Mark Wilson: Fast Company's Global Design Editor on design's defining moments in 2025

19:38Mark Wilson:And I don't see any reason they will stop. They've had some talent changes there, but overall, they have a lot of investment. They think about the data right. One other little criticism, because I'm terrible, though, is we are seeing more ads on it. I don't know if you've noticed this, since this sort of app relaunch, we're seeing a lot more integration of ads. That concerns me. And then the final thing that concerns me is journalism leaning on games as a platform overall. Even Fast Company launched Crosswords earlier this year. A lot of people probably don't know that. You know, you don't necessarily think of fast companies in places you do a crossword.

20:07Mark Wilson:I think that's very fair. But games are engagement. And journalism is after engagement to drive the business. My concern is there is very little real journalism left with these larger organizations. For them to pull resources into drawing readers, the readers they have toward games feels a little antithetical to the purpose. My wife and daughter ripped through with the New York Times games every day, so I can't judge it. But that concerns me as a journalist longer term. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

20:44Design Better is supported by Masterclass. I've been fascinated by the research from Cornell University showing that we get far more lasting satisfaction from experiences than from material things. They call it the experiential advantage. The idea is that while a new gadget eventually becomes just another thing, the wisdom and skills you gain through learning actually become part of your identity. That's why I've made Masterclass such a consistent part of my routine. It's an investment and an experience that pays dividends for years. And I'm not alone in that. 88 % of surveyed members feel that Masterclass has made a positive impact on their lives.

21:24I use the platform to stay curious across the board. I've been using James Clear's class to refine my daily habits, and I'm looking forward to Michael Lewis's class to find better ways to tell the stories that we share right here on Design Better. Whether I'm in the car using audio mode or at my desk, it's a way to ensure I'm actively becoming a better version of myself. With Masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best. With plans starting at just$10 a month billed annually, you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's top minds in design, business, and leadership.

22:02Plus, there's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash designbetter. That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash design better. Masterclass.com slash design better.

22:28And now, back to the show.

22:35Let's shift it back over to AI and look back at this year, but also kind of put on our prognosticator hats and think about what might happen in 2026. So it continues to be a big story. I mean, it's a big story in 2024, even 2023. It's been changing the stock market. There are some fears of a bubble. We know people who have lost their roles, and you can't maybe blame it directly in AI, but there's no question there's some influence there as to how companies are viewing their teams and organizations. So maybe we could talk a little bit about what happened in 2025 and what you think might happen this coming year.

23:12Mark Wilson:Yeah, I mean, scientifically, advancement-wise, whatever, I think a lot of people are critical about AI and saying we've hit peak LLM and all these other things. I'm not really worried about that. I do think we, of course, might be in a bubble. I think that bubble would be a two - to five-year bubble, but I don't think it's a 10 - to 20-year bubble. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you look back to the sort of original dot-com crash, there's a lot of things in common. There was a ton of investments, a ton of private capital going into it. But you have things crash at 2000. By 2005, people were hiring again.

23:47Mark Wilson:And then shortly after that, you just had everything be rebuilt, made anew, and you had this incredible thriving sort of ecosystem in the ashes of it. You know, I even think back to in 2007, YouTube sells to Google$1.65 billion. And people were so pissed. Like in the investment community, they're like, this is the new bubble. We're at a bubble again. And today it's worth roughly, if you estimate, about half a trillion dollars. I see really similar things happening right now. We do live in sort of the era of AI architecture. We're seeing the data center again become sort of the most important object of our time.

24:25Mark Wilson:And I think that the investment in data centers, though, that's going on right now will do a lot to prevent a bubble as we would think about it. There's a lot more interdependency essentially right now than there was in 2000. You know, we recently talked to the co-CEO of Gensler. Something he mentioned to me was their projects, right, in architecture go five years in advance, maybe 10 sometimes. We cover 33 different fields. And right now they're all investing. All of them are investing in AI infrastructure. They might not be meta investing in this giant thing, but they're investing in sort of smaller things for their company or their own services.

25:01Mark Wilson:So I think that sort of argues for some more health of this industry. There's also a lot of interdependent investing, right? A little Ouroboros investing where you have NVIDIA pumping a lot of money into OpenAI, but then OpenAI agrees to buy those NVIDIA chips back. You know, I'd be a little more worried about that if NVIDIA weren't again allowed to sort of mail chips to China. And the truth is I don't see China backing off on AI. So anyway, all these reasons just to address the bubble aspect itself. It is absolutely disquieting to see that AI is basically the only part of the economy doing well.

25:34Mark Wilson:I absolutely think middle Americans are being left behind. We are losing water and energy resources, and that's going to really kick our butts if we don't lock that down with some level of regulation. But as for a bubble or not, I'm very bullish on AI, I think, in the medium to long term for sure. What about consolidation? That's one thing that I'm sort of curious about. There are a number of AI startups out there, and then there's the bigger ones. There's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, Perplexity, etc. We just talked about Apple. They have this huge Achilles heel that's visible that they are missing out on the transition to AI, and it would be an essential service to their products.

26:17Do you see some sort of consolidation or acquisitions happening in 2026, either by Apple or others?

26:24Mark Wilson:To me, consolidation for somebody like an Apple doesn't make sense because AI service is really a buyer's market. There are so many different platforms offering it. I do think a lot of those sub-platforms, yeah, maybe they'll consolidate. Maybe some of them will burn out. A lot of that won't come through. But I do think we underestimate just how much AI is already baked in to sort of all of the software we're using today. And this gets back to that weird Ouroboros where you have OpenAI just launching apps now, right? They're launching apps within ChatGPT where you can talk and it'll pop up Canva or Figma or whatever to sort of actually do work for you, pop up a little GUI and things like that.

27:04Mark Wilson:But what's weird is if you do that with Canva or Figma, for instance, and you say you want to make a slide deck or something, it then queries Canva and Canva's built itself to be queryable by AI, right? There's a whole great systems and platforms to do that. But then to actually do it, technically, Canvas is using models, including OpenAI's, to sort of answer that question, answer that query, and then they serve it back to OpenAI. So there's this whole interdependent circle of AI services happening right now. And I think that applies to your apples. I think that applies to really anybody offering software.

27:41Mark Wilson:All I know is that I think it's good for developers. And I think it's probably ultimately really challenging for AI companies. And yeah, I wish I had the crystal ball to know how that'll work out better. Yeah. Well, you brought up a really interesting theme of 2025. I remember April of this year, the word that we heard over and over again was agent, agentic. You know, like that AI is going to have agency to be able to do things for you. And things like OpenAI, they did launch these agents that can do exactly what you described. And there are some other companies, ServiceNow and others that really focused on agents.

28:20Maybe Google as well. Like there's some agent stuff that's happening that maybe I haven't played with yet. Did that promise play out as we expected? Or like, is that changing the game for people?

28:32Mark Wilson:I don't think we've seen the compelling agent use case as we've been promised at all yet. And especially the agent as digital twin sort of idea where, you know, you had even people like Rabbit with the R1 launching that saying how you'll be able to train all these individual agents that would do all these different things for you. Long and short, no. I don't think we've seen sort of agents arise that way. What we're seeing is more to that earlier OpenAI example where suddenly Figma or Canva is an agent for OpenAI. And so the apps are essentially becoming agents talking to agents, rather than sort of our doppelgangers who go do our jobs for us.

29:10Mark Wilson:And that seems like the more solid and predictable path based upon the way software works. It's essentially like a new API. And parts of it are API and parts of it actually aren't. But that's how I look at it. I think it's really comfortable for the software development community. And it doesn't require some new UX to sort of explain or also train something to like crawl the web and do all this stuff for you. I've been trying personally to think up use cases for a genetic AI. And Aaron and I occasionally have to do tedious things like insert a bunch of links in this document and copy and paste between different platforms.

29:41And it's been useful for things like that. But then I was talking with a friend who I've been running these AI workshops with. And we've both sort of designed our lives and careers so we don't have to do too much of that kind of stuff. I mean, we get to do more interesting things, hopefully, like talking to you, Mark, or, you know, talking to Austin Kleon yesterday. day. And those are things I don't want AI to take that away from me. So yes, there's certainly tons of jobs out there. And that this actually lead into my next question where you can maybe offload some of the drudgery to these agents.

30:14But then there's another thing to be said for like, there's creative work that I want to hold on to and I don't want agents to do it. So if you are creative, if you are a designer right now, if you're lucky and you still have a role at a tech company, What should you be focusing on as far as broadening your skill set or what facets of AI should you be leaning into to make sure your job continues to be relevant?

30:36Mark Wilson:I don't think any creative dreams of being an AI manager. I'm a journalist, but really, that's a creative job. You have to be a dynamic thinker. And to me, that's in many ways the darkest path because I don't enjoy it. I don't really enjoy a lot of vibe coding when I've tried it. If it worked perfectly, perhaps I would. I'm not saying I won't in a year or two, but when you have to micromanage it, it's like when you hire an intern and you regret it because it's more work. It's more work than just doing it yourself. I guess my advice would be to avoid work you don't want to do as much as you can because it brings no joy.

31:13Mark Wilson:It's not like the best sort of advice moving forward. But I also think that AI management and prompt engineering won't really be what the future is sort of long term anyway. Anyway, to me, in its best articulation, AI, it'll be a lot like what we saw happen with hip hop. You know, hip hop sampled the world's music and created a new art form. And I think we had AI sample the world's knowledge, basically sampled the web. But we haven't really seen that new art form generated from that data set yet. And I think that if I were a designer working today, and I actually want to challenge myself to do this more too, it is like, what is the unique thing you build from that, from that sampling, from that new synthesizer, from whatever else?

31:55Mark Wilson:And I don't think any of that future has been written yet. A lot of people say like, AI can't be creative. Honestly, I think that's like a fairy tale we tell ourselves. I think it gets into really weird semiotics and I don't really know. But the bottom line is I think they can create things that are creative enough. I don't want to tell myself that. But could I do something I can't even dream of with this technology? That still excites me. And I hope it excites designers working today. I'm curious about the problems that we choose to solve. I am super excited about the promises that it has. And already, for us running Design Better, it's in everything we do.

32:33We scrub our audio. We just had an interview last week in Miami with the head of design, the chief design officer at Rivian, and we had three jackhammers in the background. And we knocked all that out with AI. So AI is solving some cool problems, some practical problems, but ultimately, is it solving the right problems? And more broadly, is technology solving the right problems? For so long, we had lots of companies trying to help us figure out how to split our check at the sushi restaurant. I think that's not exactly a serious problem. So what design problems are getting ignored because they're not sexy or VC fundable?

33:16Mark Wilson:I think if we look just at AI and sort of the problems AI is choosing to solve or not, obviously we're over-indexing on LLMs themselves right now. We have a lot more miles to gain out of them. I think I'm not an LLM hater. I think they're absolutely magical. I think there's a lot more we can do. But what excites me that I've seen in terms of problems that I think design-focused engineers are pursuing sometimes, and sometimes just engineers, is our sort of newer world models are using AI to understand actual physics in the world, to actually predict things that will happen next in known environments like factories and sometimes unknown environments.

33:51Mark Wilson:AI systems can actually now determine the swing of a pendulum, which to do that mathematically is downright hard to impossible. But AI systems are so good at correlation that they can take raw data and sort of understand what would happen next. I see things like physics. There's a big AI startup that just solved unsolvable math problems. What can we do when we can do math we could never do before as humans? That's really exciting to me. How could designers leverage that in products? Who knows what engineering possibilities that will open up. I also continue to think that services like healthcare and other human services are really important.

34:24Mark Wilson:We saw OpenAI this year basically say, hey, you can't use our platform anymore for medical advice or legal advice. And arguably, those are the two most important things for most people to be able to talk to a system that's pretty good most of the time about. You know, where one door closes, perhaps another one opens. But it's really frustrating for me to hear companies like Microsoft talk about AI for just this reason. because Microsoft used to talk about inclusive design. And now what they're talking about is how one middle manager could write another middle manager a summary of questions that will be answered by another AI summary of questions.

35:00Mark Wilson:And it's just two AIs talking to two AIs. That mentality is probably why Microsoft fired a lot of their middle management in the last year. That's how they viewed the jobs and that's how they viewed the technology. So that's a depressing end to me. But I do think there are so many signs of AI designers who have basically looked at companies like Meta and said, hey, that's not the direction I want to go. I have a lot of talent. I have limited time on this earth, and I'm going to break new ground here rather than sort of make a model 5%, 10 % more efficient. Continuing on the sort of more positive note here and thinking about design.

35:31It's hard with me, Eli. I know. It's hard to get to that positive. No, no, no, it's good. Let's talk about kind of design education or even at an early stage for our kids. And one of your featured products for 2025 was this Chomp Saw, which is a cool little device that you can use to cut cardboard with for kids safely. And I just mentioned, we talked to Austin Kleon, who is the author of Steel Like an Artist. And he talked a lot about the importance of working with your hands and working with physical objects. And I think we're seeing this in our students at Stanford, where for many years, the pendulum swing was toward, oh, I want to build digital products because that's where all the jobs are.

36:05But now, especially since COVID, where everybody was trapped on the screen for years, they want to use their hands, build something physical. So yeah, maybe we just touch a little bit on like this idea of connecting with our world a bit more, doing things that only for now humans can do, working with our hands, etc.

36:22Mark Wilson:If there's one silver lining to AI automation, it's that hopefully it does bring us back to the handcrafted world, which is just a joyful way to work. It's so wonderful to work with your hands. I discovered it really late in life. I didn't really start sketching until I was probably like 40. It's like absolutely remarkable. To take one step back, I've been talking to a lot of brand experts about what they anticipate in 2026. And I say, let's talk to a few different ideas and we'll put something larger together. And you probably hear this too, everybody's like a return to physical, a return to craft, a return to all of these things happening in brand.

36:55Mark Wilson:We've seen it in a couple Apple commercials already, which is, we could say, a little bit ironic for a company that sells screens, but really pushing the handcraft idea. And in my heart of hearts, I do hope it's a long-term, not just a pendulum swing, right, but a rewind to the way we were for thousands of years, really, until probably the last 20 to 30. I hope we can take the best of it in that way. You brought up Chompsaw. I don't know if anybody's tried it. Have you guys tried Chompsaw? Not yet. Not yet. I mean, it's so great. It's essentially a jigsaw that would cut wood, but instead, it cuts cardboard.

37:26Mark Wilson:and because it doesn't have an actual saw, it's actually like the tip of like an electric screwdriver, more or less, is what it was invented from. It looks like a router table or something. Yeah, yeah, very much just like that. And when my daughter dove in to use the chomp saw to just slide cardboard through it, I remember just being like, whoa, she's fearless with this. And if we were in a wood shop right now, I would be terrified. I would be like, don't lose a finger, don't lose a finger. Like we chop carrots and I'm terrified. It's like, line it up, use your knuckles as a guard. but what a wonderful, joyful sort of product in that way.

37:58Mark Wilson:And, you know, wired headphones have made a comeback. Is that because of Y2K? Yeah. Right? Is that Y2K resurgence? Is that going to be something we see longer term? I'm kind of curious about that. And it's almost along the lines of like, we saw this pushback to dumb phones, right? And we're like, does everybody use a dumb phone now? I don't really think that's what's going to be longer term, but like, is there a halfway evolution that we're going to land on? So anyway, look, I'm super hot on this too. And my last point would just be that one thing that Adobe did this year that kind of depressed me was something that would have blown me away a decade ago, which was taking kids' drawings and then using AI to make them look real or whatever.

38:33Mark Wilson:And the technology is amazing. The UX looks fantastic. It's pretty flawless. And I'm just like, I want my son and daughter to look at what they draw on that piece of paper as the thing. Be pleased with your own hand. Learn that it's a part of self-acceptance. The way you sketch and things, it's part of us. And I'm not saying it's better than technology or whatever, but I do think it's intrinsic to us. And that's an ethos that I do hope survives. I think it's gonna. I think that this year is kind of signaling that to us, to your point, Eli, and what you're hearing from students. I hope it holds out.

39:03Mark, thinking back on this year, things you read, you watched, you listened to, experienced, what stood out?

39:11Mark Wilson:I mean, Pluribus was really good. Pluribus launched, I don't know if I watched that. It's good work, Apple. I haven't watched it yet, but I keep hearing good things. talking about physical design the last couple of years i've got deeply into the manga one piece it is absolutely amazing to see somebody who's worked to this point about crafts worked on one story for 30 years imagined everything with ink and a pen and imagined whole worlds like that and now you have revolutions happening globally and people are flying the one piece flag the pirate flag from this manga some people might call silly that's taken sort of a lot of my free time i've gotten into like all sorts of sketch i got into gunpla this year building gundam with my son i've never enjoyed model building and i don't know how long i'll stick with it but that's what i've been into i've realized i've spent more and more time like actively off my phone except for i would just give one little plug and sorry this is really deep hobby stuff marvel rivals i think is maybe the greatest squad video game shooter ever made.

40:13Mark Wilson:I'm really into that as well. So it's all about balance, guys. Mark, you recently started a podcast with your colleague Liz Stitson. Tell us a little bit about that and where people can find it. Yeah, our podcast is By Design. Kind of a horribly used phrase because it's used a little bit everywhere. But By Design, it's on Apple and Spotify. And I think that's about it. It's been fun. You know, I would just say this about it. It's really fast. I didn't want to launch a design podcast because podcasts like yours existed. People listen to a lot of design podcasts already. I think there are good ones out there.

40:45Mark Wilson:We do things a tiny bit differently, I like to think, right? Like, and I could plug all the ways why, but by design, it's kind of fun. And where can people learn more about you and just follow the work that you're doing? Absolutely, Fast Company. I'm a global design editor there. My byline shows up frequently. I'm also just very findable on Instagram and LinkedIn. I run my mouth quite a bit too much on LinkedIn, I would say. Mark, this was so fun to look back on the year with you, especially given your perspective at Fast Company. Thanks for being on Design Better. No, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, guys.

41:20This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.