The Design Script Has Broken. Here's How to Stay Proactive
Why an experimental mindset is critical to advance your design career
I can’t tell you my five-year plan anymore. A lot of designers can’t either.
A few years ago, I could have recited mine without thinking. Senior, then lead, then principal, maybe director, at some healthcare company betting big on telemedicine or AI. I had the whole thing mapped.
Then AI came along, and it wasn’t just a market shift. A script broke, and it’s putting a lot of designers through real anguish.
Cognitive script theory might explain why. The theory says we build scripts from repeated experiences to save ourselves mental effort.
Imagine walking into a hospital. Announcements over the loudspeaker, patients sitting everywhere, unfamiliar equipment and jargon, people hurrying past.
If you’ve ever taken a kid there, you’ve seen what no script looks like. They’re overwhelmed, asking a hundred questions, unsure what’s going on.
But you’re not, because you’ve loaded the “going to the doctor” script.
You know not to undress in the waiting room, and you won’t think twice about it in the exam room.
You know you don’t have to stand in line: you check in, sit anywhere, and they’ll call you.
You already know a trip to the pharmacy is coming because you’ll leave with a prescription.
None of it takes any mental effort. That’s the whole point.
And it’s exactly what quietly wrecks people when their world changes.
When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, even the people who didn’t lose all their money fell apart. The scripts they’d built as bankers and stock traders vanished overnight.
You’ve probably seen a quieter version in people who retire and suddenly seem adrift and purposeless.
We’re nowhere near that. But a milder version of the same thing is happening to designers right now.
The script that broke
A lot of designers are getting hit with a double whammy: laid off, then finding out the job market changed beneath them.
The script for how they used to find work is broken. Some never even built a portfolio because they got recruited.
Others build portfolios like documentaries, not realizing no one has time to read the whole thing.
Some never had to sell themselves at all. Their script was simple: list what you’ve done, and that’s enough.
But the deeper problem is that AI has made craft feel cheap. A lot of these designers just wanted to get paid to solve problems and build cool stuff.
Now? Building cool screens can now be done (badly) with AI. So these are the people that are most negative about AI.
If AI is just a buzzword…if it’ll flame out in a couple of years and everything snaps back to normal… then you never have to touch the broken script.
You just wait it out.
But that’s not the most probable path.
Plenty of AI hype will die, and a lot of it deserves to. But things are not going back to how they were.
The workshop where you slowly hash out a problem over the course of a week.
The month of research before anyone expects to hear findings.
The weeks spent crafting a design because there was no faster way.
That world isn’t coming back. I hate saying it as much as anyone. We opened the box, and we can’t close it.
Which means the old five-year plan is gone too. Junior, mid, senior, then lead or principal, then director, up and up. That clean ladder mostly doesn’t exist anymore.
Maybe I’ll end up as a Director of UX at a healthcare company. Maybe I won’t. Right now I help designers tell their story, and I don’t know whether I’ll go back.
For a while, that terrified me. No five-year plan felt like no plan at all. Then I stopped trying to write one.
And I’m not the only one who feels better on the other side of that. I interviewed 32 design leaders about where the field is going, half expecting a wall of doom.
That’s not what I got. Most were optimistic. They just agreed on one thing: the work has changed.
One Director of Design put it in a way that stuck with me:
The core design responsibilities aren’t going anywhere. A PM isn’t going to run the design process. But designers can do more now. They can bridge the gap. Not just prototypes, but experiments, even rough drafts of the implementation code.
That’s the part the doomers miss. The core of the job is still yours. What changed is that the edges are widening.
That’s the opportunity hiding inside the broken script. You just can’t get to it with a five-year plan.
Run the experiment instead
If a five-year vision has become unrealistic, stop forcing one. Trade it for an experiment.
According to Anne-Laure Le Cunff, ex-Googler and author of Tiny Experiments, an experiment has three parts:
A bet on one thing worth getting better at.
A timebox short enough to actually finish: three to six months.
One visible output at the end. Something you made that proves you ran it.
Not a career. A bet, a deadline, and a thing you can point to.
Leaving healthcare to help designers write was one of these. It wasn’t a master plan.
It was a bet: that designers don’t have a craft problem, they have a communication problem, and that I could help.
The timebox was four months.
The output was real work with real clients, proving the bet held. If it hadn’t, I’d have known in 90 days instead of guessing for five years.
You can run these experiments at work, too, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Why? Because it’s about output, not outcome.
You can’t plan your way to stakeholder buy-in in 90 days, or “get better at communicating” in six months.
Those are lofty goals: not entirely in your control, and too vague to point to.
But you can run an experiment like this:
For the next three months (the timebox),
Write up the rationale for one design decision each week and send it to your team(the bet).
At the end, you’ll have twelve worked examples of your own thinking (the output).
It could just as easily be a bet on the AI tools you’ve been curious about. Not “master Claude Design,” but “use it three times a week for three months.”
Pick whichever you want. It just has to be small enough to finish and real enough to teach you something, whether it works or not.
I know a lot of you are being asked to do more with less, and this can feel like a nice idea that never makes it off the backlog.
But here’s the part I didn’t expect when I started. The experiment doesn’t just move you forward. It takes the anxiety out.
When the worry about AI taking your job (or not having a five-year plan) starts creeping up, you can actually do something about it. Make a bet. Run an experiment. Maybe you won’t have a five-year vision.
But you’ll have a small bet to work toward over the next three months.
That, more than ever, can calm your nerves in this crazy market.
Want help, coming up with an experiment that you can run even at your day job? Book a call, and I’ll help you set one up.