Contemporary design is a messy human problem
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We wrote a brief guide to why we use email when communicating with people. This joins a few other explainer bits that outline our principles & motivations.
Precisely three of you wanted a WTF notebook. I may print some as zines for my close people. We love a fun side project.
For the past 19 years, I’ve talked frequently about the idea that I didn’t spend very much time learning design. Design qua design is actually quite easy. Most of the issues are common sense. Most of the big challenges in actually producing design can be learned in a few months. Of course there is always room for refinement, but the basic principles don’t take much work to learn.
What makes a designer a designer is everything that has nothing to do with actual design. How do you research your work? How do you solve problems? What questions are you asking? In what specific ways are you holding critique? What are the internal politics? How is work shipped? How will work be measured? How are you defining success?
There are whole books & podcasts about the contemporary issues surrounding these problems. In the long arc of Draft’s history, we spent a while talking about design, then we spent a while talking about measurement, then we spent a while talking about research, and now we’re mostly focused on consultative issues around process & power.
I find that we move into a new topic of conversation when we run out of things to say about the previous one. Do I really need to teach you how to run a usability test again? There’s plenty of literature on that topic already, some of which was written by me. So what urgent, expensive problems haven’t been written about? You need to know how to keep the CEO from ruining your prioritization. You need to know why collaborative design is conceptually bankrupt, and what to do about it. You need to know how to resist platform collapse. You need to know how to keep your job, or get a new job, or get a job that doesn’t keep disrespecting you.
And so this week, for paid members, we’re talking about design’s role in execution. Not terribly fun stuff, but we’re not in terribly fun times. It’s been interesting watching the response: just write about design, some say. What? I am writing about design. In 2025, knowing how to manage leveraged power is design. Spaceholding is design. Correcting normalized deviance is the job of the designer – because this is how you make sure that quality contemporary design gets shipped. If the goal is to not create design, but to ship it and make sure customers like it, then these tasks are now the essential work.
And so a question: within these vitally important topics, what should I write about? I already have a few hundred ideas, but anything you tell me to write about gets sent to the top. Hit reply and let me know.
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