UX doesn't need prophets. It needs practitioners

UX doesn’t need prophets. It needs practitioners.

Our field loves to deify gurus, between Don Norman, and IDEO founders. Their names get treated like scripture.

They’re not liars - their theory is still solid, they wouldn’t be successful otherwise.

What’s missing is proximity.
I can’t help but feel they’re detached from the reality of day-to-day design work - the grind of junior designers, the messy constraints inside agencies, the compromises between design and dev.

They’ve built names big enough that they can afford to stay at the 30,000-foot level.

That’s privilege, not practice. It’s not representative of the grit of real design work.

The problem is when business schools and corporations keep recycling these voices as the canon of innovation. Because theory isn’t reality - and innovation happens in reality.

If design and innovation want to evolve, we need fewer prophets on pedestals, and more practitioners whose work is grounded in outcomes, constraints, and consequences.