renaise

Otherkind will be at Us by Night 2026 in Antwerp, Belgium. Join us for coffee this Saturday under the MAS museum (Café Storm) with other designers in attendance. RSVP below.

To everyone still making things, We are writing to you as if we were sitting across a table at a café, not speaking from a stage. A lot has shifted under our feet in recent years. The space in which design exists has been rewritten by AI. What people expect from the practice and from us has changed. A single line in a prompt box now produces in seconds what used to take a careful afternoon. Copy, flows, and entire interfaces appear in the time it takes a page to load. By no means should we reject what AI can do. It lowers the barrier to entry for everyone to create and pursue what they imagine. But many of you have also felt a quiet panic, and you are not alone, and you are not wrong to feel it. A set of skills we honed over years is no longer scarce in the way it once was. Here is what we come back to constantly, and what we want to leave with you. Design was never just the artifact. It was in the act of making it. The joy of design has always lived in the doing. The afternoon lost inside a problem. The fifth version that finally clicks. The moment your inspiration materializes into something you can touch. A machine can hand you an output, but it cannot give you the quiet satisfaction of having wrestled with something and won. It cannot give you the taste you have built from ten thousand small decisions across a career. Inspiration works the same way. It does not arrive because the tool got faster. It comes from a song that moves you, a building that stops you on the street, a friend's work that sends you back to your sketchbook wanting to riff. Sources of inspiration cannot be produced. They can only be found. So let us make a small case for what we do next. Prioritize moments of inspiration, not optimizations. Find your people, build with your friends, encourage strangers, and resist the pull to compete on speed alone. Speed is a race designed for machines and corporations, not for people. Keep joy alive by showing each other what is possible, not by measuring what gets produced. The tools will keep changing. They always have, and they always will. What stays consistent is the maker, the people around the maker, and the joy of a thing taking shape. So keep making. Keep sharing. Keep being generous with your inspiration. The industry will sort itself out. Our job is to make sure that when it does, the part worth protecting, the love of building something real with people, is still alive no matter how optimized the machine becomes. With warmth, and a lot of hope, Otherkind