Healthy Skepticism: On the hype, slop, and work left for design
Date: Friday, December 3, 2026
Time: 5:30 – 7:30 pm ET
Location: 136 W 21 Street, 5 floor, NYC
AI changed the face of design. Whether it did a good job is a different question. Our work got faster, cheaper, and more synthetic, and somewhere along the way we stopped asking who it was for.
DSI alum Grace Kwon brings together practitioners from The New York Times, Airbnb, Mastercard, and MetLife to compare notes on what’s real, what’s noise, and what’s worth saving in the work, life, and possible death of design as we know it.
Speakers include:
- Yvonne Tran, Product at The New York Times
- Jon Sweet, Service Design at Airbnb
- Mahima Jaju (MFA DSI ’21), Research at Mastercard
- Manako Tamura, CX @MetLife
The evening opens with 4 PechaKucha talks, followed by a candid panel. Provocations for conversations include:
- Design Quality: Is AI raising the floor or lowering the ceiling for designers?”
- Design Research: Synthetic research vs. sound research, when do shortcuts cost us?
- Design Practice: What does a process engineer see in a service that a designer misses?
- Design Futures: Is now the moment speculative design finally leaves galleries for industry?