I was recently reading a group chat with some design pals who were talking about their role given recent technological changes. The expectations are high, and they run largely contrary to what design does.
Despite some people’s best attempts at the contrary, humans use technology. And design is the analysis of the human element in technology.
Design asks: what do you need?
Design asks: what are you doing?
And it exists in an ongoing conversation with the customer.
Design is also a form of leveraged power around what is eventually shipped to customers. We’ve spoken about this a few times before, but it bears reiterating here. Design works only when it can exercise its power. That means it either has to exist in a position of power in an organization, or it has to be given that power by someone with the authority to do so.
This is based on a few axioms:
- Almost all organizations are hierarchical, as opposed to collaborative.
- People influence what ships to a customer.
- All decisions are, in fact, some form of “design.”
- Design decisions are different from design process. The former is a thing you do. The latter is a way of talking to customers and generating things you do. We call both of these “design” because, at one point, they were both the purview of designers.
Decisions & process were decoupled a few years ago when designers chose, on purpose, to relinquish control of their decision-making process. I actually don’t have any idea how to find a way back from that, because I’ve never allowed such a thing to happen in my contracts. Ostensibly ICs could say “no” to conceptually bankrupt processes that undermine their credibility & expertise, but I think the real answer is to become an executive and fight for it. This is not very helpful!
And so in the absence of a clear way out that restores dignity & integrity to the design profession, we must retrench. For those with the experience necessary to make it work, consultative design work is a clear answer.
Consultative work:
- Co-creates alongside executives, sitting on the same side of the table.
- Focuses on clear business needs.
- Unites those needs with those of the customer.
- Leverages the best elements of the process of design in favor of the outputs of design.
All of this raises the question: how can you start out in this field anymore? The answer is probably through learning the basic principles of research.
Research is where design decisions come from.
Research is where design expertise comes from.
And no technological development can take research from us – because research can only focus on the human.