On Design Leadership (No Scarf Required)

“No one hires a designer to keep things the way they are.” - Maria Giudice told me that once—first over a beer, then on stage at Frontiers, the design and innovation conference I ran for years.

Here in Silicon Valley, I never needed a scarf to be a designer. This job was never about aesthetics—it’s about entering a system, understanding its values, and pushing it forward.

Even during my 20 years as a designer in Milan, I didn’t wear a scarf. And—brace yourself for this arrogance—I’ve even dared to wear brown instead of black.
I’ve always been more the “I solve problems” kind of designer (cue Pulp Fiction).

Because falling in love with the problem—and maybe even turning it into money—is far better than falling in love with a solution. Even better than taking black-and-white profile pics with your hand on your chin, gazing into the void like some ascetic thinker.

Because in the world of metal and pixels—and especially here in Silicon Valley—design still means one thing first: “how it works”.

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What Design Means (To Me)

Here’s how I see it:

Level one: Identity — Design forces you to ask who you are and what values you bring to the world.

Level two: Product or service — The tangible translation of those values.

Level three: Experience — The way people connect with what you’ve built, and decide if it belongs in their life.

Fragmenting design roles is a perspective failure. It’s a conscious inheritance from the assembly line. An industrial legacy—when breaking work into parts meant producing faster. An outdated hallucination in a world where every product is a system, a relationship, a language.

Even in the early days of the internet, I struggled to make sense of it. Now, in the age of AI, it’s outright absurd. Breaking the design process into silos—research here, UI there, layout somewhere else—dilutes systemic vision.
It unloads responsibility for the whole.

Or worse: it turns every decision into a homeowners’ association meeting, where the outcomes can range from creative brilliance to watered-down compromises.

…I know how arrogant this sounds. I know how politically unorthodox.
But we’ve all been in THOSE meeting rooms. We’ve all witnessed the birth of MONSTERS born from the lowest common denominator.

We’ve sacrificed great ideas at the altar of “one step at a time” or some internal guideline that had zero awareness of the product’s potential trajectory.

And let’s not even mention those who look too much at numbers, user clusters, or click loss projections—taking on a kind of centrist cowardice that renders everything gray and slowly drains the soul out of your product.

Because without identity, every solution is just a commodity.

So let’s not act shocked. Let’s face the headache.

Every design decision is a strategic one. Isolating it from what comes before or after leads to inconsistency, inefficiency, and misalignment with real needs.

Value arises when the designer takes responsibility for the entire cycle:
Understanding the context, imagining alternatives, validating scenarios, shaping solutions—and yes, if needed—even redesigning the org itself.

That’s what the three levels are for. Print them on the meeting room walls.
That’s the most practical form of humility I can think of.

Design is glue.
It’s the shared canvas for all teams.
The language of impact that everyone—from bean counters to engineers—should speak. It’s not the sum of UI + UX + service.

It’s the constant movement between macro and micro, between strategy and detail, to generate systemic value.

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Design for Teams (No Archistars required)

If the paragraph above gave you the idea that this is some ego-driven design cult… you’ve got it wrong. Those three levels are a manifesto. But in daily operations, we need a pragmatic playbook.

I’ve developed one over time, blending coaching with hands-on innovation nurturing.
In practice, I use a cycle made of four moves:

1. Choose Desirable Futures
Imagine scenarios beyond current limits. Design doesn’t maintain—it advances.

2. Play with Emerging Tech
Embrace emerging tools before they go mainstream. Think LEGO bricks—malleable, error-prone, full of possibility.

3. Inspire Positive Rituals
Without rituals, tech is just noise. Design gives it shape — like when you share a Walkman earbud with a friend, or decide if an app becomes connection or pollution. Play with adoption. Watch for addiction.

4. Detect Emerging Behaviors
Observe what really happens when people meet systems. This is where the loop closes—not with KPIs, but with weak signals that show what’s actually shifting.

This isn’t just theory—it shapes how teams work together, sharpens observation, and trains people to share responsibility. And yes, it demands mature interpreters.
Not just pixel artisans with a bag of tricks, but real humans.

People who:
• Learn constantly — skills age in months, not years
• Work with their hands — prototypes, objects, tangible stuff
• Share — not just outputs, but ownership
• Practice distributed leadership — reverse mentorship, impact from any seat
• Focus on impact — because without it, every project is just theory

This is a different kind of design leadership.
Not the caricature of the “creative genius” who makes things pretty.
This is governance and extended responsibility.

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Designing for Presence (Not Chairs)

Today, designers must be capable of shaping the behavior of AI, new social and economic contexts, and the physical/cognitive extensions of human life.

We design extensions of the human body and mind: first physical, then cognitive—and now both together. And there’s no ceiling.
The field opens to systems, environments, new forms of human-machine coexistence.

As Steve Jobs said: “Everything around you was made by people no smarter than you.”

That’s the spark. You don’t need to be a genius. You just need to take responsibility.
Experiment, fail, share—and let design drive transformation.

We’re living through a historic shift—from 2D to 3D computing.

Not in the “put on a headset” sense, but in how machines perceive and reflect the world. For decades now, we’ve stared at flat screens. Compressed reality into dashboards and spreadsheets. But today, our machines can perceive the world in 3D.

Why should they deliver value back to us as tables? Now is the moment to fulfill the original promise of interaction design (I’m class of ‘97, for context):

Let space itself become interface.
Approaching design through the lens of physical AI is the next infinite canvas.
Physical AI is Not the Future. It’s Now.
We’ve moved beyond static physical products. Beyond sensors bolted to walls.

The early IoT was wired. Anchored. Observers of space.
Today, those nodes have legs. And wheels.
They move through environments, perceive context, respond to people, engage with infrastructure.
They’re no longer just connected things.
They’ve become cognitive things.

Mobile nodes in a living network: aka robots.
That’s why I talk about Physical AI:

Not androids dreaming of electric sheep — but robots tracing walls on construction sites. Building and fixing docks by the sea. Sanitizing hotel rooms. Producing cell therapies tailored to a single patient. Immersive spaces with no devices. Even autonomous superyachts cutting through the sea.

Technology is no longer a window we peer through — it’s a place we step into.
And design, in this new landscape, becomes the architecture of presence. It’s about deciding what deserves to exist.
And it’s not visual — it’s behavioural.

For me, design was never about chairs.
I got bored of flat UIs too.
Design was never about inert things.
It’s about what connects — not what contains.
It’s about what moves us.
What responds to us.
And how we learn to live inside intelligence.
It’s all about Presence.

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The near future -of design- as seen from Palo Alto

AI is the most disruptive tech revolution we’ve ever seen.
Clippy won’t stay confined to chats and dashboards.
It’s already moving into the world.
We’re already seeing it mounted on bodies, on heads, in shared spaces.

NVIDIA just announced a new AI processor — not for crunching infinite data, but for thinking efficiently about climbing stairs or handling delicate objects.

A compact mind.
Optimized for real-time decisions.
AI that moves from the cloud… to the body.
Meanwhile, cost barriers are falling.

Hugging Face just unveiled open-source humanoid robots at a few hundred dollars, with rental models around $300/month—about the cost of a car.
Access to anthropomorphic, working machines is here.

Designers who still think in 2D screens are drawing maps on the wrong terrain.
So what should we be designing now?

Designers can now shape entire worlds.
Intelligences.
Artificial Existences.
LIFE.

We designers, long responsible for crafting physical and cognitive extensions of humans, now face a challenge we cannot delegate.

Your company shouldn’t limit itself.
Not now. Not with AI.

Here are my conclusive 2cents about Design, today:

• Speed burns out.
• Structure locks in.
• Clarity scales.

Or just call it what it is: Design Leadership.
The only way to stay fast without getting lost.

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P.S. If someone walks in with a scarf … well, now you know what to do.