The pivot point
The 2023 Smashing Magazine article marked the public shift from "what makes designers effective" to "what human skills matter most when AI takes over more execution."
Read the articleWhere this work began
Being Designerly is the original body of work that became Undelegatable - exploring the human skills that make people effective in complexity, first through design, and now far beyond it.
What began as a question about what makes designers effective became a broader inquiry into what makes humans valuable when AI is everywhere.
The question that started it
Before Undelegatable, there was a practical question: What makes some designers consistently more effective than others?
Not faster. Not more fluent with tools. More effective.
Across years of practice, teaching, and leading design teams, the same pattern kept appearing. The people who made the greatest impact weren't separated by technical skill. They were separated by the way they thought, related to others, and acted under real-world constraints.
Design researchers called this way of working
designerly - a pattern of thinking, feeling, and making shaped by ambiguity, human complexity, and the discipline of turning ideas into reality.
The deeper insight was that these capabilities were never just for designers. They were human capabilities that designers happened to practice deliberately.
Lyndon Cerejo has spent 20+ years practicing, teaching, and leading design — first as a UX practitioner and leader across 75+ organizations, then as Head of Product Design & UX Research leading digital commerce at scale. Being Designerly began as his inquiry into what made the best designers different.
2020 - now - 141+ issues of the Being Designerly newsletter, exploring these skills biweekly
2021 - My chapter on designerly habits in a USA Today & WSJ bestselling anthology made the case beyond design
2023 - The question shifted to AI in my article Beyond Algorithms: Skills Of Designers That AI Can't Replicate in Smashing Magazine
The original 11-skill model
The first Being Designerly framework mapped 9 core skills across three domains, plus 2 overarching behaviors. Together, they described what made people more thoughtful, creative, collaborative, and effective in complexity.
Head- how you think
- Cultivate Curiosity
- Notice & Observe
- Think Critically
Heart- how you connect
- Be Empathetic
- Advocate for Others
- Work Transparently
Hands- how you create
- Communicate Visually
- Collaborate & Co-Create
- Experiment & Iterate
Overarching behaviors
Put People First · Keep Learning
The evolution
Then AI changed the emphasis
As AI grew more capable, execution became cheaper and output became abundant. The premium moved toward the skills machines expose rather than replace. Six emerged as especially important.
Cultivate Curiosity + Notice & Observe
Curiosity
Think Critically
Critical Judgment
Be Empathetic
Empathy
Advocate for Others + aspects of Work Transparently
Advocacy
Collaborate & Co-Create
Collaboration
Experiment & Iterate + aspects of Communicate Visually
Experimentation
The original Being Designerly model remains the wider philosophy. The six skills didn't replace it - they distilled it for a different era.