One thing we should realise by now is that change is a constant. Working in digital design, this provides both challenge and adventure.
Design Careers: Timeline or Trendline?
Sometimes I wonder: is my career a timeline or a trendline?
In the early 2000s, we were swept up in the dot-com boom. By 2007, the iPhone and Facebook had shifted everything—our design work lived in Photoshop, and mobile thinking began to dominate. The 2010s brought responsive standards and a push away from Waterfall practices. Tools like InVision and Sketch emerged. Agile was no longer aspirational—it was expected.
Now, in the 2020s, we’re designing in Figma, layering AI into our workflows, and thinking in terms of automation and augmentation.
But here’s a constant: we always love the current tools.
I still remember being told, “You’ll never need to upgrade from this!” when looking at those beige desktop PCs in the 1990s. I also recall the transition from 800-pixel-wide websites to 1024. Yes, that’s how old I am.
The truth is that tools and technologies are fleeting—what’s “standard” today becomes a footnote tomorrow. And what users touch is evolving even faster than what we use to design for them.
Humans Are Terrible at Predicting the Future
Consider a few moments of collective misjudgment:
- In 2003, MySpace and Flickr appeared and were expected to dominate online activity well into the future.
- By 2005, YouTube had launched and the idea of streaming movies online seemed like science fiction.
- In 2007, an IBM executive dismissed the iPhone, predicting it would fail.
- In 2008, Google Chrome launched to skepticism—many thought it wouldn’t last.
The same is true for our profession. We can’t reliably predict what designers will be working on five or ten years from now. But we do know this: everything builds on what came before.
Even the iPhone, which felt like a revolution, was the product of years of evolution (The first smart phone, by IBM, was released in 1994). Likewise, massive digital transformations I once worked on—projects that took years and cost millions—are now gone. But some of their design DNA lives on, mostly in the information architecture we laid down.
That’s a big part of our work: building foundations that others can stand on.
What Will We Be Designing in the Future?
We don’t know—and that’s what makes it exciting.
At SEEK, for example, we’re investing heavily in AI-powered experiences. It’s a leap into the unknown. But that’s part of the job: betting on the future, staying adaptable, and working closely with people along the way.
Because in the end, our work isn’t just about tools or methods. It’s about humans.
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