Constraints, complexity, and compromise are driving the next phase of design

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.  In a recent Fast Company essay titled “The big design freak-out,” author Robert Fabricant chronicled a wave of executive departures and department downsizings that suggest corporate America’s love affair with design is souring. And while some businesses, indeed, are breaking up with design because they don’t understand the value or didn’t properly integrate design, Fabricant notes that at many companies, the role of design simply has evolved from “building mode” to a corporate function with metrics and a different set of stakeholders to please.  Smarter design solutions That’s a sentiment echoed by Andrew Anagnost, president and CEO of software company Autodesk. For many years, Autodesk was best known for AutoCAD, the architectural design tool, but its portfolio today also includes tools for product designers, engineers, construction companies, manufacturers, students, and media and entertainment companies. “We used to be a design software company,” Anagnost says. “We’re now a ‘design and make’ company. We’ve shifted our emphasis from having software that works in isolation to ‘design and make’ solutions that help you understand not only what you’re designing but how the thing you’re designing is built, how people will use it, and how it might behave over its life cycle.”  Anagnost says Autodesk’s software helps an expanded ecosystem of makers work together to be more efficient and effective in an increasingly complex and competitive environment. Customers such as civil and structural engineers, architects, and even game designers “all have a capacity challenge,” he adds. “They don’t have enough resources, they don’t have enough time, and they don’t have enough materials to build and rebuild everything.”   Technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), can help. Anagnost cites the example of The Phoenix, a new affordable housing project in West Oakland, California. MBH Architects used AI-powered Autodesk software to review plans from past projects to generate designs that met criteria for the new project. Architects could then use the tools to adjust to, say, minimize street noise or reduce costs. MBH says it was able to produce an initial design package in about six hours—a process that normally takes two weeks.  The design compromise The architects, builders, and materials makers on the project also used software to collaborate on the development of a prefabricated facade, which also reduces construction time. And because the planners wanted the homes to be sustainable, the facade has a core made with mycelium, a rootlike fungus that sequesters carbon.   Fabricant’s design freak-out essay notes that not all design leaders are cheering the shift from creativity to utility and scale. But for some designers and those with whom they work, these new challenges can be energizing and may produce better outcomes.   “Every design that goes out in the world is a compromise,” Anagnost says. “It’s a compromise between time, budget, and resources. Anything we can do to speed up those compromises increases the likelihood that the design is achieving the things that people actually wanted from it—that it’s going to last longer, be more usable, be more compelling, and be more sustainably built.”   How is your team combining design and business?  If your company has a dedicated design team, how has its role changed or evolved in recent years? Can creativity, utility, and scale coexist in a corporate setting? Send your observations to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’d love to feature insights about design and business in an upcoming newsletter.  Read more: Long live design  How Frank Lloyd Wright became a Gen Z household name  The most impactful designs of 2024   Architects are building labs for neurodivergent scientists  Inside the Sphere, Fast Company’s design of the year honoree