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For months, Dan Baker has been glued to his neighborhoods Nextdoor feed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Baker, a longtime solar consultant, looked for one thing as he scrolled: attacks against a planned solar farm and battery storage facility that could help power tens of thousands of homes in the community. The local planning commission signed off on the project in February, but some residents immediately mobilized to try to stop it, filing an appeal. We have a really odd situation here in that its largely a progressive community and kind of on top of the whole renewable energy thing, Baker says. But this particular project turned out to be somewhat of a surprise because of the opposition. The solar farm, proposed by the renewable developer AES Energy, would sit just outside the city of Santa Fe in the community of Eldorado, covering around 680 acres with solar panels and a large battery energy storage system (BESS). Some neighbors have argued that the batteries pose a major fire risk. But experts say thats not the case. Baker, and other local climate advocates, have been fighting the misinformation. After two days of hearings last week, the Board of County Commissioners is still deliberating on whether the project can move forward. Its one example of how difficult it can be to build a renewable energy projectand how YIMBY (yes in my backyard) support can help. A ‘solar-friendly’ community Eldorado, which was built in the 1970s on former ranch land, was actually marketed as one of the first “solar-friendly” communities in the country. Homes were built to take advantage of passive solar heat in the winter, and some were early to adopt new technology like solar water heating. But the idea of the solar farm has been largely unpopular. “Right now, they’re used to looking out over 800 acres of unused ranch land, which they don’t own,” says Baker. “But people tend to consider that ‘their’ backyard.” The opposition echoes similar efforts to block wind and solar farms around the country. In the early days of wind energy projects on the grid, only around 10% of projects faced pushback. By 2016, that had jumped to around 25%. Wealthy, white communitieslike Eldoradoare more likely to oppose projects. A study found that the average group of protestors is made up of only 23 people, though Eldorado’s includes more than 1,500. ‘Build it in a safer place’ Most residents argue that they support clean energysomewhere else. “I don’t think any of us are opposed to the effort of reducing emissions,” one neighbor recently wrote on Nextdoor. “It’s just the wrong location, location, location!” Another wrote, “Obviously I am not a civil engineer. But I do have a right to object to this facility if there is the possibility of damage to my well-being and property.” The group gave itself a pro-environment name: the Clean Energy Coalition. (Astroturfing groups funded by the fossil fuel industry have used similar naming tactics, like the “Save the Whales Coalition,” which fights offshore wind.) In Santa Fe, residents say their biggest concern is fire risk. But the evidence doesn’t support their claims that the batteries are unsafe. How batteries are designed for fire safety While fires have happened in battery storage systems, those fires are rareand getting even rarer. “We have a tremendous amount of storage that is on the grid operating all the time, especially, for example, in California and Texas,” says Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab, a nonprofit focused on grid transformation. “Statistically speaking, the risk is low single digits.” The industry has improved quickly; the number of incidents dropped 98% between 2018 and 2024. Out of the seven stationary battery fires that have happened in the U.S. in the last five years, none have escaped from a single container. “There has never been a fire from a BESS facility that physically spread outside the facility,” Baker says. One fire cited by opponents, at Moss Landing in California, was built in an unusual wayinside a former gas power plant instead of containers, and not following modern safety standards. Even though that project was only built five years ago, safety standards have already been updated multiple times. A typical battery storage system sits inside a series of specialized units the size of shipping containers. Inside, rows of cabinets hold battery modules. A battery management system continuously monitors each battery cell for problems. The systems either use fire suppression or are designed to fully contain a fire if it does occur. In the proposed project, the batteries would be 1.5 miles from the nearest house. Opponents overstating the risk In Santa Fe, the solar farm opponents have repeatedly overstated the risk, says Baker, the solar consultant. He’s responded by trying to carefully provide the correct information on Nextdoor threads, or in person. “They make these statements without evidence,” he says. “It’s fearmongering without basis.” There’s more risk that a fire could start accidentally at your neighbor’s houseand much more risk that a wildfire could occur. Fires are natural in the local ecosystem, but becoming more frequent and destructive because of climate change; building more renewable energy can help slow down the worst climate impacts. Even if the risk isn’t zero, that doesn’t mean that the project should be built near a different community. Historically, most electricity in New Mexico came from coal power plants near Native American communities, where they dealt with constant pollution. “Coal is guaranteed to poison people every single day of operation,” says Lucy Gent Foma, a neighbor who has been advocating for the solar farm project. “I just don’t think it’s fair for us to complain about the possibility of a risk of something that can be mitigated, and has been tested and certified to the highest level of standards available in the whole country, and we’re saying, ‘No, we don’t want thatbut it’s okay that we’ve poisoned Native and underprivileged communities on a daily basis.’ That’s not fair.” Why location matters Under a 2019 law, utilities in New Mexico need to transition to renewable energy. The utility in Santa Fe has told regulators that it needs 2,000 megawatts of new renewable energy by 2030or roughly 13 plants the size of the one proposed for Eldorado. Eldorado happens to be one of the few locations that can easily tie into an existing transmission line, which is critical. “Transmission lines are one of the hardest things to get approved in the whole country,” Gent Foma says. The line also directly serves Santa Fe. Right now, power travels to the city from farther away, using transmission lines that go through forestsand utilities have started implementing power shutoffs on high fire rsk days to prevent accidental sparks. Generating and storing power locally would help the city’s lights stay on. YIMBY versus NIMBY There’s strong support for climate action in Santa Fe. Still, it’s inherently harder to get supporters to attend planning meetings than opponents who are motivated by fears about their own properties. “It’s so much easier to mobilize people who are angry and trying to shut something down than people who are in support,” says Gent Foma. Opponents tend to be retired, she says, while supporters are typically younger and may not be able to leave work or their young children to attend a meeting Supporters have been organizing as much as they can, and having meetings about how to correct misinformation and mobilize public comments. “The irony is that if you asked anyone in Santa Fe if they support solar, they would say yes,” she says. “So I think the vast majority of people who are only minimally aware of this project are thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s a no-brainer.’ There’s not the net of misinformation getting to people who would otherwise support it. One thing that’s become clear is that like support needs organizing as much as opposition organizes.” YIMBY support can make a difference, as has been proven over the last decade in the housing world. And supporters are beginning to speak out more for renewable energy projects across the country. “Community support can make a huge difference in countering the false narratives about these projects,” says Celerah Hewes, a national field organizer for Moms Clean Air Force, a nonprofit that helps parents take climate action. “Families that support clean energy projects in their neighborhoods know that they are doing their part to ensure future generations can breathe easier and that we are taking action to fight the climate warming that is contributing to extreme weather across the country.” The clock is ticking Delaying the solar project means more emissions nowbut also means that energy costs could go up. Even if the county approves the projects, opponents have said that they’ll sue. “One thing that’s happened recently that turns up the heat is Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill,” Baker says. “If there’s further delay, or if the conditional use permit is denied and we have to start over somewhere else, the cost of the project will go up 30% overnight. And we consumers will have to pay.”
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E-Commerce
We spend much of our professional lives narrowing our career identity: honing an elevator pitch, curating a LinkedIn profile, projecting a polished version of who we are at work, and so on. On the one hand, this makes sense: after all, others (e.g., colleagues, bosses, recruiters, and hiring managers) are interested in understanding who we are, and providing them a simple, consistent, even archetypical snapshot of our professional self helps them believe that they know us, at least on a professional level, even when they actually dont (it takes much longer to know a person). On the other hand, this also encapsulates or traps our self within the unoriginal and predictable parameters of occupational stereotypes (the creative advertiser, the progressive media person, the power-hungry banker, the geeky researcher, etc.), washing away not just whats unique and interesting about us, but also eliminating the nuance and complexity underpinning the richness of our personality and personal history. Moreover, in light of AIs impact on jobs and careers, which has completely disrupted how people add value and the skills they need to harness and display at work, even when they formally remain in the same role, there has never been a stronger case for expanding or broadening our work self, ensuring that our professional identity can evolve to future-proof our career. For example, a corporate lawyer who once spent most of their day drafting contracts may now rely on AI to produce first drafts instantly. Their value no longer lies in producing documents, but in interpreting nuance, anticipating risks, and guiding strategic decisions, essentially shifting from legal producer to trusted advisor. Or think of a marketing analyst who previously devoted hours to building performance dashboards. With AI handling data wrangling and visualization, their contribution becomes less about reporting and more about translating insights into bold, commercially savvy campaigns. Even a sales executive who used to focus on prospecting and pipeline updates can now use AI to identify leads and write outreach emails, freeing them to invest more in building deep, trust-based client relationships. The age of transilience One key psychological concept to broaden your self is the notion of transilience, the capacity to carry over skills and habits from one domain of life into another, transferring aptitudes and adaptations, as well as mindsets, across seemingly unrelated domains. Think of transilience as the flipside to skills adjacency, the process of broadening ones career prospects by picking jobs or roles that are a good fit for our current or past occupational skills (e.g., journalists becoming prompt engineers, chess players becoming strategy advisers, and lawyers becoming AI ethicists): instead of applying our current work skills to new career paths, we find new skills to bring to our current job. Take parenting. For many professionals, that part of their life is cordoned off from their “leadership brand.” Yet what is parenting if not real-time problem solving, empathy under pressure, long-term coaching, and conflict resolutionall of which are vital leadership capabilities in a hybrid, high-uncertainty workplace? Or consider hobbies like writing fiction, hosting a podcast, coaching a sports team, or volunteering. These often develop storytelling, persuasion, patience, or emotional intelligence; the kind of traits that dont show up in a résumé, but make you more valuable at work, especially when AI takes over more predictable tasks. Importantly, transilience allows people to enrich their professional identity with underleveraged strengths. A people-manager who coaches their childs sports team might bring sharper motivational skills, patience, and an instinct for team cohesion into workplace leadership. A software engineer who runs a local community group could transfer skills in facilitation, conflict resolution, and cross-cultural communication into project work. Even hobbies like playing in a band or cooking for large gatherings can translate into improved collaboration, creativity under pressure, and the ability to improvise when plans go awry. These experiences often sit outside the official résumé, but they are the very qualities that make professionals more adaptable, human, and valuable, especially when technology takes over the more predictable aspects of their roles. The point isnt to turn your life into a résumé. Its to mine your nonwork experiences for habits, strengths, and patterns of behavior that can expand your professional repertoire. Easier said than done Alas, most of us are not practiced at this. We have been taught to compartmentalize and specialize by role, in the name of work-life balance. One self for the office, another self for home, a third for everything else. It feels tidy and safe, yet it blocks cross-pollination. Psychologically, switching selves is normal. We deploy the traits that fit a given context, then swap them out for the next. That worked when lives were more linear. As roles multiplied, the model cracked. Dual-career households, caregiving, side hustles, and the discontinuities of parenthood, especially motherhood, turned the neat sequence into a mosaic. Over the past 60 years, more identities stacked up. Each one added another door to open and close, another set of resources to allocate. We learned to juggle like experts, and the juggling became the job. Technology finished off the old boundaries. Phones, chat, and collaboration tools keep the windows between compartments open. Context switches pile up. We handle personal matters during work hours and work after hours. The mental toll is real. The answer is not higher walls. It is smarter bridges. Use transilience to bring the relevant parts of your nonwork self into your work, on purpose. Treat your life like a portfolio of skills and habits, then deploy them where they matter. That is how you cut switching costs, widen your professional range, and get credit for strengths you already have. Not the same as bringing your whole self to work Note that transilience should not be mistaken with the popular notion of bringing your whole self to work. That phrase has often been taken to mean hauling every aspect of your personality (political opinions, personal grievances, private dramas, and quirky unfiltered impulses) into the workplace. In practice, this can be as counterproductive as it is distracting. Your colleagues did not sign up to be your roommates, therapists, or ideological sparring partners. Rather, the opportunity is to strategically and purposely transfer relevant aspects and skills from our nonprofessional self to our work persona. We all inhabit multiple selves; different identities that emerge in different contexts. You are not just you at work; you are also you as a friend, you as a parent, you as a volunteer, you as a hobbyist, you as a citizen. Each of these selves has its own skills, habits, and strengths, many of which remain untapped in your professional life. In line, transilience helps us export unused adaptations from outside work into our work role, selectively bringing valuable aspects of your broader self into your career, but adapting them to the new context. Its the difference between showing up to a business meeting wearing the clothes you wore to your morning workout (literal whole self) versus showing up with the stamina and discipline that workout built (leveraged self-complexity). Think of it like cooking: you wouldnt dump every spice in your cupboard into a dish, but you would pick the ones that enhance the flavors youre trying to bring out. Or like packing for a trip: you dont bring your entire wardrobe, just the pieces that will work best in your destinations climate and culture. When done well, this is a form of professional adaptation. A parent might bring the listening skills and long-term patience developed with their children into team leadership. A musician might bring the ability to improvise and stay attuned to group dynamics into collaborative projects. A community volunteer might bring negotiation skills and empathy into client relations. These elements enrich your professional identity without burdening colleagues with irrelevant or overly personal content. When strategically executed, self-complexity also becomes a source of resilience and creativity. It allows you to expand the ways you add value in your role, something increasingly essential in the AI age, where machines may handle the routine, but humans still own the relational, the adaptive, and the deeply contextual. Science backs this up: being reminded of roles connected to meaningful values produces self-expansion, enhancing performance and resilience. In other words, the more connected and coherent your different identities are, the more adaptable, ethical, and creative you become at work. In short, transilience is more than personal development; its a survival skill in a world where AI automates the predictable. It lets you tap into the submerged part of your identity iceberg, enriching your professional repertoire with capabilities forged in personal, social, and volunteer roles. As AI reshapes what value looks likeeven within the same job titlethe edge will belong to those who can repurpose their whole self. Not just the sliver that fits in a job description. By practicing transilience, you make your professional identity a living, adaptive system.
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E-Commerce
Of all the design disciplines, graphic designers might be the most insecure. The introduction of any new technology can feel like a threat to the field’s existence. Think of desktop publishing in the 90s, which made designing layouts accessible and easy. Or the late 2000s, when graphic design work moved online and there was fierce debate about whether designers should learn to code because print was dead. Now, with artificial intelligence, another new threat is upon us, and this time the concern is real. The World Economic Forum included graphic design among the most at-risk jobs due to artificial intelligence, slightly below accountants, bank tellers, and data entry clerks. AI will no doubt reshape graphic design, but in reality the biggest threat to graphic design has already been happening for years, without us paying much attention. So much of modern graphic design has been automated and systematized to the point of it feeling like its already a product of an AI system. From book covers to brand identities, digital interfaces to social media posts, graphic design has been standardized around similar processes, default tools, and a few globally familiar styles and practices. Like an essay written by ChatGPT, most of the results of AI design look very similar: the averaging of everything else. Unfortunately, that also sounds like a good description of a lot of contemporary graphic design. Todays graphic designers are using the same tools, designing for the same contexts, and following the same patterns. Perhaps AI feels threatening to graphic designers because, in many ways, they already design like AI. A Venn-diagram of a profession Popular AI tools, built upon large language models, are trained on large datasets of text, code, and other information to make connections and find patterns. It’s easy to think of these tools as magic, but all theyre doing is predicting patterns from all the other text theyve collected. This is why most AI-generated art and prose feels mostly average instead of revolutionary or new. (The political philosopher Danielle Allen believes a better term for artificial intelligence is centralized intelligence because of how it homogenizes everything.) Unlike the other jobs on the World Economic Forum’s list, graphic design is not a repetitive, data-heavy industry. Sure, image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s Dall-E have proven they can create passable illustrations, photorealistic images, minimalist logos, and even entire mobile app interfaces, but graphic design was never simply the creation of images. In his book on the origins of graphic design, Graphic Designers Before Graphic Design, David Jury writes that graphic design truly began when the design of printed matter became a viable commercial activity separate from printing. This definition is echoed in a conversation between graphic design historians Robin Kinross and Richard Hollis published in 1991, in which Hollis described graphic design not as a question of technique (as in skill at the tool) but ratherwhat could be done in the circumstances.” In other words, graphic design isn’t just about the technical skills of using a tool, whether that be the computer or the letterpress or AI. Nor is it about the aesthetic or style of a single person. Instead, graphic design is a nebulous, ever-changing field that sits between art and marketing, advertising and strategy, illustration and communication. This embodies the paradox of graphic design: It is something that is both visual and technical, cultural and service-oriented, artistic and commercial, strategic and human. Some of the earliest graphic designers, in fact, called themselves “commercial artists.” What even is graphic design? Graphic design, as we understand it today, emerged alongside the industrial revolution. As mass goods could be put into the hands of many more people, much faster, the task of design was, in essence, to create difference. To get someone to buy your product instead of a competitors, you made your product look different from everything else, and you advertised it in a new way. Graphic design (and, to some extent, industrial design) was often seen as a type of decoration: a finish or veneer added at the end. But by the middle of the 20th century, as designers like Paul Rand and Massimo Vignelli were designing for large, multinational corporations where their design would be applied to a variety of surfaces in a variety of contexts, the work of the designer moved from designing single objects (logo, book, billboard) to design systems where multiple components might be in dialogue with each other (a logo on a truck, for example, needed to match the advertising on a billboard). To control the output, designers would produce large design guidelines that specified how logos would be used or when specific colors and typefaces would be deployed. In these complex design systems, decoration was no longer enough. You also needed to ensure the brand message was consistent, clear, and reaching the right people. Emerging from this was a shift in how design was talked about. Graphic design was no longer an art but a strategic tool for business: a way to organize information, sell a product, capture someone’s attention. From Design to Problem-Solving In Josef Müller-Brockmann’s classic text, The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems, the Swiss-modernist designer argues for a design that is clear and organized, created through grids, mathematical organization, and a systematic approach. Graphic design, here, becomes problem-solving. Now all design decisions could be made in service of a client brief that articulated a problem: How do we get people to come to an event? How do we communicate dense facts into accessible information? How does this brand differentiate itself from the competitors? In 2008, Tim Brown further transformed design into problem-solving when he discussed design thinking in an article for the Harvard Business Review. Brown, the CEO of Ideo, argued that the tools of the designer could be applicable across a range of fields, writing that design thinking was a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into a customer value and market opportunity. Out of this came the now-canonical design thinking process: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The rise of systems thinking in design, especially with design thinking, expanded the opportunity for design while also standardizing the expectations for it. In systematizing the design process, it gave designand especially graphic designa way to legitimize itself, elevating it to the likes of engineering and science (two fields, incidentally, where AI poses a large threat) where decisions could be tested and adapted. With a design thinking methodology, graphic designers could lean not on their authorial opinions or stylistic preferences but on user research, A/B testing, and iterative design processes. In 2009, for example, Google famously couldn’t decide between two shades of lue for the links on its search results. To find a solution, 41 gradations were tested to see which ones users preferred. (Douglas Bowman, then Google’s visual design lead, left the company, blaming, in part, its data-driven design decisions.) At the time, this caused a minor controversy in the design world but it was also a signal of what was to come. Designers now live in the world design thinking has built: Design thinking has so defined design over the past 20 years that when I asked Claude AI to define design, it told me the five-step design thinking process. Assembly-Line Design As this design process became standard practice (alongside the rise of design systems, UX patterns, and brand strategy), the role of the individual designer shrank, with graphic designers becoming more like workers on an assembly line, working on smaller and smaller parts of bigger and bigger projects. Being a designer has been reduced to assembling prefab visual components and templatized structures, went a viral 2023 post on UX Planet. Many of us have recognized early similarities between using design systems in product design, and putting Lego pieces together to ‘create’ something that resembles a good product. The Marxist critique of this division of labor is that the worker becomes alienated from the workthat as it becomes more repetitive, it can more easily be automated, reducing the value of the human behind the product. Or as Silvio Lorusso put it in his 2023 book, What Design Can’t Do, This division of labour causes a mechanisation of the labourers work, so they lose autonomy, and therefore meaning in what they do. One affordance of a systematized, optimized assembly model is consistency. And as design has transitioned to an assembly-model process, so too has the output of graphic designers. Difference no longer is the goal. Take any major recent rebrand and you’ll see a confluence of similar styles: humanist sans-serif logo with bold colors, simple line drawings la Corporate Memphis, and golden-hour photography of young people with smiling faces. Or visit any digital publication and you’ll likely find a familiar layout: a big, full-screen hero image, large header typography, and a single column of text, interrupted by block quotes and ads. This is perhaps nowhere more glaring than on our phones, where we can’t escape the bento-box-style rounded rectangles filled with subtle gradients and sans-serif typography across every app. Is it possible that by following the same design process, regardless of context, we’ll get the same results? The more design processes are standardized, the more the results become templatized. Is it possible that the more the work is templatized, the easier it becomes to replicate with automation? Is it possible that this way of working has also produced a type of centralized intelligence, a homogenization of aesthetics and ideas? Is it possible that designers designed themselves into a corner ripe for an automation takeover? Last year, when Figma debuted an AI-powered layout generator, it produced a competent weather app in minutes. It was immediately accused of stealing the look of Apple’s default Weather app. But how many other apps already exist that just borrow the interaction patterns of existing apps? Capitalist technological development has rendered texts and images almost infinitely reproducibleand has built unfathomable electro-libraries in the process, design historian J. Dakota Brown wrote in his 2019 pamphlet Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor, adding, But despite this gigantic aggregation of productive force, it is still necessary to put people to work moving words and pictures around, most often in the service of brand competition among otherwise identical commodities. A decade after Brown’s article about design thinking, Natasha Iskander published an update, also in the Harvard Business Review, where she wrote that the process is fundamentally conservative and preserves the status quo. In 2025, that sounds an awful lot like the results of an AI prompt. The End of Problem-Solving This is not the fault of the graphic designer. This history of graphic design practice has been shaped, in part, by capitalist and market forces outside the control of the designer: Whats good for business? Whats efficient? What do consumers need or want? What makes money? This will likely continue with the rise of AI design. In an unstable economy, businesses (and their customers) dont want difference; they want consistency. They want something they can trust. I cant help but wonder, though, whether graphic design has reached some kind of end point in the design as problem-solving model. If artificial intelligence is a great problem solver and a competent image maker, where do designers go next? For designers to find a way through this moment, I think it’s helpful to go back to another era of graphic design history when the field was threatened by social and technological change: the rise of desktop publishing in the mid-90s. Just like today, a new technology was emerging that forced designers to rethink what they did and how they worked. Yet instead of surrendering, designers responded with a visual and intellectual interrogation of what they wanted to do and what they believed in. The result is what I’d argue was one of the most exciting eras of graphic design history: There was wild aesthetic innovationthe complex layouts of April Greiman, the grunge editorial design of David Carson, the self-reflexive work coming out of Cranbrook Academy of Arts graduate programthat called into question the rules designers previously held as gospel. This experimentation helped create a robust critical discourse, both in academia and in the profession, around the work that raised questions about the role of design in society and its relationship to capitalism, how we treat and understand design history, an expansion of where and how designers could work, and new definitions of what it meant to be a graphic designer. In the face of these changes were the first truly multimedia design projects, postmodernist graphic design, and radical design publications like Emigre magazine. The desktop computer did not replace the graphic design, and neither will artificial intelligence. But it will change it. It will likely take over mundane, repeatable tasks, making some parts of the job easier, just like the computer did. And surely for many common design needsbusiness cards, simple icons, or stock websitesAI tools will be able to handle them or simplify the production, just like website builders have for websites. This is a moent not for retrenchment in the old ways of doing things. Just as it was for designers in the 90s, its a chance to course correct and discover and invent new modes of practice. We can already see this in the rise of strategic arms in design studios and the academic movements around decolonized design, feminist design, and postcapitalist design. We can see it in the designers both embracing and rejecting AI, forcing the industry to think about its relationship to new technology. These conversations are more important now than ever. I also foresee many clients desiring, again, difference. To stand out, to signal something new, clients will long for handmade design, which is to say: things made by humans. I would not be surprised to see a return of bespoke design solutions, rooted in smaller communities, subcultures, or local vernacular, where brands take wild aesthetic and cultural swings. These are acts an AI won’t be able to do well. And in some ways, this is what graphic design was always about. The question shouldn’t be whether AI will replace graphic designers. The better question should be what new types of graphic design will emerge from this moment.
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