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Sorted: Prototype the future of design using a meta company.
**Mod Note: HYE is not monetized nor interested in followers, the experimental methods forbid it.**
Do you remember when design was creative and imaginative? When users were human beings? The moment we started measuring success in retention curves and conversion rates, we told the industry what we were for. AI just does that faster now.
The frustrating part is that everything that actually makes a designer useful, empathy, storytelling, asking why, none of that is being replaced by AI, it’s being selected against upstream because it’s friction. We just stopped talking about it like it mattered.
I’ve been sitting with a question for almost a year. If designers actually believed the future won’t be designed by accident, what would we do differently today, inside the companies we’re already in?
How would you redesign work itself to be more human-centric?
I started an open-source prototype of the future of work called Sorted, a meta company where culture is the primary design surface, not the values page nobody reads. Where the red-teamer at every product review and is required to wear a ridiculous hat so nobody can hold moral authority for too long as they push back on questionable ideas. Where two hours a week are reserved for doing nothing other than just existing with the team.
Idealistic? Perhaps, but it’s deliberately unfinished because the point wasn’t to build a solution, it was to start a conversation the design community could actually build on.
Dylan Field said the future won’t be designed by accident. I want to know if anyone actually believed him.
Prototype the future. #futureSorted
Full piece on Substack if you want to go deeper or rip it apart.
#art
**Mod Note: HYE is not monetized nor interested in followers, the experimental methods forbid it.**
Do you remember when design was creative and imaginative? When users were human beings? The moment we started measuring success in retention curves and conversion rates, we told the industry what we were for. AI just does that faster now.
The frustrating part is that everything that actually makes a designer useful, empathy, storytelling, asking why, none of that is being replaced by AI, it’s being selected against upstream because it’s friction. We just stopped talking about it like it mattered.
I’ve been sitting with a question for almost a year. If designers actually believed the future won’t be designed by accident, what would we do differently today, inside the companies we’re already in?
How would you redesign work itself to be more human-centric?
I started an open-source prototype of the future of work called Sorted, a meta company where culture is the primary design surface, not the values page nobody reads. Where the red-teamer at every product review and is required to wear a ridiculous hat so nobody can hold moral authority for too long as they push back on questionable ideas. Where two hours a week are reserved for doing nothing other than just existing with the team.
Idealistic? Perhaps, but it’s deliberately unfinished because the point wasn’t to build a solution, it was to start a conversation the design community could actually build on.
Dylan Field said the future won’t be designed by accident. I want to know if anyone actually believed him.
Prototype the future. #futureSorted
Full piece on Substack if you want to go deeper or rip it apart.
#art
