Tom and Jonny dig into the outcomes of Tom's Mostly Working event featuring James Storer from Monzo, unpacking how leading design teams are using AI not to ship faster, but to learn faster — and why the language of "design vs. product" is getting in the way. They get into the state of Figma: is it losing its grip on the design workflow, or is it actually thriving? And they draw an unexpected parallel to the smartphone camera era to ask whether AI will democratise design the same way. Plus: upcoming events, what they're each building, and some honest holiday parenting failure.

• 0:04 — Mostly Working: AI in Design at Monzo — Tom recaps the event with James Storer, prototyping at Monzo, and why the team focuses on learning speed over shipping speed
• 6:11 — Three Use Cases for AI in Design Workflows — Jonny breaks down the emerging buckets: shipping production code, faster prototyping, and building internal tools
• 13:12 — Is Figma Losing Its Grip? — Jonny's spicy take on Figma overreaching, seat cancellation stats from a 90-person design org, and the Adobe comparison
• 18:17 — Figma's Growth vs. The Designer Exodus — Two things can be true: enterprise growth numbers and a slow professional exodus
• 21:29 — The Smartphone Camera Analogy — Did smartphones kill professional photography? And will AI do the same to design?
• 25:52 — Upcoming Events: Berlin, Shoreditch & Brighton — Jonny's "Tools That Shape Us" talk at Hatch Berlin (Sep 18), the live build session at Product Unleashed Shoreditch, and the Brighton workshop
• 35:37 — What We're Building — Jonny's prototype hosting tool, a Notion CRM, and Tom's AI-powered family holiday journal idea

Find us at nearfuture.works

Click here to view the episode transcript.

Near Future Podcast – Pilot Episode

Welcome to the Near Future Podcast, where Tom and Jonny explore what they're building, learning, and experimenting with as AI reshapes how we work.

In this episode:

Agentic Murder Mystery
Jonny walks through his experiment building a six-agent murder mystery game using NanoClaw. He created a cast of AI suspects — each with their own secrets, personalities, and email inboxes — and ran a live session with a group of exited startup founders. The conversation covers what makes agents distinct from standard LLMs (triggers, tools, memory, collaboration), and the surprisingly playful emergent behaviour that unfolded when participants tried to interrogate and social-engineer the AI suspects.

The Near Future Logo Instrument
Tom shares his experiment turning the Near Future logo into an interactive, playable design tool — built in Claude Code — that generates ambient generative music as the logo animates. The conversation explores what it means to treat a brand asset as a toy, and how ephemeral software experiments fuel deeper craft practice.

Craft, Design, and What Lasts
Jonny reflects on receiving his long-awaited Poem Clock — a piece of hardware by Matt Webb that displays AI-generated rhyming couplets telling the time — as a lens for thinking about what makes design feel timeless. The duo discuss Dieter Rams' principles, the difference between craft as polish vs. craft as practice, and what that means for designers navigating the AI era.

Hiring Designers in the Age of AI
Tom shares observations from a recent head of design hiring process — how AI is adding noise on both sides, what strong portfolios look like right now, and the balance between deep foundations and pushing the frontier.

Design Engineering & the Future of the Design Team
A candid discussion on whether every designer needs to become a design engineer, the role of different archetypes within a team, and how to close the gap between Figma and code without putting everyone in an IDE.

Tools We're Excited About

• Tom: Flora AI (visual asset generation with reference images), Notion's new agent capabilities
• Jonny: UK-built sovereign design tools — Dawn Labs, Superhands, and Dessn

• (00:00) - Pilot episode

Find us at nearfuture.works