Originally Published - Feb 22, 2-24
The Dark Days of Design?
With the recent round of tech layoffs, it's time to ask a deeper question - has design become obsolete?
I've been in tech my entire career and I can tell that things are changing.
Organizations are shuttering designers, squashing leadership layers (in favour of hands-on designers), and focusing on the near term at the expense of the future. This will no doubt have long-term impacts on the industry.
I think it's deeper than just compacting org charts, and it’s worth considering what may be at its root.
But whatever the cause, design needs to remember what it means to be a designer.
The Commodification of Design.
As organizations grow larger, design has become commoditized through rules and design systems. I see design systems, as necessary, but they need to be balanced with constant re-creation. Design systems run the risk of stagnating design and design culture.
Design has become less intuitive and favours data-driven rationale, amid control layers that stop, rather than accelerate design experimentation.
In these same organizations, designers have exacerbated the problem, by selling design, and not value.
Design is making itself replaceable by a prompt.
How UX killed "design".
The edu-printers went off and took non-designers and told them they could design. But meanwhile, they never emphasized the importance of visual intelligence and other foundational design frameworks. I’m old school, and in my books, you can't be a designer if you can't master visual intelligence.
Designers are taught to focus on artifacts that augment design, but not the skills needed to create design. Design research is to inform design, not to replace it. We hide behind artifacts as busy work and do not see them for what they are, a way to synthesize the solution.
You can't claim you're a designer when you tell someone you're not a designer. (I'm UX not UI).
Single-dimensional "designers" need not apply.
Then designers messed up huge because they only see screens.
They became single-dimensional and only dropped solutions that fit those boxes. We can only solve what we can see. Designers only solve problems that they are skilled to solve. This fixed mindset is the single biggest blow to “designers”.
Designers have to become multi-dimensional, to work across digital, physical and spatial surfaces. It’s really nice that you can make pretty buttons and animations, but we need so much more than that. We need to solve real human problems. Who f’kin cares that the button has a svelte black skuemorphic look to it, when pushing it starts the process for applying for an application to adopt your first child.
Design Fragmentation
We - designers, and design leaders - have made ourselves very hard to use.
We have no umbrella term for our practice. We have no clear universal foundation for the skills we need, how we should think, or what processes we should follow. We have no universal accreditation for our practice.
Ask 10 designers what design is, and you’ll get 10 answers. Ask 5 design leaders what skills you need to be a designer, and you’ll get conflicting answers.
For an industry that claims we make things easy to use, we are simply unusable.
Closing thoughts.
A few years ago I shipped a manifesto - productecture.com, my universal design framework.
"Productecture is the Practice of Designing Interactive Products, through a Holistic, Humanized, Design Approach, across Modalities, Mediums and Disciplines."
It might be worth a read.
