Over the last few weeks, thousands of creative minds gathered first in San Francisco, then London, for Config 2025 — an annual look at the latest product launches and inspiration across our industry. At Kettle, we took the opportunity bring together teammates from New York, LA, Portland, and Chicago to join our San Francisco locals for three days of learning and community.

Wandering from session to session, we noticed one theme consistently threading through the conference:

As our industry reinvents itself yet again with new tools, automations, and yes, AI, the true opportunity isn’t in outsourcing our outputs. It’s in embracing exploration, play, and even messiness in the pursuit of craft and meaning.

We saw this theme as we heard about how seeking opportunities to be an amateur can help you see unexpected pathways past constraints from Dr. Madeline Gannon in her talk How to be a robot whisperer. Helena Zhang taught us about the importance of wide exploration to create products with texture and soul in The space-filling curve of design. In Crafting your AI play(book), with Lane Shackleton and Mihika Kapoor, we examined the importance of play in the creative process, both for us as makers and for users of new tools and form factors powered by AI. And we learned principles to bridge the gap between current products and ambitious visions of the future in Designing positive futures with John LePore.

At Kettle we believe the future of digital experiences is incredibly personal.

In other words, the mindsets we need for the future leverage the very things that make us strong designers, product managers, and technologists. Mindsets of adaptability and experimentation. A focus on expansive possibilities. The discernment and taste to turn it all into meaningful experiences.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing at the Kettle. We believe the future of digital experiences is incredibly personal, not just in terms of data and AI, but in terms of thought, care, and feeling created by what we build.

We left Config more inspired than ever, not only to bring new tools to our work, but new mindsets. Here’s a few learnings the team will be carrying forward as we continue to design powerful digital experiences for our clients:

↳ David Galavotti mentioned in The endless canvas: Figma, 2D pixels & 3D shaders that he uses a practice “creative microdosing,” carving out routine chunks of time to play with design and new tech tooling. Integrating these brief yet regular moments with novel technologies can unlock new avenues for designers’ creative expression and discovery.

This distraction-free dedicated time — even in small increments — allows for unstructured experimentation that may foster long-term skill development, innovative outcomes, and a deeper understanding of emerging design possibilities, independent of immediate deliverables.

↳ Config got me thinking a lot about where to move fast and where to move slow when it comes to exploring new digital experiences. All these new generative AI features let us create and push ideas quickly, but the human craft shines through when we make the time and space to refine for details and quality.

↳ As designers, we have to listen and be empathetic, to create trust through curiosity, and to establish a medium that combines our client’s expertise with our way of thinking. We have to rethink how we use and create tools, knowing that AI is here to stay. It's on us to be more intentional in our creative process and put together all the noise the world makes to turn it into a melody.

It’s on us to be more intentional in our creative process and put together all the noise the world makes to turn it into a melody.

↳ It’s easy to let media narratives and our natural, human trepidation toward technological change fuel our fear of artificial intelligence. The talks we heard at Config helped transform that negative perception, encouraging designers to see AI not just as a tool, but as a vital creative partner.

In our industry, the pressure to achieve pixel-perfect precision can cast a shadow over the design process. By embracing the messiness and chaos of creativity, we can let go of that Fear of Messing Up (FOMU) and rediscover the freedom of creation.

↳ In a world of design automation and efficiency, the art of play and exploration has been lost. While tools like Figma have made our day-to-day design tasks more streamlined, creativity has been inherently stifled. There is a need within the design community to play again, as many of the themes at Config supported this.

My favorite talk from the conference was Inga Hampton’s The art of not naming your layers, where she dove into the practice of tinkering, testing, and executing in a way that works for you.

I find talks like hers inspiring, as they help recapture the wonder of experimentation and breakthrough moments. What has stood the test of time is design thinking. The tools around us are always changing, but what remains consistent is our curiosity and approach to solving problems. This is what makes me tick, and I’m glad to see more and more people in the design community excited to wonder, experiment, and discover again.