3x founding designer. Head of Member Experience & Design at Harbor Health. Led product & design at Photon Health, Balanced, Thirty Madison, Condé Nast.
New York, NY
Joined August 2010
- Tweets27.2K
- Following2.2K
- Followers1K
- Likes25.2K
Pinned Tweet
Beautiful, long-lasting, easy-to-use things and systems shouldn't just be accessible for those whom can afford expensive things.
I firmly believe the challenge of the next century is to find ways to drive down cost but increase quality at net positive human & global impact.
JOMI CUBOL retweeted
“Utopia is a literary invention of a place so perfect that it can't exist in reality. But that's exactly what we should be striving towards.
Of course you can't realize utopia in a single flash. What we can do, however, is make sure that every time you are called upon to design a building or an urban space, you have to make this little fragment of the world more like the way you wish the world to be.”
— Bjarke Ingels (@BjarkeIngels / @BIG_Architects)
JOMI CUBOL retweeted
This is really neat but it’s not a design tool as much as it’s a design _production_ tool.
The practice of design is mostly about what comes before production.
There’s no doubt in my mind that all parts of software production will become automated very soon. Writing code, making web pages, putting pieces of a design system together etc.
And that’s fine. I think few people actually enjoy this kind of production work. Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our precious time in life on what is more meaningful?!
At the core, the practice of design is methodical; like architecture, not like art. In a nutshell: We find constraints, form comprehension of the whole and propose solutions that honor those constraints. First after that do we enter some form of production phase, usually prototypes first, learn about some constraints that were hidden before, loop back, prototype and then build the production-grade “final” artifact.
These last few tasks are quickly losing value because AI tools can do it much faster (not yet better though) than humans. It’s simply just what has the best RoI for a business.
Some companies and individuals will continue to spend human time on certain parts of the “production line” as a market differentiator, but it will cost them a relatively high price compared to competitors.
Anyhow, I still haven’t seen a tool better than Figma that supports the actually-interesting part of the design process.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma focused their products on that, maybe separating “products for production” of “products for ideation & exploration.” The latter would obviously still leverage AI, but not to do the work for me but rather to support my efforts the way a therapist helps me live a better life (not living my life for me.)
Agency is and always was the thing that mattered most.
High agency leads to high skill (doing whatever it takes to acquire necessary knowledge & skills), and the more skilled one becomes, the more agency they generate (the number of things they can do widen). Ad infinitum.
Redpoint's @loganbartlett says AI has completely changed hiring—favoring people with unique backgrounds:
"Agency might be the only thing that matters."
"That's the thing that we are trying to figure out—where do you find pockets of people who still want to do the job talent-wise, or have the capability to do the job, but also have agency?"
“Tens of millions of Americans have delayed surgeries, vacation plans, career moves and other big life decisions because of the cost of health care [...]
As groceries, housing and utilities also become more costly, those pressures are forcing difficult tradeoffs in nearly every aspect of life — even for those who have insurance.”
axios.com/2026/03/12/healthc…
So much about being a design manager is not trying to solve things for the designers and instead coaching them to see things differently and solve problems on their own.
* So long as it's not extremely urgent, sensitive, or high risk. Sometimes you have to do it.
Sure, the ticket could've been solved and the fix pushed to production if you do it yourself.
But the bigger leverage is giving designers frameworks, patterns, and mental models to deduce problems so they can think for themselves, and solve other problems like it in the future.
When you understand that you're not just playing a game, and you're not just choosing which game to play, but you actually design the game you play, you already won.
You are not a mere accident of circumstance reacting to events.
You are the event. You literally bend reality.
Reposting this 11 years later. Go @Seahawks.
JOMI CUBOL retweeted
I call this the “Agency Premium”.
Intelligence is rapidly becoming a cheap, abundant input which means the scarce, valuable thing is shifting from having ideas to acting on them.
When everyone has “genius on tap,” the binding constraint moves from IQ to initiative, from cognition to courage.
Agency > Intelligence
I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?
Grok explanation is ~close:
“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.
People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.
It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”
The best designers love problems, not solutions.
What drives you is there’s this big gaping void between where things are and where they need to be. Where they *can* be.
This perpetual dissatisfaction is never-ending.
And yet, you wake up each day to close the gap just a little bit closer.
You might never close that gap. But that’s what gets you going.
Because someone has to.