Design Unmapped: the city designers built, and keep rebuilding

We borrow the language of cities when we talk about careers. We say we’re navigating, or that we’ve lost our direction, or found our path. In this session we’ll visit the city of design.

Over a few months in 2026 Veron travelled to Barcelona, Madrid and Amsterdam and sat down with 30 experienced design leaders. Some of them arrived before there was a name for what they did. Some built the discipline while they were practising it. All of them have been through growth periods and downturns, good jobs and bad ones, certainty and uncertainty.

What they described was a city that took thirty years to build, that looks different now, and doesn’t work the way any of us were promised. Where you might want to stand in it, what that place asks of you, and one thing the people in the room can still do for the people trying to get in.

Field

Forces

Format

Talk

Day

Thursday, Oct 15

Room

Aula K

Time

12:00 PM

A design career is less like a ladder and more like a city

Full of landmarks that aren’t what they looked like from the street, neighbourhoods with different rules, and turns that only make sense looking back.

Thirty years ago there was no map because there was no city. Design proved itself and built the thing. Designers built some parts of it brilliantly, kept scaling across industries, survived the downturns. But the part many of them struggled to build was the one that translates what designers do into the language the business already trusts. That’s why design keeps gaining the seat at the table and losing it again.

So how a designer progresses changes. What matters now is where you want to stand in this city, what that place asks of you, and which of the things worth building aren’t design skills at all.

Why is this conversation important now?

The story most designers were given, build your skills, get experience, move up, isn’t holding. And it isn’t just personal. Where you sit in the city shapes how much you can do about any of it.

Companies are asking out loud what design is worth. The roles are splitting into paths that look nothing like each other. And AI is pressing on the question underneath all of it. If the work you produced was how you proved your value, what is your value now?

Senior designers learned by doing the slow, repetitive parts, because doing them was the learning. If those parts go to AI, where does the next generation learn the foundations? Or are the foundations different now?

Who is this session for?

Mid-to-senior designers and design leaders working out where they go next. Inside an organisation, moving between roles, building something of their own, or wondering what their experience means now the field has changed.

It’s for people who’ve questioned the path they were given and want real stories rather than another framework.

A different way of looking at design career. You can embed deep inside a business, and rethink "designer" becoming a few things rather than one. Or build with fewer rules, more freedom and more uncertainty, and never quite leave orbit, because the money and the clients still get decided somewhere else. Neither is good or bad. The path is just different, and the people who chose each one can tell you what it cost.
The city was made by many people, and it was made by connection. Today that connection didn't get weaker, it got buried. What used to be designers meeting in a bar in the city centre is now thousands of connections online. You can be seen by thousands and known by no one. Designers used to learn by shadowing someone senior, or from a critique that happened because you passed them in the corridor. Remote work makes that rare now. So how does that learning happen today?
What connection can we build so someone still sees a designer's work, so different generations still connect, so a door still opens? The city is here. It was built, and it keeps building and rebuilding.

Takeaway LIST/text

Veron WK Lai

Service Design Consultant and Senior Lecturer @ University of the Arts London

Veron is a service design consultant and design educator with 20 years of experience across public and private sectors. After studying design in Melbourne and beginning her career in Hong Kong, she moved to London in 2010 for a Master’s in Service Design, then worked across UX and service design before stepping into design leadership at two London scale-ups.

Her work spans a broad range of settings: introducing service design to some of the UK’s oldest organisations, running early service design projects for the UK government, and building a design team from the ground up at Elvie, an award-winning FemTech company.

Alongside industry practice, Veron teaches Service Design at University of the Arts London, where she created Ways of Working, a unit exploring how designers bring their craft into different environments. In 2026, she spent three months researching across Barcelona, Madrid and Amsterdam, learning how design leaders elsewhere see the industry’s future.