Design Officer Moment: When Aesthetics Become Infrastructure

Something shifted in the tech landscape between August 21-22, 2025. Three announcements that individually might seem like standard industry moves, but together reveal a tectonic shift in how power structures are organizing around aesthetic control.

Joe Gebbia becomes America's first Chief Design Officer. Meta licenses Midjourney's "aesthetic technology." Loredana Crisan moves from Meta to Figma as Chief Design Officer.

Each appointment tells part of a larger story about what happens when aesthetics stop being decoration and become infrastructure.

When Government Discovers Design

Gebbia's appointment under Trump's "America by Design" executive order sounds almost surreal—like someone decided to treat national digital infrastructure the way we'd approach launching a startup. The mandate is specific: transform high-traffic government sites by July 4, 2026, America's 250th anniversary.

This isn't about making prettier websites. When someone like Gebbia—who co-designed Airbnb's user experience that convinced millions of strangers to sleep in each other's homes—starts redesigning how Americans interact with their government, we're witnessing aesthetic choices becoming policy implementation.

The IRS website. Social Security Administration interfaces. Federal retirement systems. These aren't just digital touchpoints anymore—they're the primary interface between citizens and state power. Design decisions at this scale become political decisions disguised as user experience improvements.

My mind immediately goes to Morocco's digital transformation over the past decade. When King Mohammed VI announced the national digital strategy, the emphasis wasn't just on digitization—it was on creating digital experiences that reflected Moroccan cultural values while remaining globally relevant and competitive. Aesthetics as cultural sovereignty through technological interface design.

Gebbia's three-year mandate represents something similar at national scale. Design as soft power. Interface as ideological expression.

Meta's Aesthetic Acquisition Strategy

The Meta-Midjourney partnership, announced by Alexandr Wang (formerly Scale AI's founder, now Meta's chief AI officer), reveals a different dimension of the same phenomenon.

Meta isn't just licensing Midjourney's image generation capabilities—they're licensing what the partnership calls "aesthetic technology." Wang's framing of Meta's "all-of-the-above approach" to AI competition suggests they understand something crucial: the battle for AI dominance isn't just about computational power or model parameters.

It's about aesthetic control.

Figma's Executive Capture

Loredana Crisan's move from Meta to Figma as Chief Design Officer completes a pattern that's been building for years: Meta's design DNA spreading throughout the tools that shape how everyone else designs.

Figma's market position is staggering—40.65% market share in design tools, 13 million monthly users (two-thirds of whom aren't even designers), revenue growth from $4M in 2018 to $700M in 2024. When you control the tools that design the interfaces, you control the aesthetic possibilities available to entire ecosystems.

Crisan brings Meta's approach to "design at scale"—the systematic thinking that lets you create consistent visual experiences across billions of users and thousands of product features. But she also brings something more subtle: the aesthetic sensibilities that emerged from Meta's particular approach to social media interface design.

Consider Figma's 2025 AI product launches: Make (prompt-to-code), Sites (website builder), Buzz (marketing), Draw (illustration). Each tool doesn't just automate design work—it codifies specific approaches to visual problem-solving. The aesthetic assumptions built into these AI systems will influence how millions of designers think about visual solutions.

When design tools embed aesthetic biases, those biases compound across every interface those tools create.

Aesthetic Standardization and AI Alignment

This pattern of aesthetic consolidation connects to broader concerns emerging in AI alignment research. The 2025 ACM Conference highlighted "perspectival homogenization"—AI development approaches that inadvertently suppress disagreement and diversity in favor of optimization toward statistical majorities.

When aesthetic decision-making becomes increasingly automated through AI design tools, we risk what I'd call aesthetic alignment problems: the systematic filtering out of minority visual perspectives in favor of statistically "optimal" design choices.

Consider how Instagram's algorithmic feed gradually shaped global visual culture toward certain aesthetic patterns—oversaturated colors, specific composition styles, particular ways of presenting human faces and bodies. Now imagine that same homogenizing pressure applied to every interface, every visual communication medium, every aesthetic choice mediated by AI systems.

The consolidation of aesthetic control into fewer institutional hands—whether through government design offices, Meta's AI partnerships, or Figma's tool dominance—creates systemic risks that go beyond individual companies or design decisions.

Cultural Memory and Digital Aesthetics

Being between Moroccan and American visual cultures taught me something about aesthetic sovereignty that feels increasingly relevant. Traditional Moroccan architecture, calligraphy, textile patterns—these aren't just decorative choices. They encode cultural values, mathematical understanding, spiritual concepts, social organization principles.

When digital interfaces become the primary medium through which culture gets transmitted, aesthetic choices become cultural preservation or cultural erasure decisions.

The three appointments from August 21-22 represent a moment when aesthetic decision-making power is being systematically centralized in ways that will influence cultural transmission for generations. Government interface design, AI-mediated visual creation, design tool development—each represents a different layer of aesthetic infrastructure coming under coordinated control.

What happens to cultural diversity when aesthetic possibilities get systematically narrowed through technological convergence?

Infrastructure Aesthetics vs Surface Aesthetics

The distinction between surface-level aesthetic choices (colors, fonts, layout preferences) and infrastructure-level aesthetic choices (interaction patterns, information architecture, cognitive load distribution) becomes crucial.

Surface aesthetics affect immediate visual experience. Infrastructure aesthetics affect how people think, process information, and relate to digital systems at psychological levels.

When Gebbia redesigns government interfaces, he's not just changing how tax forms look—he's potentially changing how Americans conceptually relate to bureaucratic processes. When Meta licenses Midjourney's aesthetic technology, they're not just improving image generation—they're influencing how AI systems will visually interpret and represent reality for billions of users.

Infrastructure aesthetic decisions create the conditions within which all future surface aesthetic decisions occur.

The Attention Layer: Where Aesthetics Meet Power

Design at this scale isn't just about making things pretty. It's about structuring attention, guiding cognition, and shaping the cognitive conditions under which people make decisions.

Every interface design choice creates what I think of as "cognitive affordances"—subtle environmental influences on how people think, feel, and act. Make a form slightly harder to complete, and you reduce participation rates. Make information slightly harder to find, and you shift behavioral patterns. Make aesthetic choices that feel culturally alienating, and you create systematic exclusion effects.

When aesthetic decision-making becomes infrastructure-level control, it becomes a form of soft power that operates below conscious awareness while shaping collective behavioral patterns.

The three appointments represent different aspects of this power being systematically organized:

• Government level: Aesthetic control over citizen-state interactions
• Platform level: Aesthetic control over AI-mediated reality generation
• Tool level: Aesthetic control over the creative possibilities available to other designers

Beyond User Experience: Experience Architecture

What emerges from this pattern isn't traditional user experience design, but what might be called "experience architecture"—systematic approaches to structuring how entire populations encounter and process information through digital interfaces.

Experience architecture operates at the intersection of:

• Cognitive science (how people process visual information)
• Cultural anthropology (how aesthetic choices encode social values)
• Political economy (how aesthetic control translates to behavioral influence)
• Technical infrastructure (how aesthetic choices create technical constraints)

The Design Officer moment represents the recognition that experience architecture has become strategically crucial to organizational and national power structures.

Questions for the Aesthetic Infrastructure Era

As aesthetic decision-making becomes increasingly systematized and concentrated, several questions emerge:

Technical questions: How do we build aesthetic diversity into AI systems that optimize toward statistical patterns? How do we prevent aesthetic homogenization while maintaining usability and accessibility standards?

Cultural questions: How do we preserve aesthetic traditions and minority visual perspectives when global aesthetic choices increasingly flow through centralized technological systems? How do we balance aesthetic consistency with cultural diversity?

Political questions: Who should control infrastructure-level aesthetic decisions that influence how billions of people interact with information, government, and each other? How do we create democratic accountability for aesthetic choices that operate below conscious awareness?

Economic questions: When aesthetic control becomes a source of competitive advantage and market power, how do we prevent the consolidation of aesthetic decision-making from creating new forms of monopolistic control?

The three appointments from August 21-22 represent more than executive musical chairs. They signal the emergence of aesthetics as a recognized form of infrastructural power—one that shapes cognition, culture, and social organization through the seemingly neutral medium of interface design.

We're entering an era where the question isn't just "what should this look like?" but "who gets to decide what everything looks like, and how do those decisions compound across global information systems?"

The aesthetic choices being made today will influence how future generations think, process information, and relate to digital systems. Understanding that these aren't just design decisions—they're architectural choices about the cognitive environment we're building for humanity—might be the most important insight emerging from the Design Officer moment.

Filed under: Things That Look Like UX Changes But Are Actually Cultural Engineering, Aesthetic Power Structures, and Why Visual Choices Might Be the New Nuclear Weapons

What aesthetic infrastructure questions keep you up at night? How do we build design systems that preserve cultural diversity while leveraging AI capabilities? The conversation continues...