config is coming

Config is coming again

I think it was Config 2024 when I first had the feeling “Oh shit. Stuff is going to move faster than people can learn it”.

I organized the first few Figma user group meetups in Atlanta back in 2018. During the first meetup we didn’t even have color swatches in Figma, but multi-player was clearly the future of design. Moving off of platform-locked tools (I still miss Sketch) and empowering collaboration on one design platform was exciting. Figma had incredible flexibility at the free tier, and you could afford to learn the tool without paying anything and it ran on a lot of accessible machines. I was excited about what a tool like this could do to help democratize access to design.

But Config 2024 was the first time that I realized that the era of having expert users of an entire design platform were just about over. I was an early adopter, playing around with Figma years before I started teaching it to members of the global studio network at AKQA and using it to develop Delta’s design system library. I always felt like I had a grasp on 80-90% of the features that had come out at any given moment...always making time since I was teaching and supporting other designers and making my way in the world as a creative technologist, design ops and design systems practitioner...it made sense to prioritize a couple of hours to learn every new feature within a week or two of its release. Then Config 2024. I realized that I was overwhelmed and felt like the standard I had been able to maintain of “platform expertise” was just over. To stay up to date on the massive feature set, community ecosystem, APIs, additional products, incoming acquisitions, and best practices for all things Figma...would require a full-time job just teaching Figma. And I am not sure I would enjoy it anymore.

And that was the beginning of me realizing the limit on velocity isn’t the output anymore...it’s the bandwidth of input and how we architect the organizational responsibility for learning. Having 1-2 naturally disposed hyperfixated platform experts per 20 person team while the majority of designers focused on knowing good design with their eyes and being able to efficiently enough move their boxes around to get their point across...that was functional enough for design. People who talk about design tools on the internet are a different subset of people than people who make incredible design work. I have worked with so many people with absolutely incredible taste, curatorial instincts, and good intuitive imagination who still to this day don’t know Figma has version control or how to build out a variant. People who haven’t ever bothered installing a plugin and who start every design file with a messy scratchpad and continue to detach components because design control matters more to them than the integrity of my design system library.

I have always dreamed of being able to just make plugins and linters that can accept that workflow and find convergence after their brilliance because I think in systems, and some people don’t, but I want their brilliant way to be a part of the work because they make it better. I’ll do cleanup and governance and they can continue to breathe and innovate and leave human hands all over the work. I’m pro-permeability. A closed system is a dying system. I want to orchestrate living systems always.

But now I don’t even really believe that UIs of data entry and buttons make sense anymore. In part because of this product development velocity. I hope that individual people will take up software crafting for themselves and build their own weird n of 1 software that does cool things. Build a Pokémon Go app for your birdwatching. Make a snarky coffeeshop passport app that roasts all the places with no outlets. Build a block-based editor for your astrology practice. That’s where this velocity increase feels human and inspiring. But I am actively anxious and full of dread for Config 2026. I can only imagine that building has continued to accelerate. I am in like a freeze state, overwhelmed without even knowing the release notes. And ultimately I think what I want most from Figma is to build more power into their MCP for agentic tooling, to tell me how they are going to bring Weave and Buzz more value...but I don’t actually care about any of that anymore. Because when you can build in words with an agent orchestrating in the background, I open Figma these days to just drop screenshots from my apps in and refine...before realizing that actually I already have tokens and rules and context maps that can handle it from a prompt I can send in Wispr Flow via Telegram to my star chart orchestrator...so I do that. I speed through design and development because my instincts have been honed over 15 years in tech, and the magic of being human lives elsewhere now.

All I want to do as a designer is find places where slow human speed design still makes sense. I’ve taken up sewing and fiber art. I’ve taken up ritual design. I do astrological journaling. I greet my rue plants every morning and have a chat with them. I go on walks. I write and write and write trying to metabolize this fast, scary world. I sit with my parents. I slow way down with them. I think about how my dad’s voice was so spacious and booming and now it cracks and whispers.

There’s so much I want to slow down.

I’ve been a tech worker for my entire adult life. I’ve never been JUST a tech worker. I’ve been a meditator, a person with rigor and discernment. Someone who feels and thinks in systems. A tech optimist with integrity, something harder and harder to be these days.

I’m ready to stop trying to keep up with an industry that’s more machine than man every day. I’m not gonna Paul Bunyan myself. I will go write poems to the gardenias and breathe with my friends. In my leisure I’ll tinker with robots because I am a born and raised computer kid of the 90s, and have some kind of hand in getting us to that fully automated space communism. But friends, keeping up with product development cycles that are exhausting rather than exciting to read...I’m over that.

What I’m not over is system intervention design, but the only part of the system that isn’t moving much faster is the people. I love people. I care so deeply about every moment someone who's the collective dreams of every ancestor wastes reading docs that will be stale before they get to the end. In a world that has mindlessly and in lockstep prioritized velocity of output over anything else, sacred or mundane, velocity is cheap to me now. Attunement. Presence. Relationality. Ritual. Threshold design.

I’m more and more interested in how companies could possibly believe that AI workflows just mean forcing people to do the same thing but with 5x expectations of outputs. Let’s build things that were impossible before...things that solve real problems. Not just more SaaS integrations faster. Ugh. Let designers with vision who have always detached components anyway breathe. You need their imagination more now than ever. I’m so tired of accidentally hitting sparkle icons who hijack a text field.