Whose future are we making?

Last week, I watched the Adobe 99U conference on YouTube. Like many creatives.

The opening keynote was by Eric Snowden, SVP Design at Adobe. The title of his talk: “The future we make together.”

He spoke with sincerity. No triumphalism, no threat. A steady voice that acknowledges the tension: AI helps creatives do better work, and at the same time it threatens their income. He did not resolve it. He reassured.

And he closed with a promise. In this new world:

human creativity is this new currency. It is going to be the thing that helps people stand out and cut through the noise and the sameness.

Eric Snowden, Adobe 99U

Everyone must have felt reassured. Inside me, something tightened.

Because that sentence says exactly what brought us here. It frames a question of speed, never of direction. It tells us how to stay in the race. It never asks where we are running, nor for whom.

What future, exactly, are we making together? And this together, who does it include?

The future we are being sold

For three years, a fear has run through creative fields, and tech more broadly. The machine draws, writes, generates. Faster than us. And the question returns. Again and again: what will be left for us?

The dominant narrative has found its answer. What will be left is us. Our creativity, our taste, our singularity. The machine produces, the human distinguishes. Snowden puts it better than anyone: human creativity is the new currency.

It is reassuring. And sincere. Snowden is not selling a dream. He has seen the numbers, he knows his tribe's anxiety. He reaches out.

But look at the words. Currency. What is exchanged, compared, hoarded. Stand out. Set yourself apart. Cut through the sameness. Slice through the mass.

This is the future we are being sold. A future where the human remains the measure of all value, required to stand apart, to produce, to hold their rank. A faster future, more creative, fuller. But one that revolves, as always, around us.

We are reassured about our place at the centre. We are never asked whether the centre is the right place.

A future for us alone

This future has a single addressee: the human.

Snowden gives the perfect image of it, without meaning to. He describes coding an app for his car journeys, turning traffic jams into useful time. “Reclaim time for myself.” Even when we celebrate creativity, the horizon remains the self. My time, my value, my place.

Design knows this reflex well. It has even made it its grand narrative. We are proud to have moved from the self-centred creator to user-centred design. To have left our ego behind to think of the other. It is true, and it is progress.

But we stopped there. Researcher Ron Wakkary, in Things We Could Design, puts it plainly:

human-centered design is not the answer to our problems but is itself part of the problem.

Ron Wakkary, Things We Could Design

Forty years of bringing everything back to the human, while the rest of the living world was thinning out. Design did not cause this crisis. But by placing the human at the centre of everything, it went along with it without ever seeing it. What we thought was progressive looked the other way.

The user has become our ultimate horizon. We design for them, for their comfort, for their satisfaction. And beyond? The collective, society, the living world that carries everything else? Out of frame.

A future designed for the human alone is an unliveable future. Not out of idealism, but simple logic: no human lives outside the living world. Optimising our comfort while ignoring what keeps us alive is sawing off the branch while tending the leaf.

This reflex is not the designer's alone. Designing belongs to no one in particular. Whoever shapes a policy designs. Whoever builds a course, a service, an organisation, a meal, designs. The moment we decide what we put into the world, and for whom, we design. And almost all of us have learned to do it for ourselves, pushing the rest aside.

What we handed to others

The rest, precisely. Society, the living world, those larger circles beyond us. What have we done with them?

We handed them to others. It is not for me to save the living world, that is for the government to regulate. Not for me to repair society, that is politics. And the professional version of this dodge: I only execute the brief, the decision comes from above. Each of us passes the burden up a level, which passes it higher still.

Laws matter, though. Institutions act, sometimes well. I do not expect them to disappear, I expect them to do their part. But their part will never be mine. You can vote for a law, you cannot delegate your own conscience.

The trap is not politics. It is waiting. By treating it as everyone's business, we make it no one's. And that is my most stubborn conviction.

Taking the human off its pedestal

So whose future are we making?

Not the one where the human keeps its place at the centre. The one where it agrees to step down. Yannick Roudaut speaks of humanimism, the idea of placing the human back within the living world rather than above it. To decentre it is not to diminish it. It is to return it to the weave, among other forms of life, dependent on them.

And here is the paradox. To decentre the human as a species, each of us must recentre as a person. On our own actions. Making society is not waiting for a law, it is how I behave as a citizen, day to day. Thinking of the living world is not signing a petition, it is what I put on my plate, what I consume, what I refuse. The larger circle is not built from above. It is built from below, through a thousand decisions no one can take in my place.

Whoever designs has a particular hold here. They do not consume the future, they make it. The designer knows it: refusing a brief that serves only the human centre, killing a feature that traps, is not acting beside the structure. It is acting within it, at the exact point where the future is decided.

But they are not alone at that point. The teacher choosing what to pass on, the cook what to serve, the elected official what to put forward: all design tomorrow's world, at their own scale. This hold varies, of course. You do not refuse the same things at the bottom and the top of a hierarchy. But no one, in any role, has zero hold. And none of these acts is a small virtuous gesture. It is a direct hold on the world to come.

But refusal is only half the act. The other half, the better half, is momentum. Designing for the living world. Showing that another future is desirable, and possible.

A single push counts for nothing, true. It will be replaced. Except no practice has ever changed any other way. What one person dares to design, others adopt. What was daring becomes habit, then obvious. The desirable future is not decreed from above. It is set in motion, and it is taken up.

So what now?

I think again of Snowden. Of his outstretched hand. “The future we make together.”

The phrase is beautiful. But this together, in his mouth, stops short. Creatives, peers, the community, the industry. Humans among themselves. Never the living world that carries them all.

Yet we do not make the future together as long as that together stops at us. Nor do we make it by waiting for others, for politics, for the neighbour, for the level above.

The real together does not begin with a comfortable we. It begins with an I that decides. One act, then another that takes it up, then a profession that shifts.

Whose future are we making? One where we are no longer alone at the centre. Where to design means to care for something larger than oneself. That future, no one will make in our place.