Issue 146

WELCOME

Being Designerly 146 focuses on what remains undelegatable as AI keeps making the work faster. This issue is about the slower, harder work that still belongs to us: curiosity that can “live the question,” judgment that keeps its reps, empathy with candor, and advocacy before efficiency becomes harm.

FEATURE

What must remain human because consequences are human?

This is me trying to name the part of AI work that cannot be reduced to better prompts or faster workflows. The more we let systems translate people into data, scores, outputs, and recommendations, the more undelegatable advocacy becomes: the human responsibility to ask who gets flattened when efficiency wins too easily.

CURIOSITY

Curiosity Makes Me a Better Parent

Curiosity may look like a small parenting move in this article, but it’s really the practice of learning to “live the question” instead of rushing to solve the person in front of you. In an AI-shaped world that rewards fast answers, staying with uncertainty allows you to nurture that undelegatable curiosity.

CRITICAL THINKING

AI Is Eroding Critical Thinking At Work. The Window Is Closing.

AI doesn’t just speed up work; used carelessly, it can quietly remove the reps that build judgment. The undelegatable move is not to reject AI, but to keep humans in the loop where it matters most: questioning, verifying, and deciding what’s actually true.

EMPATHY

Is this the end of empathy?

This piece made me rethink the easy story that empathy is what slows leaders down. The harder, more undelegatable version is knowing when care requires patience, when care requires candor, and when “moving fast” is just avoidance with a calendar invite.

ADVOCACY

10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’

This article made me rethink advocacy as something quieter, harder, and more upstream than “speaking up.” In an AI age where power can hide inside platforms, models, and supposedly neutral systems, the undelegatable work is protecting the places where people can still participate, question, and be defended before the decision becomes infrastructure.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

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