Essay · Feb 2026
Designers (should) run the world
A short re-visit of the closing session from the 2017 UCDA Design Conference, nine years later.
In October 2017, I gave the closing general session at the 47th UCDA Design Conference, in Baltimore, my own backyard, with the intentionally-provocative title “Designers (Should) Run the World.” The argument was not that designers should literally take over. It was that the discipline of design (start with the human, make the thing, test it, iterate) is the one discipline most organizations are still optional about.
Finance is not optional. Legal is not optional. Design, somehow, still is. That is the thing worth changing.
The argument kept growing after that room: it became “Creatives (Should) Run the World” at CASE the following year, and an essay on Medium. UCDA still hosts the original deck in its conference archives.
Read “Creatives Should Run The World” on Medium ↗
The original deck, in UCDA’s 2017 conference archive ↗
What I would add in 2026
Everything I said in that talk is more true now. The tools got cheaper, the stakes got higher, and the orgs that treat design as infrastructure are moving at a speed the others cannot match.
