John Howrey
Design Leader
ContactCURRENTLY DigitalOcean
PREVIOUSLY SCAD
IBM
Skeptic
Philographica
Selbert Perkins Design
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Set Users Up for Success
Empowerment by Design
Driving Growth Through Design
All the World’s a Map
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Design Leadership Is Cultural Leadership
Designers Should Own the Narrative
Speed and Substance Can Coexist
Collaboration Is the Work
Design as Stewardship of Experience

Design as Stewardship of Experience

Design isn’t decoration. It’s responsibility.


Let’s start here: if you are a designer, you are shaping the world. Every interaction, every decision, every default setting and visual emphasis and empty state—each one tells a story about what matters. About who matters. And each one teaches the user what to expect next time.

You are not just moving buttons around. You are determining how someone will feel in a moment they didn’t choose, while using a tool they may not fully understand, to complete a task that likely carries weight in their day or their job or their life. That’s not a neutral act. That’s not a creative flourish. That is an exercise in power.

And if that feels dramatic, good. It should.

Because what we’ve allowed design to become in too many organizations is performance. Style. Presentation. We obsess over flow and motion and “delight” while quietly offloading all the responsibility for consequence onto someone else—product, engineering, support, compliance. But let me be clear: design has consequences. If the user doesn’t understand the flow, that’s not an edge case—that’s a failure of design. If someone clicks the wrong button because the hierarchy was misleading, or misses a setting because it’s buried in complexity, that’s not a support issue—that’s a design decision. If a user comes away from your product feeling stupid, manipulated, or alone, that is not a surprise. It is the outcome of what you shipped.

And here’s the thing: they will never blame you for it. They will blame themselves. Which means it is our responsibility to speak for the person who can’t name what went wrong. To advocate for the experience they should have had. To shape the systems that shape behavior.

This is what stewardship looks like. It’s not about control. It’s not about protecting your “vision.” It’s about protecting the humanity of the people on the other side of the screen.

You can feel it in the small moments—what the error message says, what happens when the connection drops, how long it takes someone to undo a mistake. It shows up when you design something to feel effortless, not because you added motion or polish, but because you actually understood the intention behind the task. You respected the person’s time. You gave them clarity instead of friction. That’s not just UX. That’s care. And care is not something we add at the end. It is not extra. It is the job.

And let’s talk about systems. Because scale is where care goes to die. We build design systems so we can move faster, with consistency. But consistency without judgment is just mass production. If you’re applying components without thought, without interrogation, without asking whether this pattern serves the user’s need in this moment, you’re not designing—you’re decorating. Your work is no longer adaptive. It’s indifferent. Aesthetic coherence without experiential coherence is nothing.

This is the shadow side of scale. And it’s where leadership must show up. Not with vision decks. Not with playbooks. But with presence. With rigor. With the kind of cultural pressure that says: we design for impact, not just interaction. We prioritize understanding, not just polish. We build teams who know that the job isn’t finished when the file is handed off—it’s finished when the user finds ease, or relief, or power in what we made.

That’s what we’re here to do. And if we don’t do it, no one will. Because no other discipline sits at the intersection of feeling, function, and framing the way design does. We’re not consultants to the experience—we’re its stewards. Its historians. Its advocates. And its authors.

So let’s act like it.

Let’s stop asking for permission to care. Let’s stop pretending that we don’t see the tradeoffs. Let’s stop hiding behind “just doing our part.” There is no part. There’s only what the user actually experiences.

And that experience is your responsibility.

Design like it matters. Because it does.

Design like someone’s future behavior depends on it. Because it does.

Design like you’re accountable for the emotions you cause, the assumptions you reinforce, the dignity you preserve—or deny.

Because you are.

This is what it means to be a designer now.

Not a decorator. Not a deliverable machine.

A steward. A shaper. A practitioner of care.

And if that doesn’t excite you, you’re in the wrong field.

But if it does—then step up.

There’s real work to do.