In today’s digitally-mediated world, designers translate ideas back and forth between the richly poetic language of the physical world and the logical parameters in Computer-Aided Design tools. As these tools develop to understand more of our intuitive human knowledge, they will have the ability to become intelligent collaborators in our creative process. How will the objects and activities of design change in this future? Through exploring how objects ‘work’, this talk considers how an acute understanding of this design language can make us better designers and help to develop more intuitive computational design tools that provoke and democratize a ‘new’ industrial design process.