Risograph print by Leonardo De La Rocha
There were six of us in the room.
A senior designer on my team was presenting work she’d been wrestling with for two weeks. The room was small enough that everyone’s body language was legible. I watched a peer of mine, another design leader, pull out his phone, glance at it, type something, put it down, glance at it again. The presenter saw him. I saw her see him. The work she was presenting got quieter in the next five minutes, less ambitious, more defended. By the end of the session she was framing every choice as something she was open to changing, which is not how she’d opened the crit.
I pulled my peer aside the next day. The conversation was uncomfortable in the way these conversations should be. He hadn’t realized. He’d been catching up on a Slack thread that felt urgent. He’s a good design leader. He cares about his team. The phone wasn’t disrespect. It was attention drift, which is the more common failure mode and the harder one to name.
I told him what I’ll tell you. Crit is sacred ground. It’s the one place in a designer’s week where their unfinished thinking is on the table and they’re asking the room to help shape it. Everything around the crit is increasingly fast: the Slack channels, the file shares, the AI-assisted writeups, the typed-up summaries that land in your inbox before the meeting ends. The crit itself is the thing that hasn’t compressed. It can’t compress. It is, by design, twenty minutes of human attention on a piece of unfinished work.
When the facilitator’s attention slips, the burden of feeling safe to present moves to the presenter. She starts spending energy managing the room instead of presenting the work. The crit gets worse. Not because of malice or because of a bad crit format. Because the room stopped holding her.
This is a small example of the larger pattern that’s been on my mind. The fast parts of the design process got faster. The slow parts didn’t. The slow parts can’t, because they’re the parts that depend on a human staying present with another human’s unfinished work. If the design leader’s attention is on the fast parts, by habit or by default, the slow parts erode. The presenter feels it first. The work degrades second. The team’s willingness to bring real work to crit degrades third, which is the part that takes a year to repair.
I don’t want to make this sound mystical. The fix is mechanical. Phones face down. Laptops closed unless the work requires them open. The facilitator names the presenter at the start, makes eye contact, and stays with her. If the facilitator has to step out, she steps out and rejoins, rather than half-stepping out from her chair. The presenter gets to see that the room is in the room.
The principle underneath the mechanics is what I want my team to hold. The facilitator’s presence is the safety signal. It’s the thing that tells the presenter whether to bring her real work or a defended version of it. Every crit you host as a design leader is a quiet vote about which version of the work your team is going to bring next time. If you hold the room well, they bring the real work. If you don’t, they don’t.
A design leader I respect once told me that the most important meeting on his calendar each week was crit, and the second most important was the prep he did before crit. The prep wasn’t on the agenda, the work, or the format. The prep was on himself. He blocked the fifteen minutes before crit to clear his head, close his other tabs, and remind himself that for the next hour, six people were going to bring him their unfinished thinking. He thought of it as walking into a room he was responsible for holding.
That’s the framing I want to leave you with. The crit is not yours. You’re holding it for someone else. The presenter is the one taking the risk. Your attention is the only thing in the room that costs you nothing and is worth everything to them.
The fast work doesn’t need your attention. It’s already moving. The slow work, the crit, the one-on-one, the moment a junior designer pauses before asking a hard question, those are the places where your attention is the actual deliverable. The displacement we’re all navigating right now will redistribute a lot of design work to faster tools. It will not redistribute this.
Phones down. Laptops closed. Eyes up. Sacred ground.