Siddharth on where design is headed next.

So this started with a mail from Marianna from DesignIndia about their yearbook. They were putting together an edition called The Next and asked if I'd like to contribute a chapter. That felt like the easiest yes of the week. Of course I wanted to write. I replied faster than I should probably admit. I was told the book is about where design is moving, what it’s becoming, and how people are responding to that shift while work keeps moving.

I ended up writing the seventh chapter, titled Sensory Stimulation (I know, I know, it sounds way more exotic than it is. Almost like it belongs in a very different section of a totally different book). Which is really about how design actually behaves now. It moves. It responds. It shows up across screens, spaces, and moments. You’re not designing a single visual anymore. You’re designing a sequence, an experience, a reaction. And then the topic of AI… Uff. The polarising topic. I really feel AI naturally sits inside this. I think of it as an extra set of hands. Ideas move faster from head to screen, which opens up space to test, explore, and take sharper calls. As tools get easier to use, imagination and judgement start doing most of the heavy lifting.

I also wrote about how the canvas itself is changing. Communication design (I'm including all sub-disciplines here), in the past decade or so, has spent quite some time learning how to live inside phones. Tight screens, short attention spans, compressed formats. I believe now it’s starting to spill outward again. Physical and digital spaces overlap. Motion, sound, touch, type, data, and narrative begin to work together. Communication design starts feeling like a group activity. Visual designers, motion designers, writers, technologists, strategists, all shaping the same thing from different angles. Collaboration becomes the default mode.

These are the same questions that also keep coming up in our discussions at Dreamjar. How early technology should enter the thinking. Where a new tool genuinely adds value and where it turns into noise. How quickly workflows should adapt to this crazy stream of shiny, tempting tools that keep popping up every month (or rather weeks). How different disciplines work together when the output is an experience and not a static 'deliverable'. And how design decisions change when imagination, not technical limitation, becomes the main constraint.

These little bits I wrote above is me just skimming the surface. The chapter itself goes much deeper into these ideas and how they’re playing out in real work. The full thing lives inside The Next. There’s a lot more in there too, and far better writeups than mine.