As Don Norman shares in “Design for a Better World,” with every human-centered invention comes a shadow of unintended consequence. We’ve optimized for efficiency, convenience, and productivity, with success. But today we face growing and epidemic levels of loneliness, anxiety, and disconnection. We’ve become the most digitally and superficially connected generation while in that time increasingly the least relationally connected. Kids that have grown up knowing only these advances are more anxious, less social, have shorter attention spans while being increasingly addicted to the cause for these outcomes.
As designer-practitioners: policymakers, educators, leaders, we negotiate important decisions that shape these experiences in the world. And these are important signals.

And if we care about designing a better future, we need to listen and respond, both to the alarms in the systems and the people that exist within them.

The Problem Is Not Just the Tools—It’s the Tradeoffs

The tools we’ve built—social media, smartphones, and now artificial intelligence—have reshaped our cognition, our conversations, and our communities. They’ve saved us time and mental energy, but they’ve also enabled what researchers call “cognitive offloading,” outsourcing our thinking and memory to machines (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). We don’t remember phone numbers. We don’t get lost. And now, with generative AI, we don’t even have to write the first draft.

At the Future Talent Council Summit in Stockholm, I joined leaders from across industries wrestling with this shift. Employers shared real concerns—not just about skills gaps, but about the human gaps emerging in their workforce. The question wasn’t just about “How do we train people to use AI?” It was “How do we equip people to still be human in an AI-infused world?”

The Rise of AI Is a Wake-Up Call for Humanity

AI isn’t inherently good or bad, but it is a powerful tool. It tempts us to bypass inefficiencies, hard things, with simple, quick shortcuts: uncertainty, patience, thinking from another’s point of view. When we automate everything, we risk flattening the parts of humanity that make us human.

When we look back in history, we have instructive guidance from other major technological advances. The Industrial Revolution brought massive productivity gains, but also harsh working conditions, pollution, inequity, and a reorienting of the economy and labor markets.

Today, we’re living through an “intelligence” revolution, and the question is: What will we choose to design for ourselves in response?

The Antidote is Humanity, and Design can Help

Design isn’t just a discipline, but a collection of mindsets. It’s a way of approaching problems and the world that centers on people, curiosity, and context. It cultivates key skills, capacities, and mindsets, and they might be just the ones we need to help ourselves navigate the future.
In my work with universities, workforce initiatives, and community-driven projects, I’ve seen firsthand how humanity-centered design fosters the very capacities that employers, and our world, are most hungry for:

• Empathy – the ability to understand experiences different from your own
• Curiosity – the willingness to ask better questions, not just search for answers
• Critical Thinking – the skill of analyzing trade-offs and unintended effects
• Creativity – not just artistic ability, but generative problem solving
• Resilience – the capacity to try, fail, and iterate forward
• Responsive – the confidence to learn through change

These aren’t just soft skills (a term coined by the US military when describing anything that didn’t involve “technical” skills associated with operating equipment or completing tasks). They’re human skills. And they’re the skills that machines will only ever be able to mimic, from the data and input we offer.

According to the World Economic Forum, skills like creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and complex problem solving are among the top skills needed in 2025 and beyond (WEF, 2023).

Humanity-centered design develops all of these—by doing, not just by learning.

Design Is How We Practice Being Human—Together

The practice of design demands working together around hard problems. It forces us to navigate the tensions of ambiguity. It requires us to listen deeply, to watch and learn with each other, to co-create, to test and learn, especially when the problem is unclear or the answers are messy.

In a world moving faster than we can comprehend, design slows us down. Not to go backward, but to go intentionally forward. It reminds us that while AI can generate analysis quickly from large data sets available, it can’t see what we see. I can’t care. And it certainly can’t connect like we can.

Design, when done well, hands power back to people. A high school student in a recent design workshop put this beautifully:

Let’s Design Our Way Back to Each Other

This is why I do the work I do. I believe that humanity-centered design is a powerful tool for making change alongside others while cultivating the capacities that will serve humanity in the future. It fights for ourselves by learning skills that will sustain our humanity while we use that humanity to drive change.

It’s time to design our way back to humanity. Not just at the edge of human-machine interaction, but at the center of our relationships—with each other, our communities, and the planet.