With many companies announcing hiring freezes or staff reductions, hiring managers tend to prioritize candidates who can wear multiple hats over those with hyper-specialized skill sets. While open positions are shrinking, the number of newcomers continues to increase year after year—generating more competition among entry-level designers and making it harder for folks to find their first job.

On the senior side of the spectrum, the ongoing trend of managers shifting back to hands-on positions shows no sign of slowing down. Companies cannot afford leaders who are only good at talking and not as good at delivering. The last thing they want is territorialism, silos, and the “this is not part of my job description” mentality. Since next year’s economic landscape isn’t clear and teams continue to be spread thin, watch for burnout within your team and keep track of your own resignation tendencies.

One meeting is over, and we jump right into the next one. Everyone has an opinion but no one has a decision. Technically, the work is getting done and items are crossed out of the agenda, but there is an unsettling feeling that the team is just pushing through deadlines rather than executing a vision. 

Now is the time to double down on our bias toward action. If you disagree with a decision made by the team, bring alternatives forward. If the team feels stuck, create a framework for decision-making. Sometimes you need to be a fixer, other times it’s better to be a driver.

We are often afraid to let go of certain steps of the process, thinking it will undermine the value of design. But not moving things forward is even worse. As soon as we start delivering, we add clarity. Deliver something every day—whether a prototype or a bullet list—to ensure collaboration is not just sharing opinions but actually building something together.

Thought leadership has been a divisive topic in design: while some designers find in it a way to share knowledge and build reputation, others think influencers are abandoning the craft in pursuit of fame. Still, in the early days of social media, we were able to choose who we followed and who we looked up to.

This is changing: now it’s an algorithm that selects what we see, keeping our feeds on TikTok, Instagram, and Linkedin well fed. When we don't have a choice about who we are really following, the platform prioritizes what works best for them: the most polarizing (clap if you agree, share if you don't), short, and prescriptive posts.

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.

The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

In the past few decades, automated robots have made entire industries more efficient by reducing the need for manual labor. Now, in the fourth industrial revolution, the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence threaten to chip away creative labor as well (with AI-generated images even winning art competitions). The creative industry is on the verge of one of its biggest technological transformations.

AI is getting closer and closer to doing the work we do every day—although designers are still divided between embracing it or trying to keep it at bay. UX writers are both excited and scared by the rise of AI-assisted writing, while UX researchers are finding ways to help build trust in AI systems. Even within design publishing we’ve seen authors trade generic Unsplash stock images for those generated by Dall-e, Midjouney, Stable Diffusion, and similar AI.

Designers are already exploring different collaboration models with AI and creating Figma plugins to help them be more efficient in their day-to-day tasks. As our industry figures out the most robust use cases for this tech, our main advice is to keep an open mind: we want to be good at what we know, but even better at what we don’t know.

Figma disrupted the industry with a browser-based, collaboration-focused design tool. They also invested in building community and connecting with a new audience of designers less interested in two-thousand-dollar conferences with long lectures and more interested in short talks available online for free. The US$20B acquisition of Figma by Adobe validates this approach at an enterprise level.

As design tools move upstream to big enterprise companies, new paths open for future design tools. Today’s designers are following open-source protocols to design more freely, connecting with development workflow to improve hand-offs, and augmenting design systems powered by AI capabilities. 

Real design happens when the tool gets out of the way, enabling people to talk, comment, see each other in real time, co-create, and make space for collaboration. If anything, this year has proven that the best design tools are also conversation tools.

Designers have always felt the need to go the extra mile: many of us spend our free time creating side projects, taking on freelance work, moonlighting at startups, mentoring protegees, sharing content online and trying to prove ourselves to others. At our workplace, we push ourselves to break into the industry, get that promotion, earn recognition from our managers, and have a seat at the table. 

We need the time, space, and agency to grow at our own pace. We need to untangle the idea of progress from the idea of making new things, and start seeing maintenance and self-care as equally important, if not more so. We need to find meaning in our work but also outside of it. In the long run, consistency is more important than intensity. 

We will need to be there for ourselves tomorrow, regardless of how things went today. Drink water, be kind to yourself, and stay true to what you hold dear. Bring your best to your work, but give yourself an extra minute.

2022 taught us a humbling lesson on volatility and change. A year that started with the unparalleled promise of web3 (and the acronym party of NFT, DAO, DEX, DeFi), ended on a different and less energizing note. Faith in crypto is shrinking, the metaverse has now become an expensive joke, and web3 startups are trying to force unimaginable use cases down everyone’s throats. 

The real lesson of the year is about the fictions we tell ourselves: how we build up and disown idols overnight and how we can learn from the bitter taste of reality checks.

Our hope is that we all enter 2023 prepared to challenge things more. To challenge what we see around us (the hype, the buzzwords, the inflated excitement around us), but also to challenge ourselves. We should question the way we work, what we truly value in our jobs, and what we consider “the right way to design.”

In times of change and turmoil, uncertainty is the only certainty there is. There is a vibe shift coming, and with it, a real opportunity to reshape the reality around us–and more importantly–ourselves.