Design feels irrelevant these days
For those who are feeling an insatiable restlessness in their design career, buckle up, I have a few thoughts on how we can change for the better. For those who are peacefully content with their careers — move on, the words ahead might trigger an unraveling.
—
I can’t help but feel like design is in a crisis. It’s restless, agitated, and uncomfortable at worst. At best, it’s irrelevant, insignificant, and incapable.
There is a crushing reality that no matter how great you make the mortgage experience, it won’t stop the housing crisis. That no matter how perfect your pixels are, our social dilemma persists. That no matter how well you articulate a strategic future, it won’t save Ukraine from invasion.
In a world where design used to feel so impactful, we are now deafened by the chaotic upheaval of our world. As I go into a diatribe on the process, the methods, and the artifacts of design, all I can hear inside my head is “who fucking cares, it’s not big enough.”
Right now, everything I design feels like lipstick on a pig.
And yet, there is something to be said for a better mortgage experience. For pixel perfect. For well-articulated futures. In the bumpy deluge of our lives, even if one thing can go smoothly — it’s something. But this can’t be all there is. I cannot accept that.
In that refusal, I have been thinking a lot about leaving design. A few of the more desirable paths that have come to mind are hunkering down in a pottery studio, wandering into the forest never to return, or becoming a human rights lawyer. But, all things considered, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet and so, if I can’t accept it — I might as well try to change it.
So how do we evolve design to meet the needs our world is facing? 3 easy steps of course.
Step 1: Stop using strategic design to solve every problem. Instead think about systemic change and tactical implementation.
When I first started as a service designer, I was helping companies answer strategic questions like “what is the future of my industry?” and “how do I fit into this future?” We focused on helping companies reimagine what their future could look like, and how they could make it viable. We still do a lot of this work, and will continue to help companies find growth and relevance through strategic service design. But oftentimes, strategic design cannot stand on its own. I hear clients say things like: “We have strategies, we couldn’t possibly need another strategy — our problem is implementation”. And every once in a while, if I’m lucky, I have a client asking “how do we change the narrative all together.”
To answer these asks, we need to stop using strategic design as a catch all. We must move upstream to answer systemic challenges, and downstream to aid in tactical implementation.
Tactical implementation requires detail-oriented, alignment driving: ensuring that every detail has been ironed out for the launch of a product/service/initiative — and that everyone is on board.
Systemic change requires systemic thinking and broad scale impact analysis: if you’re dreaming of changing a system for the better, you better well understand all of the impacts it might have, even on the peripherals.
Strategic design is the middle ground — requiring folks to think big for what might be, but quickly narrow that down into what can be.
Each of these realms of thinking (tactical, strategic, systemic) involve the same principles — visions, alignment, prioritization, success measurement, direction setting — the list goes on. Where these initiatives differ is the scope of the issue they’re trying to solve, and therefore, the types of designers who are best suited to do the work.
Step 2: Lose the jargon, the lingo and the artifacts. Stop talking about outputs and instead focus on the outcomes.
Design has been moving closer to the centre of organizations for some time now. Which means designers, now more than ever, have a proverbial seat at the table (like we’ve been demanding for years). The problem that we now face is a language barrier.
Designers don’t speak the same language as many of the other folks at the table — where we use terms like methods, artifacts, and principles, the rest of the folks are talking about things like metrics, margins and targets. Designers struggle to translate what they do into the outcomes the business needs.
To evolve as designers, we have to be incredible translators. When talking to clients about the problems that design can solve, seldom will you hear the client ask for a design thinking workshop or service blueprint. Talk to clients about the problems their business is facing, rooting the conversation in issues and outcomes — rather than design lingo and artifacts.
Leave behind the precious methods and artifacts, lingo and jargon. Instead of focusing on the output of a journey map, work towards the outcome of alignment. Journey maps in themselves do not bring alignment — but the process of co-creating one can. Ensure that what you’re doing is in service to the outcome, not the output.
Step 3: Put your ego aside and collaborate. Design cannot stand alone.
Haven’t we all yearned for projects staffed with only designers? No developers, business analysts, or engineers to limit creativity. The sky’s the limit. I know I have. But I quickly learned that projects staffed with only designers rarely go anywhere. The ideas and concepts aren’t based in the reality of the business or the complexity of implementation. And therefore, incredibly hard to realize.
Looking back, the most successful and fulfilling initiatives I have worked on were with teams staffed with an incredibly vast set of skills— strategy, technology, development. These were also the projects that brought the largest impact and solved the most complex problems.
If we, as designers, truly want to solve the biggest problems our world is facing, we need to drop the assumption that we know best or that we should be the ones leading initiatives. Our job as designers is to bring people together, and move through a process to solve the toughest problems in new and innovative ways.
Working with others to make the intangibles tangible, the fuzzy clear, the unknowns known.
So where do we go from here?
The world doesn’t need more quick talkers, more heroism, or more shallow strategies. It needs good listeners, good collaborators and people that are biased towards action. So we have a choice: to continue down the path that we’re on, and continue to feel that inkling that what we’re doing isn’t right — or change it.
Evolution never ends, iteration is a constant in life. As in any profession, we will need to continue growing, shifting and shaping our profession to solve our planet’s and client’s needs. Darwin famously said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” And isn’t that what design is all about? The delicate art of change? The engine of growth?
