The New Designer — Andrew Pandji

Design is dead… is not what this piece is about. This is going to be an optimistic and empowering take on the field, and what I’m calling the “New Designer.” In this semester of exploring design leadership in Doug Powell’s “Design Leadership” course at Washington University, we’ve been engaging with practicing design leaders in the field. In this reflection I want to explore an observation I made — a shift from designers working within traditional, linear career models to more fragmented, or fractional approaches.

We spoke to one design leader, who mentioned that the industry is shifting towards more independent, self-directed “portfolio” careers. She describes the current way things are done, especially for those underrepresented in the field as “not made for us… [and] not built for us.”¹ After a career working with big names like Apple, Nike and Youtube, she now is moving towards fractional design leadership. In her words, “there are other ways to be successful, and I want more people to understand that.”¹ We had Rama Gheerawo join our class, and his ethos of “human first, designer second” speaks to the notion that identity and values, not career structures, should orient a designer’s practice. In his chapter on Creative Leadership, Rama talks about how his personal practices in “yoga, meditation, philosophy, self-development and spiritual inquiry”² is core to his work. I see a connection between the two, where humanity — particularly our curiosity — drives this move away from traditional career structures into more liberatory frameworks. And what’s exciting to me is that it feels like an evolution of the freelance/independent model, except it moves the designer from a space of craft, to that of leadership.

So what are some of the reasons for this shift?

Changing trends around company loyalty. A McKinsey study from 2021 suggests that up to 25% of workers in advanced economies could shift toward more hybrid, independent or project-based models of work.³ A 2023 Monster poll found that 37% of respondents had more than one full-time job.⁴ During the shift to remote work during the pandemic, we saw a trend of “overemployment” where someone is fully employed at two places at the same time. These trends reflect the erosion between employer and employee, and the social contract of the workplace. In a way the emergence of the fractional design leader is a professional, and above-board version of a similar instinct. The design leader we spoke to talked about “getting the bag” and using that earned credibility to move into more independent spaces. Other design leaders that we spoke to expressed similar sentiment.
The gig leadership economy normalized portfolio careers. As reported by The Great Entrepreneurs, Linkedin mentioned fractional roles increased from 2,000 in 2022 to 110,000 in early 2024.⁵ An OECD forecast, as reported by Portfolio Collective, predicts that by 2030, half of all professionals will have portfolio careers.⁶ These studies suggest that the fractional CDO (Chief Design Officer) is following things like fractional CEOs and CFOs. For design leaders that have that earned credibility, going fractional allows them choice in the work that they do, flexibility to pursue passion projects and ability to not be confined to a single geographical location. We spoke to a design founder from California who now lives in Lisbon. Others that we spoke to expressed a desire to move away from the Bay or New York, or even America completely. In some ways, this was reminiscent of the digital nomad culture of the mid 2010s.
AI as an enabler to ‘build and deploy’. This shift is one that is still unfolding. For a lot of recent design history, designers had to play ball with other functions to get something to market. As someone who was part of a ‘design transformation’ effort in the late 2010s, we were talking about design as being part of the Triforce that is Product - Design - Engineering. Now, a senior designer with deep knowledge of craft, but limited engineering skills can build and deploy projects as a solo person. This can be a non-serious, or passion project. Or something that generates enough for the New Designer to not be beholden to a single job or company. There is still much research to be done in this space, but I’m starting to see tools like Cursor, Claude and Replit — as well as new modes of working — as a liberating force for the New Designer to chart their own path. In our study, 94% of design leaders expect their tool stack to change. Perhaps this is indicative of this shift towards the solo designer being able to move mountains without the need for traditional product team structures.

So what does this New Designer who engages with fractional design leadership look like? I find the vision outlined in Changemakers by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland inspiring for this. In a diagram, they describe some outdated approaches to change as “traditional, siloed, hierarchical and linear”⁷ The book suggests that designers are positioned to tackle “wicked problems” that are “VUCA” — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Thinking about the shift away from being beholden to organizations (particularly, profit-driven corporate orgs) to having the power to pick and choose what they do, I can’t help but imagine the impact the New Designer can have on wicked problems like social inequity, climate change, civic infrastructure and more. These are problems that are not about optimizing for quarterly returns, but instead rewards the values-driven, human-first design thinking that Gheerawo describes. One thing that resonated with me from our research project was the re-centering craft. The more designers rise within traditional organizations, the less they get to make. Making gets replaced with meetings, stakeholder management and office politics. We heard a lot about this from our interviews. The one design leader we spoke to that exemplified this New Designer mentioned feeling empowered to get back to making, particularly through side- or passion projects. Empowered by AI tooling, they are able to juggle their demanding 9-to-5, while getting back to making.

We have to also ask: what are some of the risks that the New Designer will have to navigate? We read Phil Gilbert’s Irresistible Change which describes the transformation that IBM started in 2012.⁸ We discussed maturity models that rewarded the deeply embedded design leader. Capital, sponsorship and organizational stability are things that the embedded design leader has, that someone who’s independent doesn’t have built in. In some ways the path of the fractional design leader mirrors that of the freelancer. In addition to the work itself, is added admin — like figuring out getting paid, getting things like insurance, client management and the like. This wasn’t a question that we probed on in the interviews but I am curious how design leaders looking at fractional paths think about this more freelancer-esque path — one that is arguably less stable than being in-house and being able to rely on things like insurance and a direct deposit hitting every two weeks. Another question is if everybody has the same kind of access to this fractional path? The design leader we spoke to had built credibility, having worked at places with name recognition, but what about someone who did similar work at places with less recognition. And as we think about the kind of wicked problems that need solving, are we privileged design leaders coming from Apple vs. say, the Alzheimer’s Association? This equity dimension is a big one to probe on, because while the landscape is shifting, I wonder if it is available to those who are already credentialed, networked and financially stable. Finally, what is the role of design education in all this? When we were discussing different organizational structures – the centralized model, the decentralized model, designers working along with product, engineering and other cross-functional partners – one of the questions that I started to ask was how the emergence of The New Designer is going to change that. What skill should we be teaching designers, in a world where work changes? Is it entrepreneurial skills? Business acumen? Prompt engineering?

The New Designer is not a rejection of design leadership but rather an evolution. While they don’t anchor their identity to a single organization, they are still practicing design (and creative leadership). Our research has only skimmed the surface when it comes to understanding this fractional approach to design leadership.

“Anonymous Design Leader”. Interview by author. Spring 2026. ↩ ↩²
Gheerawo, Rama. Creative Leadership: Born from Design. London: Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, 2020. ↩
Lund, Susan, Anu Madgavkar, James Manyika, Sven Smit, Kweilin Ellingrud, Mary Meaney, and Olivia Robinson. The Future of Work After COVID-19. McKinsey Global Institute, February 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19 ↩
Monster. “2023 Work Watch Survey.” Monster.com, 2023. https://hiring.monster.com/resources/blog/monster-poll-how-workers-feel-halfway-through-2023/ ↩
The Great Entrepreneurs. “The Rise of Fractional Senior Roles.” Accessed 2025. https://thegreatentrepreneurs.com/the-rise-of-fractional-senior-roles/ ↩
Portfolio Collective. “The Future of Careers.” Accessed 2025. https://portfolio-collective.com/content/articles/the-future-of-careers/ ↩
Giudice, Maria, and Christopher Ireland. Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Era of Globalization. Brooklyn: Rosenfeld Media, 2014. ↩
Gilbert, Phil. Irresistible Change: A Story of Design. IBM Design, 2019. ↩

Footnotes