The contemporary role of a Designer
June 17, 2024
What is behind Design?
First, let me clarify what types of designers this article addresses as the word “design” can get too broad and mistakenly fantasised. We live in a heavy demanding digital world where the urge to design, create and deliver digital products is often wild and overdue. Additionally, that digital side of things often extends to an important non-digital realm as well, more than we think.
Organisations ought to enrich themselves with talent in order to fulfil market needs. Disappointingly, in a counterproductive way, these key pieces at work we classify as human beings, can be named today a myriad of words with some that are just about the same thing though wrapped with a fancier name. We always struggle to keep it simple right, even on the simplest tasks. Experience designers, UX designers, UI designers, product designers, product managers, product owners, digital designers, scrum masters, CX designers, and so on, are just labels for those key professionals part of an enterprise, that have the delicate and ethical responsibility to discover wise solutions to real needs, without compromising the longevity of all variables involved during their cognitive journey. This is the spectrum of designers, professionals and associated design following paragraphs try to cover and explore.
If we think about when a first try of a possible “design” happened in the past, we have to go way back in time, most likely, to the Prehistoric Era. Eventually when we, as individuals part of a community, initiated the transition from pure nomad beings to sedentary ones. Apart from the language and communication used at that time, some actions and tasks performed by humans could have been defined as an attempt to design something useful and functional to solve a specific need.
Let’s first look at the real meaning of what Design is, or how it should be perceived, understood today. Tim Brown, former Chief Executive Officer and now chairman of IDEO, has a wonderful concise and straightforward definition. For Tim, when we shape the world to meet our needs plus to make it an easier and sustainable place to navigate, we are designing, we are creating real and good design. From this statement we can dive deep into numerous topics which could turn this article into a postdoctoral bucket of thoughts across several pages. That is not the case with this one, I will leave that analysis for another slot! What I find fascinating in Tim’s definition is that, if you are a designer and apply design with the mindsets those words mean, then your work will not only make you a better designer, will make you better at everything.
Tim’s definition of Design touches on a broad range of different types of Designers. An experience designer embraces an entire service or experience of a specific audience, from moments of awareness to post-reflexion. An industrial designer plays a fundamental role creating a piece and getting it ready for manufacturing and scale for the masses. A user experience designer deeply understands the interaction and the whys between a user and an interface. A user interface designer applies wonderful talent and skills to make visuals look beautiful, clean, understandable, attractive and easily usable. Ultimately, all of these designers (should!) have one thing in common: to understand in detail, to learn, and to make wise decisions. No designer should create solutions for non-existing problems (Isn’t this the mainstream?!? Sadly…).
Any individual has the ability to be creative. Particularly, designers have a great power of creation as they sit at the very beginning of potential and future products, services and experiences. With this power comes a greater risk, a risk of failure that can stand far away from goals, targets, estimations. A risk that sometimes can leave traces of chaos for long periods of time, affecting lives and businesses. There are several behaviors, approaches, designers can embed to help drop this risk significantly, though it is fair to say Design is a vulnerable profession.
The reality of today’s challenges
We have great design professionals nowadays making a difference, performing at the forefront and being a reference for aspirational generations. It is also true that designers are responsible for creating and building a lot of crap, especially with the digital fever quite often organisations embark on, sustained on theories with wrong premises and thoughts. It is evidence-based, measured and validated that the major reason why new startups fail (and most of them fail!) is because they build something people do not need or want. Simple as that.
The human-centered design (HCD) approach, when well applied, has been a key mindset to not only avoid building stuff that people do not need or want, but to help making wise decisions about present and future of organisations and communities.
What is exactly this thing about HCD putting people at the centre of everything?
It is never late to remind a myth that has been going for long, with a majority of leaders seeming to not yet comprehend; when we swap the focus to people instead of the product, does not mean the company will follow and create everything the customer wants or needs, including their impulsive whims. It does mean that any knowledge or technical resource a company owns, should be utilised to understand the market first and then find the best solutions that will fit in, and not the other way around, i.e., invent great products and services at the eyes of those thinking is going to produce millions in sales and try to find (or should I write force!) a market fit to sell it at scale. It means the team will settle in a great position to understand deeply the ones they regularly design for, giving themselves the needed space to think about efficient solutions, plan in advance in a more intelligent way and envision the future at a lower risk of uncertainty.
That is what people-centricity is about. It also creates the environment for disruptive innovation, a concept well studied and explored during decades by the brilliant and former author Clayton Christensen, where successful companies are able to create new market for new audiences, with products and services that are new to customers and completely disrupt the mainstream (we can think about Apple here for example). So, being people-centric is fully proactive and not the opposite.
The HCD mindset and performance is not about following processes. It is about a strong present attitude and being mindful of HCD principles; keep focus on people and the entire system to solve the right problems. It is a social collaboration and gathering of knowledge to further improve outcomes no matter the challenge. HCD has been a great force to create a major positive impact not only in the corporate world but also in complex social and political challenges. Despite, this human-centered design model does not seem to be enough for some of today’s complexities we may face at work.
If we look at the tough design challenges we participate in, as designers, there seems to be a pattern that surfaces: they tend to be harder to find and create a successful, sustainable, solution. These challenges touch on numerous and different important variables of a complex system that requires deep study and analysis. As we progress along the discovery and learning, we start uncovering and opening new doors of additional challenges we could not foresee before, with such importance to consider that would be a poor move to be ignored. Several smaller complex problems on top of each other, forming a greater system with varied hurdles and obstacles to deconstruct and thoroughly unveil.
If we look at these several smaller complex challenges together as consequences happening in front of us, at the main stage, where the action happens, then what would be their causes? What can be on the backstage and behind the scenes as their origin?
To understand the root cause(s) of these complex systems, we ought to be aware and understand the full story. To give an example of how complex systems may originate and ramify, let’s zoom out, broad a little bit and blueprint some examples of current global issues human society faces in today’s reality:
Societal, like the ongoing increase of inequality and unfairness
Economic systems, like unfair wealth concentration
Political systems, like governmental weakness when facing the power of certain markets or corporations
Health systems, like health rights that can be absent or not enough for everyone
Education systems, like public education being rarely a right for everyone
Information, like the internet of everything that looks more the internet of lies
Artificiality, with examples of reality shows that are more attractive and important for people than our ocean’s threats for example
Examples above may look, at a first glance, too broad and disconnected from a typical challenge designers face weekly at work. You might be wondering what the examples above have to do with the revamp of an ecommerce platform you have to perform to trigger increase in sales within a specific range of health products. In fact, they are the beginning of every challenge we end up facing today. They mold behaviours, dictate rules, trigger reactions and mostly, impact on how human beings may perceive the world, develop thoughts and act, individually and collectively.
As Don Norman, co-founder and Principal Emeritus of Nielsen Norman Group, has been sharing publicly the recent years, present design challenges seem to go beyond the individual. It is now bigger than human-centered design, it is a humanity-centered design thing.
What can we do about it?
One aspect human-centered design has been showing and solidifying across past years, apart from opening a path to deeply understand people, is a great ability of helping mass production, which is generally a target to reach among corporations that sell products, services or experiences. This very large quantity of anything that we, as problem solvers, are capable of designing, creating and putting out there in the world, can at the same time be the nucleus and great cause of destruction and chaos in our lives, societies and planet. Look at the plastic industry for instance, with its mega mass production associated with thousands of design projects developed and launched to support it. An industry that is today a major harm to ourselves and planet. As I write these words, in a very short glimpse, we just crossed through a global virus pandemic situation, our oceans, flora and fauna are under ongoing severe threat, we have a global war happening and some countries face serious and extreme crises with very concerning and unthinkable percentages of poverty among their population.
The real and major problem here is one: human behavior.
How might we shift this behavior then? How might we overcome the power elite that forces it? How might we create an awareness of what the real problem is, powerful enough to trigger design action in the right path?
I started this article by writing “designers have a great power of creation as they sit at the very beginning of potential and future products, services and experiences”. I truly believe designers, in general, can help get us out of this, designers can help design for a better world.
Though here lies a major wall to climb; traditionally, designers have no say, no power. They usually sit at middle level across organisations or institutions, hence no executive authority to make impactful decisions for the future. Majority of designers receive a brief and perform what they are told to. We can find some exceptions today (finally!) with a seat at the board and within executive teams of organisations, as an element with influence on higher decision making. It is a beginning, a needed beginning.
How might we create the foundation and necessary environment so designers can be desired and needed at executive level and top decision making?
Another important topic to be aware of when thinking about a designer’s role, is the one about Design Education. Traditionally, design schools evolve from main branches of Art or Architecture, but the truth is that Design is not art, it is much more than that. It is a way of thinking, of working, of communicating, of acting, of collaborating. In a complex design challenge where economics may play a key role, we may have to know how to swim through an economics lake. We do not need to master swimming, nor do we need to be a great swimmer. Nevertheless, understanding the minimum enough will help us feel comfortable with ourselves in areas we typically do not have the knowledge nor the basic structure and, therefore, perform the needed design work successfully.
Adding to the unbalanced traditional Design Education programmes, there is another key ingredient usually absent from talks and discussions: ethics.
How important is the vision of ethics when we design?
To answer this question we first should ask ourselves what ethics is really about:
the analysis of what may be morally right or wrong, based on principles and values that people in general consider to be right, honest and acceptable.
It then makes complete sense that ethics should be part of a design challenge, specially those that are on the complex category. Regardless, ethics is rarely covered by design studies, academically and professionally.
In today’s reality, Design Education may need to ramify and cover other important areas so future designers can be better prepared and have the necessary knowledge about additional required themes such as history, politics, economics, tech or humanities for example.
How might we educate designers in a more balanced way, so they can be well prepared for today and tomorrow’s complex design challenges?
Final notes
The Design world moves at a very fast pace. Technology, remote accessibility and worldwide gradual recognition have fuelled this acceleration that seems not slowing down soon. We, designers, quite often struggle to follow this intense velocity where it is difficult to make decisions or choose the right path.
I truly believe Design is ripe for continuous development and transformation, for the better. To everyone. The spectrum of new challenges, existing ones that need to be rethought, the fascinating complexity around them, the power of simplicity that ought to be exploited rather than ignored, and the amount of great resources at hand are definitely key ingredients that can feed greater design work from a lot of professionals, foster greater rewards and a better world to all of us, individually and as a community. We must embrace the opportunity and take advantage of this moment by working together, through a common purpose, through a synchronised behaviour.
If we had to describe what have been the key drivers of Design among companies and institutions, most likely mass production, more sales and top ranking in the market would be some of them. This strategy needs to shift and what we really should be looking at now, in the Design world, would be driver statements like be meaningful, sustainable and humanity-centered.