Ian Gehlhaar
He/Him
Experience Design Director & Founder
Fail Fast Studio
Ian is the Founder and Experience Design Director of Fail Fast, a digital studio built on bold ideas, fast prototyping, and meaningful storytelling. Since founding the studio, Ian has led its growth from a 2-person team to nearly 100 multidisciplinary creatives, with an average annual growth of 35% over the past five years.
He believes in breaking the false divide between creativity and technology, and in designing experiences that resonate beyond the numbers. As a design leader, Ian champions a culture where experimentation is encouraged, failure is seen as fuel, and ideas are built to move people—not just convert them.
#Design for your rights!
Talk
The Good Designer: Rethinking Service Design in the Age of AI
For five months, I asked design leaders across Europe two simple questions: What made someone a good designer before AI? And what will it take in the future?
In this presentation, I share the key takeaways from this research with the service design community. I don’t offer easy answers to current uncertainty, nor am I here to tell you when your company will fire you. Instead, you'll find unexpected ideas and provocative triggers to shift your thinking, challenge classic Design Thinking frameworks, and start reinventing your place in the future of services.
💡 3 Key Takeaways
- From Designing Touchpoints to Architecting Autonomous Systems: We are moving away from controlling every static micro-interaction or blueprinting linear journeys. Service design is shifting from output to orchestration—defining playground boundaries, establishing ethical guardrails, and setting rules for how autonomous AI agents act within flexible service systems. Judgment and system framing are the new blueprints.
- The Death of the Traditional User & Non-Human Actors: What happens to service ecosystems when "users" stop being passive consumers and start generating their own tailored tools and apps on the fly? We will unpack what it means to design services when end-users become creators, and when LLMs and AI agents become one of your highest-growth user segments within the system.
- Reversing the Service Loop: For decades, Design Thinking focused on helping humans understand technology. The new frontier for service designers is helping technology understand humans. We’ll explore why human empathy, critical thinking, and contextual intuition are not mystical concepts, but high-level human data that algorithms need to make services comprehensible and safe.
🎥 The Project & Documentary
This talk is part of The Good Designer, an ongoing research project exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping design disciplines.
- August: Final call for contributions! Share your service design perspective, video, or thoughts before research closes: [👉 Share your story / Take the survey https://forms.gle/FcCoQ6JLhKQw3hUD7]
- September: Official release of The Good Designer documentary summarizing the full European investigation.