Leadership CONNECT: 11-JUNE-2025 (Y25W25)

📚 “In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the world now produces enough data and information to fill 23 billion e-books.” — Reid Hoffman, Impromptu

Stop and think about that for a second.

That’s not some abstract number. It’s the messy reality of right now — every Slack ping, TikTok scroll, code commit, Google Doc edit, sensor reading, YouTube comment, and yes, newsletter like this one. It’s the digital exhaust of eight billion people living online lives at the speed of light.

We built this world. Now we’re drowning in it.

Which brings me to the question that keeps me up at night:

In a world cranking out 23 billion e-books worth of stuff every second, what deserves your attention? What deserves your users’ trust? What are you choosing to make loud?

🧭 The Job Has Changed

Look, I’ve been designing for long enough to remember when our biggest worry was whether the button was the right shade of blue.

Those days are over.

AI didn’t just give us faster workflows. It gave us infinite content, infinite variations, infinite everything. The bottleneck isn’t creation anymore — it’s curation. It’s judgment. It’s the very human act of saying, “This matters, that doesn’t.”

Ethan Mollick’s research backs this up: human-AI teams crush both humans alone and AI alone, but only when the human does the editing, the prioritizing, the “yes this” and “no that.”

The machines can generate. We still have to choose what lives and what dies.

🤝 Trust Is the New Black

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching Reid Hoffman think about networks and Mollick study AI collaboration: [as designers] we’re not just shipping features anymore. We’re shipping belief systems.

Every recommendation you surface? That’s you saying, “trust this.” Every notification you send? That’s you saying, “interrupt your life for this.” Every AI suggestion you let through? That’s you co-signing the algorithm’s judgment.

We’ve become trust architects, whether we signed up for it or not.

🔍 Getting Real About What We’ve Built

Can we be honest for a minute?

A lot of what we shipped in the 2010s made people’s lives more chaotic, not clearer. The infinite scroll that turned browsing into a trance. The notifications that trained us to be reactive. The dark patterns that are optimized for engagement over actual human benefit.

Now AI is pouring gasoline on that fire. We can generate more content, faster recommendations, and smarter-seeming interfaces. But smarter-seeming isn’t the same as actually helpful.

The real question isn’t “can we build it?” It’s “Should this exist?”

🧠 What Actually Matters Now

Speed is cheap. Meaning is expensive. The designers who figure this out first will shape what comes next. They’ll be the ones who:

• Build signal, not noise — helping people find what actually matters instead of just what’s new
• Design for trust, not just engagement — creating experiences that feel honest and human
• Curate meaning from chaos — being the human editor in a world of machine-generated everything

This isn’t soft skill territory. This is survival.

💬 Three Questions Worth Asking:

1. What’s the one signal we want to amplify in this product?
2. What’s the noise we’re deliberately choosing to filter out?
3. If someone used our product for a year, what would they believe about the world?

The Bottom Line

[As designers], we’re not pixel pushers anymore. We’re not even user experience designers in the old sense.

We’re meaning-makers in a world that generates infinite content but struggles to create genuine understanding.

The most important thing you’ll design this year isn’t an interface. It’s clarity itself.

This newsletter is called Design Amplified because whispered design doesn’t cut it anymore. The world is too loud, too fast, too overwhelming for subtle. We need designers who are willing to turn up the volume on what matters and turn down everything else.

So here’s my question: What signal are you amplifying right now?

Because — and this is the part that gives me hope — AI might scale content, but it also scales our opportunity to be human curators. To be the editors, the taste-makers, the people who say “this is worth your time” and mean it.

That’s the real design challenge of our era. And honestly? I can’t think of anything more important to get right.

More:

[1] Lance Shields’s newsletter “design-amplified” – https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/design-amplified-7292594546415153154/