In this video Samuel Fabayo argues that the present moment is the most advantageous time to be a designer because history shows a recurring four‑phase pattern whenever a revolutionary technology emerges. Phase 1 is creation by engineers for engineers; Phase 2 sees the technology as intimidating, costly, and inaccessible; Phase 3 is where designers intervene to make the technology usable for the masses; and Phase 4 is mass adoption. Fabayo illustrates the pattern with three historical case studies: the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution (engineers built massive machines, designers added gauges, manuals, and interchangeable parts), Henry Ford’s Model T (design‑driven standardization, higher ground clearance, and the moving assembly line that slashed production time), and the personal computer’s graphical user interface (Xerox’s research and Apple’s skeuomorphic icons made computers intuitive). He then maps the pattern onto today’s AI boom, noting that AI is still in Phase 2/3 – powerful but only engineers and prompt‑engineers can extract value. He cites OpenAI’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s design agency, Sam Altman’s awareness of the pattern, and Y Combinator’s push for design‑focused founders as evidence that investors see design as the catalyst for AI’s mass adoption. The recent Figma IPO, valued at $50 billion and tripling in price within 12 hours, is presented as a market signal that design talent will be in high demand. Fabayo concludes with actionable advice for designers: experiment with AI tools, showcase work publicly, shift from portfolio‑shipping to becoming discoverable, and learn rapidly because the window between Phase 1 and Phase 4 is shrinking dramatically (75 years → 40 years → 20 years → 2 months). He also promotes his newsletter and the sponsor Mobbin, a UI‑inspiration library.
This video is sponsored by Mobbin.
Design software maker Figma going public today right here at the New York Stock Exchange. Joining me right now, first on CNBC, is Figma's co-founder. Well, first of all, just a huge thank you for being here with us today.
This is Dylan. You may not know who he is, but you know the design software company he co-founded, Figma. Dylan co-founded Figma in 2012 when he was just 20 years old. 13 years later, Figma went public and something surprising happened. Within 12 hours, the stock price tripled. Investors valued Figma at $50 billion. For context, that's more than the GDP of most countries. That's also the first time a mainstream design software is going public in over 30 years after Adobe's IPO. But the thing that's actually insane is why this is happening. I went on my LinkedIn feed and I was still seeing posts about how Figma is dead or UX is dead or how AI is going to replace designers. So this got me confused. Which one is it exactly? Are designers about to be obsolete or is design going to be more important as we are ushered into the AI era? So I spent the last one week digging into this, trying to find some answers, and what I found completely changed how I think about technology, design, and where we may be headed as a society. Because this video isn't just about Dylan or Figma, it's about a pattern that's been repeating for 200 years that most people completely miss. And when you see this pattern, you'll understand why right now, this exact moment, might be the most important time in history to be a designer. So here's what I discovered: every time humans create a revolutionary technology, The same thing happens in 4 phases. In phase 1, the technology is created by engineers for engineers. In phase 2, it's intimidating, complicated, expensive, and even sometimes dangerous for everyday people to use. In phase 3, designers step in and make it usable for everyone. Then in phase 4, mass adoption happens. This has happened 3 times in modern history, and it's happening again right now. To show you, we have to go back in time to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, then we'll find our way back to today. My name is Samuel Fabayo and I've spent the last 9 years designing products for startups in Lagos, Nigeria and a few high-growth companies in the UK including Deliveroo and Monzo Bank. We're in the middle of the 18th century. A British inventor called James Watt just made significant improvements to the steam engine to make it functional. This was revolutionary but also terrifying because these machines were so huge and intimidating. Picture this, you're a worker in a textile factory, you've never used a machine for anything ever, you've always done everything Then your boss installs this massive roaring monster in your factory that brings out so much steam that it looks like it's about to explode. There are no instruction manuals, no safety protocols, and no clear way to tell if this thing will actually explode or not. Only the engineers who built the steam engine knew how to operate it, and this is a problem because if only engineers can use the technology, then it can't scale. So what happened? The first industrial designers started thinking about how to make it easy for regular workers to operate and maintain the machine. They They introduced things like labeled gauges and visual indicators so workers could understand what the machine was doing. They introduced instruction manuals so workers understood how to operate the machines, and this was the first instance of the product manuals that we see in every machine that we buy today. Then later on, they started standardizing the interchangeable parts of a machine so that workers can assemble their own machines and change faulty parts without involving a technician. Suddenly, regular workers could operate these machines safely. Some workers could even replace faulty parts with new components safely with some training. These changes became the design principles for manufacturing other machines that came after the steam engine, especially cars. Speaking about cars, our next stop in time is going to be the early 20th century when an American industrialist and businessman called Henry Ford set out on a mission to make cars affordable for every household in America. You see, cars used to be something that only wealthy Americans could afford until Henry Ford started conceptualizing the Ford Model T in 1908. Ford famously said that he wanted cars to be so cheap that every middle-class American would be able to afford one. So how did he pull that off, and what role did design play? We'll get back to the video shortly. Before we do, I want to tell you about Mobbin, the sponsor of today's video. Without sponsors, I won't be able to show up regularly on this channel in the way that I do. Mobbin is such an important tool in my design process. I've spoken about them on this channel several times, even before they became sponsors. With With Mobbin, I have access to real UI screenshots from some of the best-designed mobile apps and web apps. I can study what works in the real world before applying it to my own designs, both at work and on my personal projects. My favorite Mobbin feature is the search functionality. Using the search feature, I can easily find specific apps, user flows, or UI elements. For example, if I want to design a story component on an app, all I need to do is search for stories, and I'm going to see apps that are on Mobbin that have story components for my inspiration. Mobbin has also recently introduced sites, so you can find the best-designed Mobbin is offering 20% discount on their annual paid plans to new accounts. All you need to do is use my exclusive link mobbin.com/samuel to get 20% off. Now back to the video. So how did Henry Ford achieve his dream of making cars affordable to everyday people in America today? Firstly, he simplified the design of the Model T so it could be built quickly and consistently using Standardized parts like using the same chassis for different variants of the Model T. The chassis is basically the frame of the car, so for different variants of the Model T, he would just use the same frame. This principle was borrowed from the improvements to the steam engine in our first stop in time. It may look like a no-brainer today, but then, no one had thought about it. Secondly, he raised the clearance between the car and the ground so that it could handle rougher unpaved roads, which were common in America at the time. If you're a middle-class American, there's a high chance that the roads you would drive On, maybe unpaved. But these were not the most impactful things he did. What had the most impact was redesigning how cars were built, not just what they looked like. He introduced the moving assembly line in 1913. Instead of workers moving around to build a car, the car came to the workers using a conveyor belt. Each person was responsible for one specific task, like attaching the wheels, bolting the engine, or fitting the windows, while the frame of the car moved from one team of specialists to the next. This new system cut production time from about 12 hours to just 90 minutes, and because of that, the cost of the Model T dropped by nearly two-thirds. By 1927, Ford had sold over 15 million Model Ts, and at one point, more than half of all the cars in the world were Ford Model Ts. Our next stop in time is 1980, 50 years after the success of the Ford Model T. Industrialization was global at this point, and the next notable innovation was the personal computer. By the way, a lot of things had happened in between, but let's focus on the personal computers. So how did computers become personal and how did they make their ways into offices and homes? How did a machine that was so huge and complex to operate become so small and easy to use? Think about how easy it is to pick up your laptop today and navigate through apps and screens. Now, Imagine performing every operation on your computer by memorizing hundreds of commands and typing them in a terminal or command line. If you make one typo, nothing works. This was how using computers used to be like when the electronic computer was invented. Again, only engineers can use this technology. So to solve this problem, in 1980, a group of researchers at Xerox came together to reimagine how people could interact with computers and that was when they introduced the GUI, the graphical user interface. It was the first time you could click icons on your screen and move things around with a mouse. Then Apple took the GUI mainstream with the Macintosh. They used skeuomorphic design patterns, making digital icons resemble real-world objects. A file looked like an actual paper document, a folder looked like a real folder. To delete something, you click on an icon that looked like a real trash can. It was intuitive, even for someone who had never touched a computer before. Around this time, early computers like the Commodore 64 and Apple II were already finding their ways into a few homes, but it was the GUI that made computers far more approachable for everyday people, paving the way for the massive expansion of personal computing. In the last 45 years between the popularity of personal computers and today, there have been 2 other major notable technological innovations. The first one is the evolution of the internet, and the web until 2020, and the second one is the ridiculously fast progress with artificial intelligence in the last 5 years. Now, the repeating pattern here is that every major innovation since the steam engines in the Industrial Revolution era has an early development phase that involves highly technical people, which is then followed by mainstream adoption, usually influenced by design. And this is not any different today. AI is incredibly powerful. It can write code, it can create art, it can analyze data, it can even have real conversations, and it's just the beginning. But using it effectively still feels like this. It looks like we're somewhere in between Phase 2 and Phase 3 again. The technology exists, it's powerful, but the people that seem to get the best results from AI are technical people like engineers who write detailed system prompts in JSON format or prompt engineering experts, most people still don't know how to get the best results from AI tools. And this is the AI problem. Just like every other time, the solution isn't going to come from the engineers who built it. It's going to come from designers or engineers who understand design, which explains something that seemed crazy 6 months ago. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, paid $6.5 billion to acquire a design agency run by Jony Ive, the lead designer behind the design of Apple's iconic products like the iPhone, iPad, iMac, and the iWatch. Why would an AI company pay that much for a design agency? Well, because Sam Altman understands this pattern as well. He knows that AI may never reach the scale of adoption that it's looking for until someone figures out how to make it as intuitive as an iPhone or even better. And it's not just OpenAI. Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that backed Stripe, Airbnb, and Coinbase, is specifically asking for more founders that have design backgrounds. Why? Because venture capitalists also understand this pattern. They know that the user experience layer is so crucial to get AI right, and designers are the ones that are naturally inclined to think about the experience. And that brings us back to Figma. Like I said earlier, this isn't just about Dylan or Figma's successful IPO, but it's a signal that investors are seeing this pattern as well and they understand it. They are betting $50 billion that design is about to become incredibly valuable, especially in the AI era. If you're a designer already, then you're in the right place and it's the right time. There are so many companies that are trying to figure out what the user experience layer on interacting with AI products should look and feel like. This hasn't been figured out yet. The existing UX patterns are limiting, and a lot of AI product builders are thinking about how to provide value to users without overwhelming them with the plenty things that AI can do. This is where your design expertise is most valuable. Don't waste your time debating pointless UX topics on social media. Instead, try to experiment with as many AI tools as you can and share your experiments on your preferred social media platforms so that these companies can find you. You need to move on from a designer that is always shipping his portfolio around and be the designer that is find you because of the kind of work you share. If you're thinking about becoming a designer or you're at the early stage of your career, this is literally the best time in history to start because you have the opportunity to learn in a new way, but you need to move really fast. You need to be obsessed about learning as fast as you can because this moment won't last forever. The window between Phase 1 and 4 is getting shorter with every cycle. It took 75 years for industrialization to go mainstream, 40 years for personal computers to make its way into people's homes. 20 years for the internet to reach 1 billion users. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in 2 months. The window is open, but it won't be for long. Weeks to making this video, I shared the original ideas that led to this video in my free personal newsletter. If you want to read my unfiltered thoughts and learn from personal experiments I've been running to remain an irreplaceable designer, then you should subscribe. You'll find the link in the comments. I'll see you in the next video.
