11 questions, three answers
I got interviewed on Step by Step Business. Parmesan is also depicted on the aforelinked.
Scott Berkun is smarter than me. He wrote the book I wish I had written in this moment. His work pushes us to be better designers. And recently, he wrote a post that asked eleven questions that should be in every designer’s browser history.
While I don’t know if I personally search the web in complete sentences like that, the questions are excellent. They’re also kind of hard! Some of them likely have book-length responses, or they involve practicing design for decades. At least one of them has a really spicy answer. Another is probably answerable with therapy.
In an industry so corroded that literally not mentioning the word “design” is helpful to one’s career, it’s clear that designers have a lot of work to do to manage our broader perceptions & claim our power. Of course, we won’t be doing that by yelling about why design is good. We need to make design legible & worth investment.
People don’t understand what we do here.
People don’t understand our impact.
I’m now going to try to answer three of these questions. I might take a crack at others in the future, especially if you tell me to.
How can we modernize design jobs and training so we can thrive today and in the future?
I’m too in the weeds to consider how IC work should be overhauled, so take this with a grain of salt, but I suspect that design still has two untapped frontiers: systems governance, and value-based work.
It’s easy to make a design system, but hard to maintain it. There is some literature on systems governance, but not enough. And governance isn’t automatable. It is fundamentally a human question. It is a political question.
Value-based work is another clear way forward. By connecting our work to economic impact and measuring the results, we’ll be able to prove that our jobs are worth investing in.
As for training, there hasn’t really been good, consistent training for design in my whole career. Coding bootcamps exist, as do scattered master’s programs, but there is no real substitute for hands-on, client-facing work. Design firms are historically too busy to allow newcomers to make mistakes with grace. In fact, I don’t see most places hiring for junior-level roles at all anymore.
I learned design by getting a master’s degree where I learned a bunch of stuff that ended up being less-than-applicable to my career. I read a lot of books outside of class, and took a front-end dev job where I cut up Photoshop comps to bugfix for IE6. (Dating myself here, I know.) I was underpaid, hated it, wrote my first book in my spare time, and got hired two weeks after it got fully funded as one of the first-ever projects on Kickstarter.
This is not a sustainable trajectory for anyone to take when they break into design. Imagine scaling it to all of us! I suppose at least you’d end up with a lot of books.
Who are true design heroes that faced these challenges and overcame them? Why aren't their stories more popular in design circles?
Jan Chipchase is a good start. Jony Ive, really, but he had conscious CEO support.
As for the latter question, because designers are generally quiet about their success. They keep a low profile. They don’t write often, and when they do it isn’t about this topic.
Is there a way to treat the frustrations I experience at work as design problems, and then use my skills to solve them?
Yes, by researching the specific reasons that people buy design. We do a great job of applying this research process to the businesses we work for, but we seldom turn the mirror around and look at ourselves. What motivates economic buyers to invest in design? What motivates them to try designing themselves?