Design Thinking Meets Computational Design

On the eve of “The Life of a Showgirl” being released (by the time this lands in your inbox, the world will be a much different place 🧡), I thought it fitting to go back and do a little Design Eras Tour of my own and step back over the past 25 years to see where design is shifting, what progress we’ve made, and what we should anticipate.

Starting around 2013, something unprecedented happened: the world's largest technology companies went on a design acquisition spree that would accelerate through 2016 and beyond. Accenture acquired Fjord. Capital One bought Adaptive Path. Facebook acquired Hot Studio, then Teehan+Lax. Google bought Gecko Design. McKinsey acquired Lunar Design. According to John Maeda's Design in Tech reports, over 100 design-related companies were acquired since 2004, with over 60% of that activity happening after 2015.

This wasn't about adding more people. These were strategic acquisitions of entire design practices: their methodologies, their reputations, their ways of thinking. In essence, their culture. The price tags suggested these companies believed design capability was fundamental infrastructure, not just some superficial stereotype of “making things pretty”.

What they were buying wasn't just talent. It was organizational capability to bridge the ambiguity between business strategy and technical execution. The ability to walk into complex enterprises and create alignment around transformation that would take years to build organically.

The Design Thinking Moment

The acquisition wave coincided with design thinking's peak influence in enterprise. By the early 2010s, companies like Salesforce had built internal innovation practices that embedded design at the C-suite level. When Salesforce launched Ignite in 2012-2013 (a team I was part of), it created a pre-sales innovation team that combined strategists, designers, and researchers to help enterprise clients reimagine their businesses before they ever purchased software. Salesforce also acquired GravityTank in 2016 to formalize our practice.

This was design as strategic consulting. Ignite didn't pitch features; we conducted user research, facilitated workshops, and built prototype-driven experience visions. We helped executives see their companies through their customers' eyes. The work could take months, but it built the kind of deep alignment that turned into multi-year platform commitments.

Adaptive Path pioneered this model in the early 2000s. They coined the term "experience strategy" and showed that service design could be a board-level conversation. When Capital One acquired them in 2014, they were internalizing a strategic business capability.

Fjord, acquired by Accenture in May 2013, brought this same thinking into management consulting. Suddenly Accenture could walk into client engagements leading with human-centered design, not just process optimization. Design became the lens through which digital transformation happened, de-risking large investments of resources and time in technical execution.

Why Acquisitions and Why Then

Mobile had won. By 2013, it was clear that mobile wasn't a channel, it was the primary interface to digital services. Companies that understood interaction design and service flows had fundamental advantages over those that didn't.

Digital transformation became existential. The companies that weren't "born digital" realized they needed to become digital or face disruption. But you can't transform a 50-year-old enterprise the way you build a startup. You need different methods that can work with legacy systems, entrenched cultures, and complex stakeholder environments.

Design thinking provided the bridge. It offered a methodology that could work across organizations, align executives, and create shared language between business strategy and technical implementation. It was collaborative enough to get buy-in, structured enough to scale, and human-centered enough to differentiate from pure technology consulting.

The firms being acquired had proven they could do this work. They had case studies, methodologies, and teams that could walk into a Fortune 500 company and create change. The acquirers recognized this was infrastructure as fundamental as cloud architecture or data platforms.

The Shift to Computational Design (UX to AX)

At the start of 2020s, executives weren't asking "How do we become more customer-centric?" They started asking "Quick! What’s our response to AI?", perhaps with the user a little more out of sight. The pandemic accelerated this. Digital transformation moved from strategic initiative to survival requirement. AI has moved from research curiosity to board-level priority, albeit very quickly and without a lot of strategic framing. AI is so early, I like to think of it as throwing spaghetti on the wall to see if it sticks.

We are now in the world where the perception of speed becomes the shiny object.

This shift has created uncertainty in the design community; what Fast Company recently framed as "the big design freak out." But framing this as decline misses the point. The organizations that invested in design capability during the acquisition wave weren't wrong. They built the foundation for what comes next.

This is where John Maeda's framework becomes useful. He describes three types of design: classical design (objects and interfaces), design thinking (organizational transformation), and computational design (designing with AI and algorithms as your material).

Computational design doesn't replace design thinking, it extends it. Design thinking helps you ask "What problem should we solve and why?" Computational design helps you answer "How do we build AI systems that actually serve human needs at scale?"

The New Strategic Capability

The most sophisticated organizations today are building hybrid capabilities. They're not choosing between design thinking and technical implementation, they're integrating both.

Google Cloud's Delta team positions itself as an "AI factory" but maintains the strategic consulting posture of design thinking. They help clients identify high-value use cases, build alignment across organizations, and deploy AI systems that deliver measurable outcomes. The deliverable isn't a workshop deck, it's working code in production.

Fjord evolved with Accenture into Accenture Song. They're now hiring Conversational AI Designers (the link may expire so here’s a screenshot 😃 ) roles that treat AI as a design material. Fjord leaders frame this as designing systems where AI blends with human intelligence, extending human capability rather than replacing it.

Design still provides the strategic lens, but the output converges alignment and vision with deployed systems that change how work gets done.

What This Means for Strategic Design Investment

If you're making decisions about where to invest in organizational capability, this evolution suggests a few things

Pure design thinking without implementation capability is strategically vulnerable. The question "What did you learn?" gets immediately followed up by "What did you ship or build?" Teams that can't move from insight to deployed system struggle to compete for resources.

But pure technical capability without design thinking is equally limited. You end up with AI systems that technically work but fail adoption, or that optimize for the wrong metrics, or that create new problems while solving old ones. This should still be aligned to what core user ‘Jobs to Be Done’ you are solving for.

The strategic capability is the integration. Teams that can identify the right problems, build organizational alignment, and deploy AI systems that users actually trust and adopt; these teams become infrastructure.

This is why the acquisitions mattered. The companies that bought design firms in the past few decades were building this integrated capability (and hopefully design leaders were learning how to better operate in corporate entities). They were betting (I’m being really optimistic here) that design wouldn't be a service layer on top of technology; it would be woven into how strategy gets formulated and executed.

The Next Era

Organizations will continue to need the strategic lens that design thinking provides the ability to identify real human needs, build alignment across complex systems, and prototype before committing massive resources.

But increasingly, that lens will be applied to questions about AI systems: Which workflows need AI versus better processes? How do we design systems users will trust? How do we ensure AI creates real value rather than technical novelty? And, more importantly, how well does this effort align to our business outcomes?

The nature of design work itself is shifting. As Doug Cook from thirteen23 frames in their series on human computing, we're moving from "scenic" to "semantic" design. Doug describes the shift from crafting fixed user journeys to building systems that understand intent. Traditional interfaces forced users to translate their goals into the system's language. Semantic systems do the opposite: they interpret what you're trying to accomplish and orchestrate a response. It’s really a great framework to think through in terms of what changes for designing these new experiences.

This isn't just about making interfaces smarter. It's about designing relationships between humans and AI, not transactions. The designer's role expands from "how does this screen flow work?" to "how does this system understand, learn, and adapt to human goals over time?" At the very least, it’s a point of view, which you can agree or disagree with and validate on your own.

This evolution validates why the acquisition wave mattered. The firms that acquired design practices in weren't just buying visual design talent. Designers have learned what it feels like to be more embedded in-house (for better or worse as not all experiences are equivalent). The future growth will be companies that realize as systems become more intelligent, the human side of design becomes more critical, not less. And winners will prioritize divergent critical thinking, tangible outcomes, good taste, and understanding user jobs to be done.

Hopefully, we are in a better position as Designers to answer these questions. The question for everyone else is: are you building this capability, or are you dependent on vendors who have it?

Because the next wave of strategic advantage won't come from having AI. It will come from knowing what to build with it and having the integrated capability to go from strategic vision to deployed systems that get jobs to be done fully across the finish line while avoiding AI slop.

Just as AI needs good context to be effective, so should organizations.

Subscribe to Design Shift for more conversations that help creative professionals grow into strategic leaders.

Together with Kojo

Find your next winning ad creative in seconds with AI

Most platforms push you to make thousands of ads. Kojo helps you make better ones. We turn your social data into proven ideas, predict which will perform, and send them to real human creators in seconds. Less waste, more certainty, and ads that actually work.

Book a Demo