Design is splitting in two: the part a machine can produce, and the part someone still has to decide.

The market has steadied, but not for everyone. Demand for designers has held up, but it sits with senior and AI-capable people. Junior openings are fewer, and in the UK advertised pay is falling.

Junior work is getting thinner. The tasks AI does well are the same ones juniors used to learn on, so entry-level roles now ask for experience that the entry level no longer gives you. Most of the hiring slump since 2022 comes from the economy, and AI explains less of it than the headlines suggestthan the headlines suggestthan the headlines suggest. Some companies now train their own juniors instead of waiting for experienced hires. Shopify, for example, runs a six-month apprenticeship where early-career designers work on real products with a senior mentor.

What companies pay for now is judgement. They want someone who can take a problem from research to something shipped, explain every decision on the way, and tell good output from bad. Screens on their own are worth less. The thing being designed is growing past the screen into how a system behaves: when an AI may act, when it should stop and ask, how it recovers from a mistake. Some call this AI design, some agent experience, some conversation design. They don't agree on the name, and a few say it shouldn't need one.

I found no art school closing a digital design programme. The UK is offering fewer courses overall, and the art and design degrees closing so far teach hands-on making, such as textiles, costume, and jewellery and silversmithing. The schools I looked at in Europe, the UK and the US keep the studio and the critique at the centre, and add code, AI, sustainability and futures work around them. AI usually arrives as one small course, not yet as a direction. In the Baltics, the Estonian Academy of Arts is one of the few places where digital product design is a bachelor's programme of its own.

Taken together, the picture is this. Design education still does the hard part well. Studio work and critique teach framing and judgement, which is exactly what the work now pays for, and a strong visual foundation still counts.

It moves slower on the rest. AI usually arrives as one small course, and designing how systems behave is barely taught anywhere. Shipping something real, which juniors used to learn on the job, now has to be learned before the job. Every junior has to build these in themselves, in school or outside it.

What already works should be strengthened too. Craft and systems thinking are the two skills that age slowest: someone still has to make things good, and almost everything a designer touches now behaves as a system. And because the directions a designer can take are so many, a design education works best as a strong shared core with real room to choose: a common foundation in craft, systems and framing, then space to go deep in one direction or combine several. Some schools already build it this way, with a shared first year and pathways after it.

Two more things belong next to the craft. The first is business, understood simply: I do what I love, so how do I make it work? Business here has nothing to do with a man in a suit with a briefcase. It means knowing how to position yourself, how to explain what your work is worth, and how to shape a professional identity that is your own. A salaried job is a version of the same thing, because people are chosen for what they can show and say about their own contribution.

The second is foresight and innovation. Anticipating change gives a designer an edge that reacting to it never will. Futurists and forward-looking organisations scan for early signals, read them into trends, build scenarios and speculative prototypes that question what everyone assumes, and use systems thinking to test today's decisions against several possible tomorrows. Brands use these methods to plan products and strategy, and international organisations use them to plan under uncertainty. AI extends what already exists. Imagining what does not exist yet, and deciding which futures are worth building toward, is design work, and it belongs at the centre of a design education, not at its edges.

Both are learned best close to practice: real projects, people from the field in the room, and real cases instead of invented briefs.

The full report goes deeper into each skill and direction: why the work asks for it, how to practise it, and how to show it in your work.

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