As artificial intelligence reshapes the contours of creative work, the design industry offers an unexpected counternarrative: not displacement, but expansion. Across the UK, design employment has grown 15 percent since 2020, and the sector's economic contribution now surpasses retail — suggesting that human imagination, empathy, and deep expertise remain stubbornly irreplaceable. Yet even as the profession adapts to its new algorithmic intern, a quieter crisis unfolds in classrooms, where a generation of potential designers is quietly disappearing from the pipeline.