I ran into my friend (and one-time collaborator!) Nick (no relation) the other week, and we sat and chatted about design. I talked a little bit about a tattoo I had recently gotten. In addition to the usual things you ask an artist for (size, location, what you want), I handed the artist a creative brief, set some intentions for what I think it should express, and said that I surrender to their process.
Which means that whatever they make is going to go on my body, roughly. And that’s precisely what happened! My feedback was very minor: shrink this slightly, move this over here, add one tiny thing, and we’re done. The first & second revisions were not materially very different. You would look at the first revision and think yeah, that’s good enough.
Was I expecting the final result? No, because there is no way to conceive of what another person will make for you. When allowing another person to manage the process, all you can really do is be clear about what you want, set a focused intention, and get out of their way.
We’re not naturally wired to do this. We want to feel some sort of agency. We have our own preconceived notions of what the work might end up being. We want to feel like we have control. We want a sense of power.
This is why I speak of design as a form of leveraged power. In the final, post-research phase of design, work is commonly presented & critiqued. This is the moment of maximal emotion for the client, for it fundamentally challenges what they thought the work was supposed to be. Everyone has their own image, in their head, of the final product, and what is shown never matches what they think by definition. The more a stakeholder can ask questions, exist in a space of curiosity, and surrender to the will of another expert, the more likely it is that the organization will embrace design as a profitable guiding principle.
Design is for those who are willing to be challenged in what they think the status quo must be for their business. Conversely, when prospective buyers of design operate from a fear-based place, when their ego tells them that they already have all the answers, then they are likely to avoid investing in design. As designers, we must continue to resist this corrosive principle, and show them what we all know to be true: design shows us the future.
If you’re wondering how to create the future for your business in Q4 and the years ahead, we presently have one slot open for consultative work. Apply here and we’ll get in touch.
This week, for paid members
- This week’s paid lesson covers the ways that value-based designers must build expertise in order to further your career.
- Our design of the week shows a truly excellent transactional email. Remember that education is relationship building at scale!
- And finally, our monthly office hours are today, at 1p CDT. Look forward to chatting with all of you!
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Links
- Lovely summary of some of the methodological considerations when running a comprehensive experimentation program. Remember that testing is only as impactful as the ideas you put into it – and design decisions need to be framed as hypotheses in order to be testable.
- Good Betteridge’s law on a truly repellent & highly unprofitable idea: using fake people to conduct customer interviews. Remember that machine learning is only as good as the prior information fed into it, making it highly inappropriate as a catalyst for true business growth.
- “Austerity-era service design” accurately captures the sentiment of low-quality services that emerged after 2020. To answer the clickbait headline: we can, if we want to make more profit, of course.