Across your entire career, from your beginnings in designing album covers to creating investigative exhibitions into the human experience, what is one philosophy that you’ve carried with you? Trying to touch the heart of the viewer. I’ve held that from the beginning, whether it was the David Byrne cover or what I’m doing now with data visualization and installation. But I’d add something else I’ve learned: Empirical optimism. Data-grounded joy. The idea that if you look closely enough at the actual world—not the Twitter version of it, the actual numbers—you find reasons to be hopeful. That’s not naive. It’s harder than cynicism. It requires actual attention.
Tell us about your relationship with Digital Design Days in Milan. What compelled you to speak at this year’s iteration of the event? For one, I’ve always liked Milan. And Digital Design Days asked me to talk about the intersection of data and beauty, which is exactly what I’m thinking about right now.
Why do you think beauty is important to design as a concept that exists beyond form? What does beauty contribute to the discipline? Beauty is useless in the best way possible. It doesn’t optimize for anything except the experience of being alive. Function gets all the credit in design, but beauty is what makes functionality matter to actual humans. It’s what makes you remember something instead of just using it.
As generative AI art has become more common, especially as a way to “streamline” the creative process or deliver work with fast turnarounds, what is your argument for design’s need to retain human judgment? The argument is simple: generative AI can’t do what you didn’t already tell it to do. It’s fundamentally reactionary. It can remix the past brilliantly, but the past doesn’t contain the future. I’ve used AI extensively for inbox triage and for visualizations—things that don’t require originality. But if you use it to create the work, you’ve outsourced the part that matters. You’ve hired someone to dream for you. That’s a choice, but it’s not a choice I’m comfortable making.
Does generative AI present an existential crisis for designers, or do you see it becoming another tool within a designer’s kit? Both. AI is a tool, but it’s a tool that some people will use to make themselves obsolete. That’s not the AI’s fault. It’s ours—a failure of imagination about what design is actually for.
If you believe design is about making things faster and cheaper, then yes, AI is an existential threat. If you believe it’s about making things better, true to human need, then AI is just another material you have to know how to use. It’s like asking if photography killed painting. No, it freed painting to do other things. But painters had to decide what those things were.
In a discussion on your website, you brought up your new purpose to move away from commercial design and create more low-functioning design. What defines low-functioning design for you? Low-functioning design is the opposite of optimized design. It doesn’t try to solve the problem in the most efficient way possible. Instead, it leaves room for the viewer, the user or the participant to complete the thought. It’s design that trusts people.
Where do you see the field of design and the industry going from this point on? Toward fragmentation, probably. You’ll have a wing of design that’s entirely algorithmic and optimized. And you’ll have a wing that’s hyperaware and hyperintentional. The field won’t resolve that tension. It’ll just exist in it.
The question is which world you want to build. I’m betting on slowness, on human scale, on the idea that something worth doing is worth doing carefully. But I’m not naive enough to think that’s where the industry is going. Most of it will chase velocity and efficiency because those are measurable. Beauty and meaning are not.
What advice would you give designers who are just starting their careers today? Travel. Walk a lot. Delay email and socials until the afternoon every day so you have a few hours every day where your attention belongs to you. Make something that couldn’t have been made by anyone else. Make something that requires your specific experience and your specific way of seeing. Everything else, eventually, will be done by machines. ca
Stefan Sagmeister is one of the most influential graphic designers of our time. As founder of Sagmeister Inc. in New York, he has earned virtually every major design award—including multiple Grammys—with his work for the Guggenheim Museum, HBO and the Rolling Stones. Beyond commercial work, Sagmeister explores the relationship between design and happiness through the acclaimed documentaries The Happy Film and The Happy Show, which have toured museums worldwide. His TED talks have garnered millions of views, inspiring designers globally to rethink their practice. Sagmeister advocates for regular sabbaticals to prevent burnout and prioritize meaningful work over endless productivity. In May 2026, he will present “Beauty as Function” at Digital Design Days in Milan, the annual international design festival founded by Filippo Spiezia. Addressing an audience of creative leaders and industry decision-makers, the talk examines the role of human aesthetic judgment in an era increasingly shaped by AI-generated design.
