In Defense of Slow Work: Developing Craft and Taste as Design Skills

Conventional wisdom says beauty is in the eye of the beholder… so, did the elders lie, or is there no objectively good design?

Well, when you encounter a beautifully crafted product, you just feel it. This talk pauses and explores that moment, asking how to reproduce it in your own work through a slow, diligent process. But slow is a hard sell in a business world that already moves at a ruthlessly breakneck speed – one that new-fangled AI tools promise to make even faster. The question now is: what unique advantages does a methodical approach even offer? How do you defend slow work?

This session is a love letter to product design as an art form that rewards patience and rigor, even as AI promises to shortcut the hard work. It’s for designers ready to treat taste and craft not as some subjective mystery or innate talent, but as legitimate skills – ones that new tech can enable for better, bolder, more meaningful design.