Designers Have to Move from the Surface to the Substrate - Suff Syed

"For most of computing history, designers have been the authors of the visible world. They shaped the screens we tap, the icons we recognize, the patterns we repeat until they feel second nature. From Xerox PARC to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, nearly every interface worth designing has already been designed. The metaphors of interaction: the desktop, folders, windows, menu, tap, swipe, are now complete, endlessly iterated but rarely reinvented."

"Today's most profound design problems don't live on the screen at all. They live in the invisible substrate beneath it: how models behave, how they reason, and how their decisions are constrained or liberated. This layer, once the domain of researchers and engineers, is now where the future of design will need to be written. The things being shaped today are not pixels and layouts, but policies, training data, weights, prompts, tool use patterns, and memory architectures. These are the true materials of intelligence design."

Design must move from crafting visual surfaces to shaping the underlying intelligence that determines behavior. Interfaces are transitioning from static metaphors to systems that think, requiring designers to engage with models, training data, weights, prompts, policies, tool-use patterns, and memory architectures. The most consequential design choices now concern how models reason, how their decisions are constrained or liberated, and how those behaviors map to human values. If designers fail to influence this substrate, researchers or profit-driven companies will set defaults that define human experience. Design leadership must therefore learn the technical and ethical craft of intelligence design to preserve human-centered outcomes.

Read at Suff Syed