between creator and consumer. Design, in this context, has become less an act of decoration and more an act of translation: a way of giving form to things that are otherwise invisible.

Many companies now sell invisible and untraceable products—the form of which, are never touched or felt, and only experienced digitally. The challenge of visual communicators is obvious — and our direction is as much an exercise in philosophy and truth-seeking as it is in mark-making. Above all, my work hoping to both fulfil immediate design needs in-terms of output, functionality, and appeal — but to also teach those who use it to more carefully scrutinise the material world.

So while the superstructures of our digital and physical world continue to arrange themselves in increasingly complex and layered ways, design must work to simplify and rationalise this information and decipher it into a digestible and truthful reality — a divine mission during our age of post-truth politics and difficult moral relativism.