This is from 2025 | 5 minute read

Sunday morning thoughts on Henry Ford and UX

I've been thinking a great deal about the idea of industrialized software production, and the impact it has on, among other things, employment for students. This is an incomplete and completely overly-simplistic analogy, but I keep coming back to Ford and the process of assembly, mostly because the word "assembly" keeps coming up over and over in the larger conversation of design, primarily in the context of Figma and design systems.

I'm no expert in Ford, but here's a brief, surface-level approximation of the timeline of car production at scale, cobbled together from my memory of design history from 30 years ago, web histories, and our friendly Wikipedia:

• Ford grows up in the late 1800s, and starts tinkering on approaches to transportation. He makes something called the Quadricycle, and uses it to raise money for the Detroit Automobile Company. Fascinating to me, although probably obvious to everyone else, that there was VC money at that point. I wonder what their expected returns were.
• He makes and drives a sort-of-modern looking car in 1901, raises more money, works with someone no one's ever heard of named Alexander Malcomson (it seems like there’s always someone no one ever heard of; poor Ronald Wayne), raises another round of angel capital, and starts Ford.
• In 5 years, he cranks through the evolution of different models, until the Model T shows up in 1908.
• By 1913, the assembly line is a thing, built largely on precedent from other industries (like meat packing; do they still read The Jungle in school, or is it too woke?), and 13,000 employees work it.
• He's killing it with huge productivity gains, so he doubles wages for workers, cuts the workday, and vehicle prices drop. (I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of revisionist history here......)
• In 1918, he pulls some weird Elon-Musk style drama, where he pretends to step down and create a new company, causing a massive sell-off of stock, which he then buys back for majority control; still presciently channeling Musk, in 1920 he publishes an article called "The International Jew: The World's Problem."
• By 1927, Ford has sold 15 million Model Ts, and then has an all-in-one, materials in one door, cars out the other, plant.
• In 1929, he lays of 50% of his staff due to the depression.
• By 1940, the remaining staff is unionized.
• By 1960s, robots are doing their thing, with the Unimate being unveiled on the Johnny Carson show, where it poured a beer. Ha ha ha, look we commoditized your job!
• In 1969, robots were in GM's plants, spot-welding 110 cars per hour, double any previous plant, where people still did it with their hands.

So to summarize: cars went from nothing to a one-off hobby in lots of years; then, to limited assembly production in about five years, with growth, "celebration of workers", and great money; to huge efficiencies in about ten years; to labor disputes related to fair practice in another ten; and then to robots, and the inevitable shrinking workforce, in another twenty. Call it 70 years from magic to robots, with stops along the way for golden years and profit sharing, huge jumps in efficiency, a little racism, the need for fewer and fewer people, and now we have the Ford Escape and the Toyota Corolla.

That sure looks familiar-ish. Engelbart in 1968 with an entirely one-off platform, through BBSes from the late 70s through the late 80s, running packages like PCBoard (My stuff was on UltraBBS). Software in production in the 80s and 90s; I'm old enough to remember buying it in boxes, and before CDs became a thing, installing one of the Kings Quest games from something like 25 floppy disks. The crazy of the internet in the mid-1990s, with the complete lack of infrastructure; when we built Barcraze in 1999, my friend Zack made his fraternity pledges watch the server and restart Jrun when it crashed. Pure experimentation with tons of VC money in random stuff, a crash, rise, crash, then formalized web systems and application framework packages like jquery, the rise of ticketing systems and requirements in, software out product/engineering/design squads, a slow decline into blanding that is today's apps, and then old people like me telling everyone to get off my lawn. With the exception of the union part, there's a similar pattern in software right now, and the Unimate is staring at us in the face as AI-generated layouts.

So back to the original question; what happens to employment for design students?

UX is basically now the ability to operate on the assembly line. Tickets in, do your thing with a framework, software out. That's a race to the bottom, and is going to need unionization, which will never happen, so it will be $11/hour shit work. I'm confident that real, thoughtful design strategy and interaction design isn't going anywhere, but that needs just a tiny number of designers. I don't buy the AI is going to kill the jobs part, because I kind of think they're already gone. So maybe the reckoning here is that design just isn't a great career path? Or, at least, it's not a big career path? Maybe the kindest thing we can do to our prospective students is to tell them to go study something else.

Woof, that's pretty grim for a Sunday morning.