How are designers actually feeling? Ioana Teleanu's Design Wellbeing Index

Ioana Teleanu is running the Design Wellbeing Index, a rigorous, anonymous study of how designers are actually feeling in the AI moment, and we talk about why she built it the hard way, why the site is designed around a blur, and why adding your voice matters. Share how you're feeling: take the survey at https://designwellbeingindex.com/ (12 to 15 minutes, closes November 10, 2026).

Ioana (UX Goodies, formerly Miro and UiPath) brought in a PhD researcher and accepted clinical scales rather than running another Instagram poll, made the whole thing anonymous, and worked hard not to lead with doom so that the enthusiasts show up alongside the exhausted. From there we wander into the parts of this moment nobody has a clean answer for: AI as a comfortable echo chamber, algorithms that reward the extremes and bury nuance, what it means to feed a family as a creator, holding your identity apart from your employer, and the strange paralysis of being able to build anything at all.