DesignThinkers Podcast: Zooming out and designing for everyone
Episodes 4 & 5 — DesignThinkers Podcast, Season 4
Two very different conversations. One is about where design is headed; the other is about who it keeps leaving behind.
In Episodes 4 and 5 of the DesignThinkers Podcast, Season 4, Nicola Hamilton RGD sits down with Peter Smart, Chief Experience Officer and Managing Partner at Fantasy, and Dr. Dee Miller, Director of Product Strategy and Insights for Product Equity at Adobe.
Episode 4: Peter Smart on the future of design in an age of constant change
Fantasy is the studio behind some of the world's most widely used digital products—working with Disney, Nike, Spotify, Netflix, Meta and Google. Peter has a front-row seat to where product design is heading, and his message to designers feeling the pressure of constant change is surprisingly grounding: zoom out.
The one thing that doesn't change
It's easy to get caught up in the daily churn of new tools, new workflows and new ways of working. Peter argues that designers who anchor themselves to the fundamentals—creative problem-solving, human-centred thinking, the ability to ask honest questions—are actually better positioned than those scrambling to keep up with every shift.
“What we do as designers is bring creative problem-solving to really challenging problems—and imbue the things we touch with more value. That is never going to stop being valuable. It's just about learning new ways to do that.”
Peter Smart, Chief Experience Officer and Managing Partner at Fantasy
Why designers entering the field right now might have the advantage
A lot of the anxiety among designers just starting gets pinned on AI. Peter pushes back on that, not by dismissing it, but by reframing it. People entering the field today haven't spent 20 years building habits and assumptions around one way of doing things. That flexibility, he argues, is genuinely valuable right now. "You're probably actually some of the most valuable people on the planet right now. The question is, do you know it? And can you position yourself to speak to the problems that companies actually have?" says Peter
What happens to brands when AI does the shopping?
The conversation also gets into something few designers are talking about yet: what happens to brand identity as AI agents start making purchasing decisions on behalf of people. Agents don't respond to heritage, nostalgia or visual identity the way humans do. But Peter's take isn't that brand becomes less important—it's that the human brand experience becomes more demanding. "That isn't a templating problem anymore. That's a systems problem. How do we translate what we know about someone into a deeply human experience—and do that at scale for millions of people?" highlights Peter.
Episode 5: Dr. Dee Miller on accessibility as quality, not compliance
Dr. Dee Miller has spent her career asking who gets left out. Her path into this work is personal—shaped by being left-handed in a world built for right-handed people, and watching her grandmother struggle with a medical device that was never designed with her in mind. Through a PhD in human-computer interaction, work on inclusive financial technology at Visa and now in her role at Adobe, that same question has driven everything.
Rethinking what accessibility actually means
Her core argument cuts through a lot of the noise: accessibility isn't a legal obligation to manage, it's a measure of how good your product actually is. "Accessibility is about the quality of the product itself." Her team's work on Adobe Firefly puts that into practice—helping diversify the data the model was trained on so that generated images better reflect a global range of people and experiences, rather than defaulting to a narrow Western lens.
Getting buy-in when timelines are tight
One of the most practical parts of the conversation is about getting accessibility taken seriously inside organizations. Dee's approach is to change the terms entirely, away from legal risk and toward product health and business impact. She talks about calculating the cost of fixing accessibility issues at different stages of development and working directly with sales teams to surface contracts lost because products weren't usable enough. "I'm literally dealing with these issues right now, which takes away from our ability to be innovative and also build new features. So that's really what the quality multiplier is that I use to have that conversation and try to put it up at the front," says Dee.
The mindset shift is worth making
When asked for the one thing she wants every designer to take away, her answer is clear: stop thinking about accessibility as designing for a small group, and start recognizing that human ability is on a spectrum. A product can pass every technical check and still be genuinely frustrating to use. What matters is whether people can actually complete what they're trying to do.
“Really shifting that mindset to say, how do I make sure this is usable? Make that mindset that accessibility is good usability. I'm looking for good usability. How do I empower people to complete a task? That's the mindset shift—how can we create the product for everyone, that opens doors for everyone.”
Dr. Dee Miller, Director of Product Strategy and Insights for Product Equity at Adobe
Where the conversation is heading next
The episode closes on an emerging idea Dr. Miller is actively developing, a framework for culturally responsive accessibility. Universal design principles are a foundation, but how people interpret colour, symbols and language varies enormously across cultures in ways standard frameworks don't fully account for. It opens up a much bigger question about who we're really designing for—and one she'll continue at DesignThinkers Vancouver.
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