HeyJaredGhost in the Pixel
Uday Gajendar's renewed musings on design, leadership, and strategy
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
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- Sep 21, 2026
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- Jul 13, 2026
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Is it the Designer’s job to dismantle power structures? (opens the original)
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Recently in our doctoral ethics seminar, a simple yet powerful question was posed to the class: Is it really a designer’s job to dismantle power structures? 🤔 Not an easy question, rather thorny really.My immediate instinctive response is “No, it’s not the designer’s job.” I still think that’s mostly right as I’ve pondered it over the last couple weeks. “Dismantle” weighs some heavy assumptions around a target, a stance, and a verdict about which power is illegitimate. Design’s typical moves are
Naming the forces, and locating yourself. (opens the original)
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Pretty much every design leader I know is standing in the middle of something they didn’t build and can’t fully control. 😬 It’s not a skills gap, nor a career-stage issue. It’s really a structural condition — several really, all stacked on top of each other, each with its own physics, each pretending to be the only one that matters…I thought that more robust frameworks would fix this. Then I thought better boundaries would help. What actually helped was drawing little diagrams! Over the past sev
Part 3: Regenerating beauty in the age of AI (opens the original)
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Note: This is Part 3 of “Regenerating Beauty in the Age of AI” — a series built around rediscovering my 2001 Carnegie Mellon thesis on beauty & interaction design, and what its buried questions reveal about where we are now. Part 1 opened the document. Part 2 introduced the philosophical “agents” inside it. Part 3 is where things get…uncomfortable.New here? Start with Part 1. Returning? The bourbon is still recommended — this one needs it.😉 🥃 🔥T
Part 2: Regenerating beauty in the age of AI (opens the original)
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Note: This is Part 2 of “Regenerating Beauty in the Age of AI” — a series built around accidentally rediscovering my 2001 Carnegie Mellon thesis on beauty & interaction design, and what its questions reveal about where we are now. Part 1 affirmed why those questions got lost. Part 2 is where the real unsettling begins — two philosophers from another century arrive, and they don’t leave quietly.New here? Start with Part 1. Returning? Welcome back. The bourbon is optional but recommended. 😉 ㊆
The Four B’s of AI: A compass for product judgment (opens the original)
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I was in a collab session with a client awhile ago where they pasted some rather hastily jotted feature requirements into an AI tool — admittedly as an experiment — and typed in: “generate a usable, intuitive UI for this feature.” No contextualized rationale for what those words meant. No articulation on what they’d assumed about the customers it was meant to serve. Just…generate it! 😅I’ve been thinking a lot about that moment (and others with clients and gathered via LinkedIn posts) mostly beca
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