What does design look like when there’s no roadmap, no shared clarity, and no stable system yet?

In this episode of Design Shift, Justin Lokitz talks with Kursat Ozenc about designing at the edges of organizations—where new ventures are forming, culture is shifting, and teams are learning how to work alongside AI.

Kursat is an Executive Design Director at JPMorgan, a longtime lecturer at Stanford d.school, and co-author of Rituals for Work. His work focuses on design beyond artifacts: shaping systems, behaviors, and the conditions that allow teams to move through uncertainty together.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How designers create leverage in new ventures before clarity exists

• Why organizational change fails when culture is treated as an outcome

• How rituals translate strategy into shared behavior and meaning

• What changes when teams operate across multiple modes of AI intelligence

• Why judgment, not tools, is the next frontier of design leadership

As AI accelerates execution and automation, this episode reframes design’s role as infrastructural—helping teams coordinate, decide, and stay human in increasingly complex systems.

If you’re a designer or design leader navigating innovation, culture change, or AI-enabled work, this episode will expand how you think about what design is really for.

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