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"AI governance" still sounds like a compliance word to most designers — something legal and policy teams handle after the product ships. That's changing fast. Systems thinking, AI governance, and ethical/legal design are now being named as core design skills for 2026, alongside the usual craft skills. I think that's overdue, and I think most of the writing on it so far is still too abstract to be useful. Governance isn't a document. In practice, it's a series of small, specif

Every UX conversation in 2026 seems to circle back to the same problem: people don't trust AI outputs, and that mistrust is becoming one of the biggest design challenges of the decade. Progressive disclosure, confidence scores, explainability layers — a whole vocabulary has sprung up around getting users to believe what a model tells them. I've been sitting with this conversation for a while now, because it isn't new to me. It's the exact problem I've been designing around fo

Somewhere in the last year, "vibe coding" stopped being a meme and became a workflow. You describe what you want, the AI builds something that runs, and within minutes you're clicking through an interactive prototype that used to take a sprint. It's a genuinely good shift for speed. It's also creating a quieter problem that most teams haven't named yet: the moment a prototype feels real, people start treating it as validated — and those are not the same thing. I want to make

I've spent the last few months using an AI coding assistant (Cursor, though this isn't really about Cursor) to build against our internal design system — I'll call it Prism here, since the specific name isn't the point. We've got the components documented, we've got a skill/rules setup describing tokens, spacing, and usage patterns, and on paper that should be enough to keep every generated screen visually consistent with the ones before it. It wasn't enough. And the way it f

The first time I landed in Doha, I had a laptop full of user flows and a head full of assumptions. By the third trip, I had neither — just a much better sense of what our users actually needed, and a stronger conviction that the hardest problems we were solving weren't technical at all. I was there to run the first full customer rollout of Maintain, Cognite's collaborative maintenance product, at the headquarters tower of a major offshore oil and gas operator in Qatar — the k