“The water you once poured into the wine cannot be drained off again”

In 2024, as AI solidified its presence, the entire industry embarked on a journey of experimentation, discovery, reflection, trial, error, and prediction. A disruption like no other.

Every studio, every organization, adapted (and is still adapting) in its own way, caught in a dance of reconfiguration. Teams were redirected to rapid product development, research priorities shifted, organizational strategies were rewritten—only to be rewritten again—because nothing has settled yet. And this will take time.

As a result, designers who were hired for Role X at the start of 2024 found themselves performing Role Y by the end of the year. And often, this wasn’t how they had envisioned the beginning of their design careers.

On one hand, if you're a young designer with limited industry mileage, the frustrationThe frustration of design work not being what you imagined when you graduated design school  is understandable. But on the other hand—imagining a career? The entire industry is reimagining itself right now.

I believe every design leader has encountered this recent reality.

It brought me back to Bertolt Brecht’s beautiful poem, Everything Changes.  This perfectly coincides with my humble message to designers and managers navigating this uncertainty.

Everything Changes

Everything changes.
You can makeA fresh start with your final breath.
But what has happened has happened.
And the water You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again.

What has happened has happened.
The water You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again, but Everything changes.
You can make A fresh start with your final breath.

(Source: "A Year of Being Here")

Everything is transient—but  a designer can have a fresh start every single day. And more importantly—what you’ve done so far, what you’ve learned, your perspective and experience—cannot be taken away from you. It will serve you well, even when you start anew.By the way, this essence is present even in the smallest design tasks—in every sketch that gets discarded, in every concept the client doesn’t connect with, in every iteration that forces the designer to open a new file and start over. The file may be a blank slate, but in the new design, one way or another—whether through integration or omission—the discarded sketch will always be there.

The water you’ve poured into the wine cannot be drained off—and that’s a very very  good thing.