Ask around, in any design team today: “What exactly is your job?” You’ll see the hesitations appear. The designer who spends their days at to frame generative models. The UX that makes as many prompts as wireframesThe creative person who codes their own tools. They all have a business card that no longer quite reflects what they do.

I am the one most directly affected. My official title no longer describes my days.And none of the available words adequately replace it. For a while, I thought it was just my problem. I eventually realized that it's becoming a problem for an entire profession. And that it deserved more than a complaint: it deserves to have the right questions asked.

Vocabulary always comes last

A profession exists first and foremost in the gestures. The word comes after, sometimes years later, once the practice is widespread enough that it needs to be filed away somewhere.

“Web developer” meant nothing when the first people were just tinkering with web pages. “Community manager” came about long after people were already running communities. “Data scientist” took time to break away from the statistician. Each time, the same gap: Practice first, name second.

We are experiencing this very disconnect, on a large scale, at the boundary between design and AI. And the first good question to ask is not “what is my name”, but: Am I mistaking my discomfort with positioning for a sign that I am lost, when it may actually be a sign that I am too early?

Too many hats, or just one poorly named one?

When you take on multiple roles – design system, training, consulting, AI prototyping, conferences – the reflex is to think that you are spreading yourself too thin. It's often the opposite.

In my case, when I looked at what these activities had in common, I didn't find six professions. I found only one, presented in six scenes: bringing together two worlds that didn't speak the same language. Translating a designer's intention into something that a machine can execute, and bring what the machine produces into a framework that makes sense to humans.

Hence the second question, and it applies to you as much as to me: Are your multiple roles truly different jobs, or variations of a single action that you haven't yet been able to name? The answer changes everything. If it's six jobs, you're spreading yourself too thin. If it's just one, you're defining it.

Ambiguity has a cost, and we need to talk about it honestly.

Let's not romanticize it. A job without a name complicates everythingPresentations, job descriptions, recruitment, and platform listings that only categorize people into predefined boxes. An unreadable profile is a difficult profile to sell, both for the candidate and for the managers who have to explain it to higher-ups.

And yet, it is precisely at this blurred boundary that the most interesting roles of the decade are being created. Between design and AI. Between creativity and code. Between strategy and machine.

Which leads to the third question, perhaps the most disturbing: Do you wait for a clear and reassuring title to exist before you begin, or do you accept working in the discomfort of the nameless, where everything is at stake?nant? Because those who are waiting for the word will arrive when the places are taken.

The question that this article will not answer

I don't have a definitive answer to offer you, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. I don't yet know what to call this profession that many of us practice without naming it. Augmented designer, generative systems architect, design and AI translator: all of these sound either pretentious or incomplete.

But I believe the key skill of this decade is not technical. It's the ability to to maintain the ambiguity for quite some time So that reality catches up with vocabulary. To continue making the gesture without the security of a word to define oneself.

So I'll leave you with the questions, rather than my conclusions:

• Does your job title still describe what you actually do, or what you were doing three years ago?

• If you had to name your job by your actual actions, and not by your job description, what word would you invent?

• What if the discomfort you feel about your own title isn't a problem to be solved, but the clearest sign that you're exactly where you need to be?

The word will come. The real question is whether you will already be at work when he arrives.

Philippe Elovenko, Product designer at UX-Republic