More about the archetypes

For decades, designers have been defined by the final products in our work. Pixel-perfect interfaces, innovative user flows, and striking visual systems have shaped both our education and our professional recognition. We have been categorized as interaction designers, fashion designers, communication designers, and more.

These roles have served us well. They helped shape industries, create access, and bring beauty and clarity into people’s lives.

however, as we find ourselves in the middle of climate collapse, inequality, democratic erosion, and a mental health crisis, these roles now feel narrow, and in many cases, they are even complicit in fueling the very problems we claim to solve.

The roles described here are future archetypes of design that could support a future that centers justice, caring, and pluriviersal ways of knowing.

These DesignShifter archetypes archetypes are not job titles to claim or boxes to check. These are not fixed roles or definitive categories. Rather, they are lenses: ways of seeing the evolving roles of designers. Each archetype describes a movement from an old approach to a new practice and together they form a set of practices that point toward a more ethical, ecological, and human future for design. They places our technical skills and aesthetic sensitivity in service of something larger; the wellbeing of people, communities, and the living world we're all part of.