Everyone in design right now is being sold the same vision: generate faster, explore more, ship sooner. And the tools genuinely deliver on that. But somewhere in the rush, a quieter question is getting lost — are we building the right thing? For the right person? And does anyone actually own that answer?
This talk takes an unexpected route to that question. It brings together a group of designers, thinkers, and builders who never wrote a prompt, never ran a sprint, never opened Figma — and makes the case that they already solved for this moment. Through Dieter Rams on the danger of endless addition, Ray Eames on what “working good” really means, a 1979 IBM training slide that reads like it was written last week, and Lina Bo Bardi on building for people before building for form — Fast ≠ Good argues that the principles that made great design great haven’t changed. They’ve just become more urgent.
Along the way, it introduces two ideas designers can use immediately: that fidelity should match confidence (and AI breaks this by outputting at maximum fidelity on the first pass), and that the real skill in design isn’t speed — it’s deceleration. Like the best basketball players, great designers know when to switch from fast to slow in the middle of a sprint.
Come for the dead designers. Leave with three things you can use on Monday.
