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The World Before Ive
The world before Jony Ive was beige.
Not metaphorically. Literally beige. Computers in the 1990s came in one color: the pale, institutional tan of filing cabinets and government offices. They squatted under desks like appliances. Humming, hot, hostile. Thick cables snaked across floors. Fans whirred. Monitors flickered with the sickly glow of cathode rays. The interface was a command line: green text on black, cryptic strings of code that demanded fluency before granting access.
Design wasn't just absent. It was deliberately excluded. These machines were built by engineers for other engineers, and the aesthetic language was purely functional: beige boxes, sharp edges, screws visible on every surface. If you wanted to use a computer, you had to accept its ugliness as the cost of entry.
Then, on a stage in Cupertino in 1998, everything changed.
A soft-spoken British designer with an unmistakable soothing voice stepped into a spotlight and unveiled a machine that shouldn't have been possible. The iMac gleamed like a jellyfish under studio lights. Translucent, playful, impossibly colorful. Bondi Blue. It had curves. It had a handle. It looked like it had been pulled from the future and dropped into the present as a gift.
It wasn't just a computer. It was an invitation.
For the first time, a machine said: you are welcome here. It even said, “hello.” You didn't need to know DOS commands or IRQ settings. You didn't need to apologize for wanting something beautiful. The iMac made technology feel joyful, and in doing so, it gave millions of people permission to care about how things looked, how they felt, how they fit into their lives.
That moment marked the beginning of Jony Ive's reign. A three-decade long era that redefined what it meant to design technology.
With his team, Ive sculpted devices from aluminum and glass as if each one were a sculpture destined for a museum. Every curve was obsessively considered. Every corner perfectly radiused. Inspired by Dieter Rams and Braun's minimalist philosophy, Ive elevated form to poetry. The click of a MacBook's lid. The chamfered edge of an iPhone. The satisfying weight of an Apple Watch. These weren't just design decisions. They were statements about what technology could be.
And the world listened.
Before Ive, most people never thought about design. After Ive, they couldn't stop thinking about it. His work raised the global baseline of taste. Consumers began to expect craft in everything they touched: the harmony of packaging, the elegance of installation, the invisible details that made something feel just right. Not just in hardware, but in software too. When Ive transitioned Apple from Scott Forstall's skeuomorphic richness to the spare simplicity of iOS 7's flat design, he wasn't just updating an interface. He was teaching the world a new visual language.
Designers went from niche artisans to cultural icons. Apple became not just a company, but a symbol of design perfection. For thirty years, this was the pinnacle of what it meant to "design technology." Ive's era gave us the form language of the modern world: clean, minimal, achingly precise.
But that world is now dissolving beneath our feet.
A new force is rising. One that doesn't care about curves or chamfers, about translucent shells or perfectly radiused corners. It doesn't live on surfaces at all. It hums in the invisible layers beneath them, rewriting the rules of what technology is and who gets to shape it.
The future of design will still be shaped—just not by designers like Jony Ive.
A New Kind of Canvas
Enter artificial intelligence.
Not as a new surface to design, but as a force that will erase the very notion of surfaces altogether.
Strip away the hype cycle, the speculative bubbles, the breathless proclamations from venture capitalists, or how “Agents will change the world.” What remains is still staggering: AI is doing to thinking what Ive once did to seeing. It is fundamentally reframing how humans interact with computers. Not through better pixels or smarter layouts, but by dissolving the interface itself.
Soon, every digital surface will have a large language model humming beneath it. Your phone. Your car's dashboard. Your child's homework assistant. Invisible agents will run in the background of your life, mediating your calendar, drafting your emails, making small decisions on your behalf without ever asking permission. We are shifting, rapidly and irreversibly, from a world defined by pixels and layouts to a world defined by weights, prompts, context, and policies.
This isn't a minor evolution. It's a phase change.
In this new paradigm, the placement of buttons matters less. The elegance of an animation matters less. These elements aren't unimportant. But they're no longer where the gravity lies. The real design work is happening in layers most designers have never seen:
The conversations between humans and machines.
The rules that govern how an AI system acts.
The alignment between a user's intent and the model's hidden reasoning.
These are the new materials of experience. And if designers don't learn to shape them, someone else will.
Designers who remain focused only on surfaces are already finding themselves sidelined. The center of gravity has shifted overnight. The leaders of tomorrow will not just craft how a product looks. They will shape how intelligence itself behaves.
And you can't influence intelligence if you don't understand how it works.
You can't shape this shift if you're not deep into the model layer. If you don't speak the language of context windows, retrieval systems, and policy boundaries.
This is where the lineage of Jony Ive-like design leaders ends.
The next archetype of design leadership will not emerge from the industrial design studios of Cupertino. It will come from an entirely different world. One most designers have never entered, and one that doesn't particularly care whether they ever do.
The Birth of a New Kind of Design Leader
Demis Hassabis's story begins not with product launches or design studios, but with play.
As a child in North London, Hassabis was the kind of prodigy adults whisper about. At age four, he learned chess. By eight, he was beating adults at his local club. By thirteen, he was ranked second in the world for his age group, a grandmaster-in-waiting who could see patterns emerge on the board like constellations forming in the night sky.
But chess was just the beginning. What Hassabis really wanted was to create worlds, not just master them.
At seventeen, an age when most teenagers are figuring out college applications, Hassabis became the lead AI programmer for Theme Park, a hit simulation game published by Bullfrog Productions. The game wasn't just about building roller coasters. It was about designing behaviors: how virtual visitors moved through space, what made them happy or frustrated, how systems interacted to create emergent complexity. To anyone trained in design, this will feel familiar. Hassabis wasn't writing code. He was designing interactions.
In his twenties, he co-founded Elixir Studios and created Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius. Games that blended narrative, strategy, and adaptive AI. These weren't static artifacts you played through once. They were living systems that evolved in response to player choices, powered by behavioral algorithms Hassabis designed himself.
And then, at the peak of his success in gaming, he did something almost no one does: he walked away.
Hassabis wanted to understand something deeper. Not just how to simulate intelligence, but what intelligence actually is. How does the brain create memory? How does imagination work? How do neurons encode the patterns that let us recognize a face, compose a symphony, or predict the next move in a game we've never seen before?
So he went back to school. Cambridge, then University College London, studying neuroscience and cognitive science. He published papers on memory and imagination that are still cited today. He wasn't dabbling. He was building a foundation. Fusing three disciplines that had rarely spoken to each other: games, systems thinking, and the structure of the mind itself.
In 2010, he founded DeepMind with a mission so audacious it bordered on absurd: to build artificial general intelligence.
Not a chatbot. Not a recommendation engine. True intelligence. The kind that could learn, reason, and create in ways no programmer explicitly designed.
The iPhone Moment of the Intelligence Era
March 2016. Seoul, South Korea.
A match is about to begin that will change everything.
On one side of the board sits Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players in history. Eighteen international titles. A man who has dedicated his entire life to mastering a game that has existed for 2,500 years. A game so complex that the number of possible board positions exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe.
On the other side sits a machine.
AlphaGo. DeepMind's creation. Trained on millions of historical games, then refined through countless matches against itself, evolving strategies no human had ever seen.
Most experts believed this moment wouldn't come for at least another decade. Go was supposed to be different from chess. Too intuitive, too reliant on pattern recognition and gut feeling. Computers were good at brute force calculation, but Go required something else. Something human.
The match begins.
Game one: AlphaGo wins. Sedol looks calm but surprised.
Game two: AlphaGo wins again. Now Sedol looks unsettled.
And then comes Move 37.
Early in the second game, AlphaGo places a stone in a position so unusual, so alien, that the commentators go silent. It violates conventional wisdom. It looks like a mistake. The kind of move a beginner might make.
Lee Sedol stares at the board. Then he stands up and leaves the room.
He doesn't storm out. He's not angry. He needs to think. Because that move. The one that looked wrong. Is starting to look brilliant. It's a move that will only reveal its genius fifteen moves later, a choice so creative and strange that no human player in 2,500 years had ever considered it.
When Sedol returns, he plays on, but something has shifted. The match continues, and AlphaGo wins decisively.
Sedol would later say: "I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation, and that it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative."
This was the moment. The iPhone keynote of the Intelligence Era. Not a product unveiling, but a revelation: machines could now demonstrate not just logic, but intuition. Not just calculation, but creativity.
The world was watching. And the world understood: something fundamental had changed.
Moving from Virtual to Real Impact
But for Hassabis, this was never about winning games. It was about proving that intelligence could be designed. Not hardcoded, but learned.
In 2020, DeepMind turned its attention to one of biology's deepest mysteries: protein folding. Every protein in your body is a chain of amino acids that folds into a specific 3D shape, and that shape determines everything. How enzymes catalyze reactions, how antibodies recognize invaders, how diseases take hold. Scientists had been trying to predict these shapes for fifty years. The problem was so hard that researchers held a biennial competition (CASP) just to measure incremental progress.
DeepMind's AlphaFold didn't make incremental progress.
It solved the problem.
In the 2020 CASP competition, AlphaFold predicted protein structures with an accuracy that stunned the scientific community. Structures that would have taken years to determine experimentally were now solvable in hours. The breakthrough was so profound that it's been called one of the most important scientific achievements of the 21st century.
In 2024, Demis Hassabis and his team were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Not for designing a product. Not for building a better interface.
For designing a new kind of mind.
This is the future of design leadership. Not someone who perfects the curve of a phone or the gradient of an icon anymore, but someone who shapes how intelligence itself behaves. We are, after all, entering the Era of Intelligence. And it needs a whole new kind of design leader. One who understands systems, behaviors, and the substrate of thought.
Hassabis is not a designer in the traditional sense. But he has done what the greatest designers have always done: he has changed how we see the world and what we believe is possible.
And he has done it by going deeper than surfaces, deeper than pixels, into the invisible architecture of intelligence itself.
→ Continue to Part II: Designers Will Move From The Surface to the Substrate
(dropping Oct 7th, 2025)
In the next part: Why every AI product looks the same. The five paradigm inversions the designers of today refuse to see. And the technical layers where designers are completely absent. The new "pixels" of intelligent systems.
