Tiny Voices

A letter to every designer who is scared right now.

The brown and orange sky holds its breath as the sun retreats to the distant horizon
And our hearts palpitate anxiously, as we soon will lay supine and wait for sleep to overcome us

Dear designer: I see you.

I know what you are feeling right now because I am feeling it too. This letter is for the designer who opened LinkedIn this morning and felt the dread settle in before the coffee. For the researcher whose team was dissolved and rebuilt without them. For the service designer who was told their discipline is overhead (by someone who could not define service design if their bonus depended on it). For everyone staring at the industry they gave their career to and wondering if it still wants them.

It does. But we need to talk honestly about what is happening, because the people in charge are not going to do it for us.

What Is Happening

The ground is moving and nobody at the top seems to care.

Layoffs across the design industry. Not one company, not one bad quarter. A sustained, rolling dissolution of design teams at organizations that once built entire campuses around the principle that design matters (sometimes the same organizations that gave keynotes about design thinking eighteen months ago). Teams that took years to assemble, dismantled in an afternoon email. The people who held those teams together, scattered into a job market that does not want to look at them right now.

AI reshaping the role as we have known it for our entire careers. Not the mission of design. The role. The job title. The seat at the table that took decades of advocacy to secure, suddenly questioned because a tool can produce a wireframe in thirty seconds. And surrounding that legitimate shift, an ocean of grifters selling fear and false certainty in equal measure.

Then, there is the part we aren’t supposed to talk about. The political dimension. Executive Order 14168. DOGE gutting federal agencies that employed designers and researchers and people who cared about the humans on the other end of government services. A cultural environment where diversity is reframed as liability, where identity is treated as risk, where having a voice and a perspective is treated as insubordination by people who would prefer you had neither.

The layoffs are economic. The AI disruption is technological. The political targeting of people who think deeply about humanity in systems is ideological. And all three are happening at the same time, which means you are being squeezed from three directions simultaneously while being told to upskill and stay positive.

They are asking you to optimize your performance inside a system that is collapsing in real time. That is a siege covered in the patina of a career challenge.

What It Cost Me

I can tell you what the siege feels like from the inside, because I was in it.

I held a senior role at NASA, working on AI transformation. My performance was not in question. My presence was. In the wake of Executive Order 14168 and the broader political shift, the space for people like me collapsed. I was not removed for failing the system. I was removed because the system changed what it was willing to tolerate.

I am still here. Still writing. Still building. Still refusing to be quiet about the things that matter.

That is not because I am unusually brave. I am terrified. It is because the alternative is not something I can live with. Silence is a kind of death for people like us. And I do not think you can live with it either.

Tiny Voices

There is a verse that has been running through my head for weeks.

And from somewhere in our black subconscious minds when we’re asleep
Comes a haunting, swirling mass of voices resonating
It screams of forgotten victims and their cries of innocence
And the desperate plea for recognition and recompense

The tiny voices. You know the ones. The voice inside every designer that says this matters when the industry says ship faster. The voice that says this is wrong when the org chart says stay in your lane. The voice that says I am more than pixels and prototypes when the job posting reduces you to a software proficiency. The voice that says I will not be silent when the powerful say know your place.

Tiny voices
Harbored deep within as we outwardly deny they have somethin’ to say
And if you don’t confront ‘em, they will never go away

What We Actually Are

We are not designers because we are good at Figma. We are not designers because we want a seat at the table. We are not designers because the job market said it was stable in 2015 and we believed it (though that certainly did not hurt).

We are designers because we believe that how things are made matters as much as what is made. Because we believe the person on the other end of the product deserves to be understood, served, and delighted. Because we believe that empathy is not a soft skill but a structural requirement for building things that do not harm people.

That belief is not threatened by AI. That belief is not threatened by layoffs. That belief is not threatened by an executive order or billionaires or a political movements that would prefer humans be optimized rather than understood.

That belief is threatened only if we abandon it ourselves.

The tools will change. They always have. The role will change. It already is. But the mission, the insistence that what we build should serve and not harm, that the human on the other end is not a metric but a person: that mission is load-bearing. You cannot remove it without the whole structure collapsing.

And they are trying to remove it. From governments, from companies, from the culture itself. So the question is not whether the mission is still valid. The question is whether you still believe in it enough to fight for it when the fighting is hard and the outcome is not guaranteed and nobody is going to give you a promotion for caring.

Do Not Turn on Each Other

Stop fighting each other.

The fear-mongers and the gurus want you at each other’s throats. The “AI will replace you” camp versus the “AI is just a tool” camp. The “designers should code” crowd versus the “stay in your lane” crowd. Senior designers gatekeeping from the juniors. Juniors dismissing the seniors as irrelevant. Everyone building walls while the house burns.

We eat our own children while selling a course, a class, a guide. Comment “HOPELESS” to get a DM for a free guide on how to survive.

This cannibalization is exactly what the powerful want. While we fight each other over methodology, the next generation of products is being built without any human-centered thinking at all. While we argue about whether designers should learn to prompt, billion-dollar systems are being deployed that affect millions of lives and nobody in the room asked what it means for the person on the other end.

The enemy is not the designer who disagrees with you about AI. The enemy is the system that would build technology without humanity at its center. The enemy is the executive who cut the research team and called it efficiency.

Punch up. Always up. Never at each other.

Tiny voices Echoes of our heritage, our long and sallow faces turn the other way

Remember What This Was

The Bauhaus artists did not abandon their belief in good design when the school closed. They carried it with them across oceans, to Chicago, to Cambridge, to everywhere they landed, and the belief survived the politics that tried to kill it.

Charles and Ray Eames did not believe good design was only for the wealthy. They spent decades proving that functional beauty could be democratic. The belief survived the economics.

Susan Kare made the Macintosh human with a grid of pixels and a conviction that computers should feel friendly. The belief survived the technology.

The spirit that drove every one of them is the same spirit that is keeping you up at night right now. The insistence that things can be better. That the human experience of a product, a service, a system, a government is not a nice-to-have. That care is not overhead.

That spirit is the tiny voice. And if you do not confront it, it will never go away. That is the beauty of it. The powerful can defund it, lay it off, restructure it, Executive Order it out of the building (and they have, all of the above, sometimes in the same fiscal year). And it will still be there. Because it is not in the tools. It is not in the role. It is not in the job title or the org chart or the seat at the table.

It is in you.

Ad Astra

Tiny voices
Harbored deep within as we outwardly deny they have somethin’ to say
And if you don’t confront ‘em, they will never go away

I do not know what comes next. Not for the industry, not for the profession, not for me. But I know what I believe. I believe the work matters. I believe the mission survives the medium. I believe that the tiny voice inside you that says this is worth fighting for is telling you the truth.

Listen to it. Confront it. Let it be loud.

Ad astra. To the stars. Even the ones they told us we cannot not reach.