Design’s next era is about making people feel seen

Alison Rand is a strategist, author, and design leader working at the intersection of design strategy, organizational structure, and operations. A former developer who helped build early UX practices at agencies like Huge and Hot Studio, she now consults with organizations to untangle complexity—how people work, how decisions travel, and how culture is shaped through structure. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston, co-founded Forty Fifty, a social health platform for women navigating midlife, and is the author of Sentido with MIT Press. In her interview with Doreen Lorenzo, Alison explores what it means to lead creative teams inside systems that weren’t built with you in mind. She discusses adversity as a professional superpower, why representation and emotional labor are core design concerns, and how systems thinking and foresight can help designers meet AI with sharper judgment, intuition, and responsibility for the futures they’re shaping. Fast Company: Tell us about your career path? When did you realize you were interested in design? Alison Rand: My path is meandering. I studied art history, wanting to be a fresco restorer. That was my dream. But when I graduated, my father said, “Happy Independence Day.” And I was like, “Oh my God, I have to get a job.” I ended up getting a job at IBM as a secretary and landed in their intranet department with everybody who was my age. I fell into that dot-com life; I learned how to code, I became a developer, a front-end programmer. But I always had my foundational fine art background. That was how I was raised: the love and passion for creativity. On my career path, I feel like I tripped and fell in so many directions. But in hindsight, I realized I also took advantage of the things presented to me and made intentional decisions, such as landing at Huge and learning about user experience for the first time, and then landing at Hot Studio as employee number one in their New Yor