Design as a Wager
23rd September 2026Design, as Buchanan described it, is the art of addressing wicked problems[1]. Problems that are dynamic, where the context keeps moving, where certain parameters are inscrutable and thus no right-or-wrong answer exists. In essence they are beyond solving solely by the acts of making or analysis. Instead what they call for is Aristotle’s phronesis, practical wisdom, the art of judgement. My posit, then, is that what makes a designer of commercially good (hereafter good) design is their judgement. Making and analysis are required to produce something worth judging. But it is Judgement that is the work, and every design is a wager placed on it.
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Design as a discipline is the result of technology deskilling the act of making. More recently it has reframed itself as analytical work (design thinking, user-centred design and other frameworks). Where technologies have typically impacted the need for physical making skills, AI is different. It threatens not only to erode making but, for the first time, to annex the analytical work as well, which it can perform adequately enough. Design hasn’t done enough to change the way it is commercially valued since its post-iPhone zenith[2], and now it’s on the back foot, needing to explain what, if anything, it is in the age of AI. Nils Gilman calls what comes next the judgement economy, where businesses will increasingly compete on how well they decide[3]. The tech industry’s word for the same thing is taste[4].
Part of the challenge in reinventing Design’s value is that we can evidence its impact but struggle to quantify its mechanics. Commercially, good design is evidenced by the breadth of the public’s engagement with it, over time: the more people that choose an object, and keep choosing it, the better. Yet we still typically pay designers for their time, materials or deliverables, with no way of knowing that the results are good prior to public assessment. The common hedge is to employ experienced designers, those who have delivered good designs before. Now that time, materials and deliverables are about to be commoditised at an alarming rate, how do designers early in their careers, without experience, justify a shift in commercial valuation?
But is experience truly the only marker for good judgement? The honest answer is that we do not know. Design research has described the kinds of judgement designers make[5], but has not measured whether those judgements were any good. Additionally, experience is not always beneficial. As Robin Hogarth described, its lessons can often be untimely or misleading[6]. Experience thus is arguably our only proxy, the one thing we can count, standing in for a judgement whose reasoning is inscrutable.
Therein lies the issue: as designers, our judgement is not purely rational, it is born not only of what is known but also of what we believe. Experience would suggest that the belief has been tempered by reality. But the test of whether a judgement is broadly good is the public’s response. Kornish and Ulrich showed that consumers rather than industry veterans were better judges of what ideas would sell[7]. But what differentiates designers from consumers is that they make that judgement before the idea exists, empowered by an understanding of the taste of others. Every design is a wager on how the public will respond, placed before launch and settled afterwards[8]. It is a wager rather than a forecast because something is staked: the designer’s record, on which their career is based.
If design is a wager, what does that mean for the way we commercially evaluate it? Historically, the royalty model made that wager literal, paying the designer on the public’s response, but it has become harder and harder to negotiate[9]. The nearest precedent is the publisher’s advance[10]. Here the publisher forecasts how a book will sell and sets the author’s advance on that forecast. Design licensing has its own version, an upfront sum deducted from future royalties, offered when the manufacturer is confident the product will sell[11]. But for the industry at large to move to this commercial model sustainably, we’re going to need a far better way to understand the odds.
Authors Note: This piece originated from an application to a fellowship asking for submissions on the future of Design in an age of AI.
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Rittel & Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning", Policy Sciences 4, 1973; Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking", Design Issues 8(2), 1992.