Hello 🎃
I use AI every day. It drafts, sorts, checks and summarises. It hasn’t made my weeks shorter, but it does allow me to achieve - without exaggeration - three times as much, and I recommend designers use it to boost both their productivity and the quality of their work. I am not writing as a sceptic.
And yet, after a week in which almost every meeting turned to AI, the conversation that stayed with me was about business cards: heavy, beautifully printed, the kind you want to touch, and you keep somewhere safe.
That is the tension running through this issue. AI is making our work faster and, used well, better. It is also filling every channel with competent, frictionless, interchangeable content, and in so doing it is making the plainly human feel scarce. Scarce things become valuable. In the middle of all this productivity, the designer who can be seen, heard and met is becoming more distinctive, not less.
This week: the blog on using AI well when your clients use it too; what I am finding as I audit my own practice; and the first stage of the Annual Review, now open.
1. This Week's Blogpost - Power Tools: using AI well when your clients use it too
Every week brings tales of new client abuses of AI. This is a legitimate business threat, and the post sets out what to do about it. But it begins with an uncomfortable observation: we too are guilty. Uploading floor plans with addresses, budget spreadsheets, photographs of children's bedrooms. The same carelessness in a different direction. So the standard you can credibly ask of a client is the one you can show you keep yourself.
The post covers your side of the upload, how to tell clients how you work, the contract clauses that protect your drawings, the four ways clients are actually using AI, and how to show them to use it well.
2. A Shift in How We Access AI - The Arrival of the Application Layer
For the past couple of years, many of my conversations about AI have asked the question: what are we actually going to do with this? Last week, I became consciously aware of a shift: the conversations were about answers.
I spoke with a respected voice in our industry about how new designers should be trained, and what place AI should take in their education from the start. I met a consultant building creative AI solutions for small businesses: plug-ins that each solve a single, discrete problem, and solve it well. This coming week I am talking to a technology entrepreneur building an AI services platform to take administrative work off designers’ hands, and to another team developing an AI-assisted spatial planning and modelling platform. Also last week, Stacy, The Intelligent Designer, ran a webinar on using OpenAI’s Astra to work for you in SketchUp. I have not watched it yet, but I am told it was mind-blowing.
Until now, using AI well meant working it all out for yourself through trial and error. Now, new businesses are forming, and consultants emerging, to do the figuring out on designers’ behalf, packaging AI into tools built for specific parts of practice. What we are seeing is the arrival of what the technology world calls the application layer: businesses that take the general-purpose models and turn them into tools for a particular job, so that you don't have to. The shift will be from needing to be a technologist yourself to benefit, to becoming a discerning buyer: clear about the problem you want solved, and clear about who is responsible for the output.
A word of caution, though. The application layer is a young market, and the survival of a new business is not guaranteed. That is normal at this stage of any new technology, but it should shape how you buy. Before you hand a core process to a new platform, ask where your data is held, whether you can take it with you, and what happens to it if the company folds or is sold. Start with something you could easily manage without, and let a tool prove itself before you build your practice around it.
3. The Relief of the Human
Which brings me back to the business cards.
Against this backdrop, several conversations this week turned to old-fashioned things: cards printed on beautiful stock, handwritten notes, the designer appearing on camera as herself, a client's desire to know who exactly they are hiring. None of it was nostalgia. Each of these things is hard to fake and cheap to verify. Someone chose that paper. Someone wrote that note. That face will be at the site meeting.
When content is abundant, attention and trust become the scarce goods, and they attach to people, not to output. That is why meeting a real human in the middle of all this noise feels like such a relief, and why it is becoming such a powerful differentiator. In a business built on trust, it is the whole of The Human Factor in its most tangible form.
In practice, it might mean:
- A card worth keeping, and a reason to hand it over in person.
- A handwritten note at handover, and a printed Handover Pack rather than another PDF.
- Face-to-camera video, or at least a photo that is unmistakeably you.
- Showing the hand that drew the plan, not only the render.
Every week I visit design websites and social media profiles with no visible human presence. Speaking personally, my buying preferences are trending increasingly human-first.
4. Practising What I Preach
I am currently working with a lawyer on my terms and conditions, and privacy policy, including a plain statement of how I use AI. I have started auditing my processes to make sure I keep the standard I am recommending to you.
I only use paid services with training turned off, but I do need to change video hosting, and add a statement to my website.
This matters for the Annual Review too (see below). The questionnaire I'll release on 12 November is designed to be completed with AI assistance, which means many of you will be putting your own business figures into a chatbot within a fortnight.
Before you do, read the five habits in the blog. At a minimum, use a paid plan with training switched off, and remove client names before you upload anything.
5. Annual Review - Stage One Is Live
It seems fitting to launch the 2026 Annual Review at Halloween, it is the nearest thing to magic in the business calendar. It is alchemy: the base metal of the year, its figures and projects, its triumphs and regrets, transmuted into the gold of a clear direction for the next.
Stage One - the data collection information for the 2026 Annual Review is now published. The resources and links are in the Hothouse group.
As I wrote here last week, every figure sits on one of four rungs: Guessed, Reconstructed, Recorded or Read. Any rung is acceptable. A questionnaire marked Guessed from top to bottom still counts as done.
The Annual Review process runs in three stages:
- Now: gather the data, so you have this ready for the questionnaire.
- Thursday 12 November: the questionnaire is released. It is a three to four hour intensive piece of homework, completed with AI assistance. Block the time in your diary now.
- Thursday 26 November, 10.30am to 12.30pm: the live, online workshop, where we turn the review into decisions for the coming year.
Find the data collection spreadsheet in the Hothouse Group, under the 'Files' tab.
6. Coming Up In Hothouse
📆 Thursday 12 November. Big Push: first check-in. Reply any time within 48 hours.
📆 Thursday 12 November. Annual Review: questionnaire released, this will be in the Hothouse Group
📆 Thursday 26 November, 10.30am to 12.30pm. Annual Review Workshop. Free, online and open to everyone. The link will be in the Hothouse group.
📆 Monday 30 November. Big Push: second check-in.
📆 Friday 4 December. Big Push deadline.
📆 Thursday 10 December, 10am. Big Push celebration.
📆 Designers' Boardroom, 2027. Enrollment in my accountability groups for 2027 will open shortly. Email me to find out more.
7. My Week In Hothouse
Looking at this week's numbers reminded me that during my annual review last year (2025) I identified that self-sabotage (because I felt undeserving) was a serious threat to business development in 2026. As a result, in my business plan for 2026, I set out to measure 'worthiness' weekly, on a scale of 1-10. This was with the explicit intention of driving it up, by looking for evidence that I had earned the right to do well. Worthiness started out in January at 6.5; this week it is 8.5. A mindset flaw, identified during last year's annual review, can be ticked off this year as having been intentionally addressed.
Measuring different forms of mindset over the last two years has been so powerful. When it is hard to recognise improvement that happens glacially, over time, a record of transforming numbers provides a strong sense of progress.
Final Word
Lots of AI this week, probably too much, but I'm not sorry. This reflects where society finds itself. It isn't optional.
In the coming week I'm running one old-school workshop on delivering the front end of the design process, and another on using numbers creatively to plan your business. I will also be scoping a session for the BIID on fees and charging, so it's likely when we next meet I'll be off on a different tangent.
See you next Sunday.
Julia
Founder, Hothouse
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