Dear Designer,

Hello and I hope you’re doing well.

The author Brené Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” It is a feeling that can arise all on its own, out of nowhere and independent of our individual actions. Often associated with family or personal trauma, it is manifest in a felt insecurity about the world driven by previous relational dynamics that we may or may not have access to.

We feel shame when we say something weird or out of turn, or when we say “thanks, mom” to our friend, or when we insult someone and they overhear the indiscretion.

But shame and shaming are also culturally present, especially online, of course. The fear of missing out, the sense that our bodies are never good enough, the terror that we cannot truly “compete” in the marketplace, the malaise of being unable, unsure, or incomplete — these are feelings of shame that our broken cultural contract offers us daily through technology. We are only one image, one email, one post, or one website away from feeling badly, or worse, about our own selves.

I felt this deeply in the past week. I’ve been working diligently on my own website for months. It’s coming along. I was becoming more content with it, not quite proud of it, but feeling like it was starting to represent me, work, ideas, ways of thinking, etc. Even the photo of myself was fine! My Dear Designer newsletter was integrated and I was excited to introduce the site.

Then I came across a colleague’s new site and I felt two emotions. I was happy that they launched; I know how much work it takes to create anything for oneself. Then, within seconds, there was a mild sense of shame.

It wasn’t quite envy, which is the desire to have what they have; I know enough about myself that I don’t want their site or to be more like them. (One practical tool that I use to test whether I am indeed envious is this: would I want to be that exact other person, with their problems, their looks, their age, their career, their partner and their ideas? It works every time: the answer is always no.)

Aristotle thought of envy as a personal response to the good fortunes of other people and as an “evil” emotion, whereas, for him, shame is a feeling of disgrace or having fallen from one’s own higher self-regard.

I felt shame.

Shame for being a designer that was unworthy of the title. Shame that I had spent 30 years designing websites and identities for others and I couldn’t design a decent one for myself. Shame for making bad decisions about my writing, both the quality and the quantity. Humiliation for being proud of what I had created just a few days ago and then shame for my own dismissal of that quiet and occasioned confidence.

I became ashamed of the shame itself. What gave me the right to feel shame for putting something into the world, despite its imperfections? And why should one person’s random design and writing negate my own creativity, self-worth and expression? Why did it only take one glance at a random website to make me as thin-skinned as an August peach?

But my own feelings connect to a much larger cultural epidemic, a time of public shaming and shame-making that many of us are experiencing. It is especially formidable for designers in contemporary conversations about AI.

Are you using AI, dear designer? Don’t you know that there will be two groups in the near future — the people that know how to use AI and those that don’t have jobs? Are you using Figma’s latest tool AI Workflows? What new technologies and platforms are you testing, exploring in order to keep your resume up to date?

Frontier AI models are advancing at an accelerated rate and we are being asked to keep up with the velocity of this transformation. Large employers and corporations are asking us to try out new AI tools, teach them our skillsets, and experiment with outputs. Billboards are telling our bosses to stop hiring humans. Some of us designers, especially those focused on user experience and design systems, are living on a knife edge.

But here’s the rub. While this feels new to us, the shaming of workers is part of a 200-year history of industry demanding that we conform to becoming more efficient. We are being asked to shelve the values designers hold most dear — independent thinking, experimentation, artistry and collaboration — in order to tie us to the new machinery of work. We are being told that our livelihoods will change indefinitely and that we better jump on the train now before it’s moving too fast.

What we might do to offset shame

There are a few important things to remember here. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their book What is Philosophy?, speak about shame as a way to go up against dominant social forces — and that artists and writers can resist and refuse shame because they are poetic creatures.

But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in common — their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present.

If you are feeling that AI loop — the pressure to use it, the conversations around it, the media hype for it — remember that this is a social phenomenon. It’s not just you. It is a result of a massive PR and marketing machine.

Anthropic (the maker of Claude) raised $65 billion in Series H funding a few weeks ago. The companies building and promoting these models have unlimited money to convince us that it’s us or the machines. Think of what you could do with just .1% of that money ($65 million) if it was handed to you, dear designer, to convince others of the value and import of these tools. My guess: probably a lot!

Second, there is a bubble. AI may be with us for a long time but it may advance at a slower pitch. A recent Gartner report notes that worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.52 trillion in 2026. This is a 44% increase year-over-year. Analysts and business reporters predict that these numbers are not sustainable; a global event or set of events can knock this spending down in a matter of weeks. It’s probably some time off, but at some point there will be a correction. The dot-com implosion, which I had a not-fun time experiencing first-hand in New York, was brutal but it also led to better opportunities for designers who stayed the course.

Finally, the shadow of shame being cast on us creative workers (artists) right now is not only temporary and manufactured — it is meant to tap into our own fears. Creative individuals are notorious for living with insecurity and impossibly high standards, often resulting in diagnosable perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and skills paralysis. We can be cruel to ourselves; but allowing massive corporations to push the arrow in deeper is crueler still. In other words, the marketers know us too well.

The days are long. Your capacity to create is untold. Don’t give in or give up.

Yours,

signature in blue pencil of Andrew Boardman

P.S. AI is not evil, though it comes off that way. It is not all-encompassing, though the numerous apocalyptic stories by influencers and tech bros are fascinating. AI offers us options and opportunities and it can leverage our creative intuition. However, the way it is being marketed and sold to us through humiliation, fear, and such conviction is untenable.

Update: Dear Designer is (really) moving

I’ve been talking about this for a while, so forgive me. But this will be the last issue of Dear Designer on Substack. In a nutshell, I don’t hate Substack but I don’t want to tacitly support platforms that tacitly support Nazis and Nazi-adjacent writing. I’m moving to Ghost, a platform that is driven by a non-profit with a mission to open source publishing.

You don’t need to do anything. Moving forward, the newsletter will be sent from Ghost and will be parked under the Newsletter tab on my site. I’ve already moved your email address over. As always, if you no longer want to subscribe to Dear Designer, you can opt out anytime.

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Bonus: My intro coaching package

For the remainder of the summer, I’m offering my professional coaching services to new clients at a discounted rate. You can find out more information on my site, including how I might be able to help you, how coaching works, what the investment of time and money is, and related questions.

If you are interested, I’d be honoured to learn more about your goals, hopes, and dreams.

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