Designer vs Designers
In the era of the customer, design has become pivotal to creating valuable experiences for the end-user. Thinking like a designer can provide great insight into solving the human questions.
Recently, I attended this event hosted by the Design Business Association, here’s what I learnt.
I’m not going to try and articulate the breadth and scale of the talks and discussion, suffice to say that they were impassioned, informed and broad — as you would expect. We learnt lots about how leading organisations are using design and how it can deliver competitive edge, add value and yes, save lives.What I am going to talk about is where things aren’t going so well. This was spelt out in the context of the UK Government’s recent Industrial Strategy, that didn’t have any noticeable input from the design industry. The question for us to ponder is why not? I think that some of the experience that day gives (me at least) some clues.
First and foremost, there was a lot of internalising going on along with a fair degree of soul searching and questioning of the value of design, something that I with my digital and consultancy background am completely unused to. I can’t think of another sector that has such a lack of confidence in its value, rightly or wrongly, and yet design is so clearly fundamental to future growth that it should be shouting from the rooftops about its value. Maybe it’s because those organisations that do get it don’t want to shout about it, or maybe because it is seen as an old practice — not modern and new. Either way, this needs to change. Broadly across the various discussions and conversations I think that two clear camps emerged, the old “brief a designer and be amazed by the results”, that sees the design process as something that designers do, if you like the “magic” camp, and the newer “we can change the world with design” camp who evangelise the process and outcomes within a larger context.
The former lack confidence in design and tend to want to keep it within the cathedral of great designers, and the latter were much more — for want of a better word — democratic, and wanted to share it with everyone. There are, to my mind, clear parallels with the internet revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century. What was once carried out in the hallowed halls of big corporations by people who were highly trained in the craft (“software”) was released into the messy, anarchistic, experimental and permissionless world of the internet and as a result its use and influence exploded. Think Pastoralists and Prometheans (breakingsmart.com) but in the design world.
To use one of the analogies from the day, everyone can use a tennis racket, not all of us are Roger Federer. Similarly, whilst everyone can use the tools of Design Thinking, not all of us are Tim Brown, but like the Lawn Tennis Association, what we must do is distribute the tools and encourage their use so that we can find and nurture the next generation of talent. We are already freeing up the software and physical tools with open source software and readily available 3D printing. We now need to distribute the approaches and thinking, equip the current and next generations with ways to de-mystify the “magic” and allow everyone to participate in, and deliver the value of design, whatever their role.
We are currently in thrall of the “technology” revolution, seeing its application everywhere and looking to technology to solve all of our problems. But while technology and its sidekicks: ‘digital and data are chipping away at the mechanistic and repetitive activities that go on, it is a long way from being able to address the human questions. And it is the human questions that designers of all types solve. Technology is good at answering the questions, what it is not so good at is asking the questions. As a nation we need to be on the right side of the Marc Andreesen equation,
“People who tell computers what to do, or people who are told by computers what to do”.
We need to equip the current and future workforce with the tools to do just that. And design tools are such tools. As designers we need to embrace this, be at the vanguard of the “post technology” society, where any sufficiently advanced technology becomes invisible. The problems that we will be facing will not be technology questions, they will be human and societal, such as how to deal with ageing, what to do about the lack of jobs, adding meaning to people’s lives, these are the challenges that we will be facing in 10+ years and we can take a lead in solving them globally. We need to move beyond the mechanistic to the meaningful and rewarding and free up human potential.
If we recognise that by democratising the ways of designing, not the act of designing, we can demonstrate its value, stop focusing just on the design doing and embrace the design thinking.
