Who are we designing for now?

"What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead. But besides the current momentum, we still have to focus on real problems that bring real value as of now. This balance is sometimes challenging, but also creates opportunities to reform our thinking and approaches."

"As AI agents become embedded collaborators in our systems, designers face a powerful and pressing question: Who are we designing for now? Suddenly, we find ourselves in the middle of a new Experience dilemma: designing for both people and programs. That means exploring new personas and reconciling different approaches: emotional intuition, logical execution, and the coherence of both. Let's have a look at the pitfalls of this dilemma and explore what we have to consider while designing for both humans and machines."

"Product Design 101 is all about understanding human experiences: how something feels, how intuitive it is, how it delights. But agents don't feel. They parse. They tokenize. They operate on pattern recognition, context, probability, and strict interpretation. Designing for agents means building interfaces that are accessible and intuitive but speak clearly to non-human readers. Think structured data, semantic HTML, accessible roles, predictable metadata, and context."

AI is rapidly transforming design workflows, enabling instant, vibe-based prototyping and shifting focus from pixel-level fidelity to anticipating future needs. Product design now requires conceptual work: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and planning years ahead while still solving present problems that deliver current value. Designers must balance foresight with immediate problem-solving, which creates opportunities to reform processes and thinking. AI agents are emerging as embedded collaborators, requiring designers to address both human users and programmatic actors. Interfaces need to be both emotionally intuitive for people and structured, semantically clear, and predictable for machines.

Read at Medium