BOX106: What happens when everyone is a designer?

I want to run a thought experiment by you that I’ve run before with several folks; what happens when ‘Design’ is just ‘design?‘ What happens when it’s no longer seen as a specialist field with accompanying specialist training but has broad comprehension by lots of people? What happens when everyone can claim to be a designer?

Let me explain by way of a historic parallel. Occasionally, I still come across folks who refer to ‘The Digital’ as if it is a discrete, modular layer of stuff, to be inserted into everyday life and switched on and off as convenient when in fact, for most people, it doesn’t even make sense to refer to ‘digital’ or ‘computer’ technology any more – it’s just technology. Even more than that, it’s not conceivably separate from the way we live, work, consume, interact and socialise.

‘The Digital’ is a colloquial hangover from a time when digital technology was novel, poorly understood and required some degree of expertise, training or experience in transitioning organisations and individuals to working ‘digitally.’ Organisations saved time by digitising files and documents, making them searchable and editable. Individuals communicated and shared more effectively through the web and so on. To you this may seem deadly obvious stuff; as per last week we grew up on the Internet. Our files have (almost) always been digitised, we met our friends on the Internet, we learned MS Office as pre-teens and spent breaks making animated slide shows and our evenings on MSM.

Now, ten or twenty years on, I want to suggest design is at similar early stage in its normalisation. But this maybe requires a little backstep into what ‘design’ I’m talking about and the different ways that I seem to encounter it in professional life. I’ll freely caveat that this is highly partial to my particular perspective from London. And obviously lots of people have tried to diagrammatise the different types of design disciplines, some notable examples include the Dubberly design map, Dan Hill and Elliot’s version which I also hacked at.

What even is design?

There strikes me as being a tension within design around whether it is approached as a way of getting certain outcomes (products, services, answers – ‘for’) or a way of understanding something better (research – ‘about’) although these overlap heavily. This second approach often feels opaque and hard to grasp. After all, design museums, shops and exhibitions are full of objects and images which are evidently outcomes. This isn’t the post to go through the different forms of design research and how knowledge is produced in design but even in something like the greater popular comprehension of UX, is evidence of acknowledgement that design has a unique way of understanding systems, people and problems. This is the principle that Design Thinking predicated itself. But unlike Design Research which I (and others) would characterise as open-ended, iterative and exploratory, Design Thinking is solution-oriented and discriminative.

But, zooming out, (again highly limited view and partial) there are three main parts here: All the green parts originate in and place their intellectual and practical heritage in the ‘design school tradition.’ E.g. someone here actually has one or two design degrees. A service designer emerging from a London university will likely have looked at grids, modernist architecture and affordance theories; the whole caboodle of design school front-loading that’s built into curriculums. This, again, is another blog post (‘why do I need to know about Le Corbusier to make apps?’ maybe) but, just as with other domains in the sciences and humanities, design, as a legitimate academic domain, is built on intellectual foundations proven in existing practice and theory. This is why design short courses bother me: I would never do a two week short course in virology and proclaim to be developing a cure for the flu.

As this big green zone has expanded it’s started to brush up against other fields, particularly Social Science Seashore and Engineering Continent. I’ve been talking recently about how design borrowed from and piggybacked on social sciences as it sought for academic legitimacy in the early 2000’s. The formal structures of journals, papers, the cycle of conferences, the underlying constructivist theories, references to Foucault and Derrida were all ways of shoehorning this practice into a form that was palatable to the academic world. Of course, the unresolved question of practice is still being dealt with: How does making things produce knowledge?

On the opposite side is Engineering Continent. I’m personally less familiar with this end of my map because, frankly I don’t find it as interesting. This is where things like human factors, bits of architecture, human-computer interaction and so on start to bleed over between design and engineering. There is a whole cottage theory I have here about people who pick up design as engineers/technical people and designers who pick up engineering. I think this is largely where UX is, at least from what I can glean. See also; engineering inventing critical theory.

Ok, so design then?

So how does this relate to my original proposition that, much like with ‘The Digital,’ Big-d Design is becoming normalised? It’s my contention that as design has rubbed up against other fields, it has started to transfer into them as well. Design has already spread across the top of business and government and those organisations will be pressing the value of it back into graduates and new workers who will press it back into universities. We’re also seeing elite universities use design as a crutch for interdisciplinary study and research and design seems to be featuring heavily in sustainability transitions. Even the American MBA Design Thinking world is reckoning with the green bits on the map and acknowledging the shortcomings of parachuting design into business and innovation. So let’s assume then, (from this, again; meagre and partial perspective) that more people who are non-designers get design (in some way) than five or ten years ago and that it’s seen as a core competency of future workers. After all, I’d say that a good design education will get you most of WEF’s future skills.

And then let’s look at the other not-so-weak-signal; the Design Thinking Deflation, and extend out historic parallel with ‘The Digital.’ The promise of total home automation, of all-pervasive servile AI, of a life of luxury enabled by digital technology and a world brought together by social media obviously failed to materialise. Really we just got cheap crap bombarded at our eyeballs a bit faster. Similarly, the over-hyped promises of Design Thinking to fix social inequity, climate change, poverty, world hunger really just downgraded to making customers slightly less inconvenienced. Now, to my memory the end of ‘The Digital’ was marked by flailing attempts to get everyone to code and getting everyone reskilled in ‘cyber‘ as if the mere act of doing digital would somehow lead to a fabulously wealthy future (something something scaling technopolitical national visions). I remember talking to prospective students at open days desperate to know what coding language they would learn. What if, I would ask, the government decides in a few years that making ceramic violas is the next big industry? The point is, are we seeing a similar rubicon being crossed in Design→design? Everyone gets it and wants a piece of it but they’re not sure what it is, how it works or what to do with it. Yet.

So then what happens? What happens in five years when your electrical engineering course has a critical design module? When your political science degree features a unit looking at affordances? When your job description for a financial analyst asks for comprehension of design-led research? What does it mean when design is everywhere and what does it look like? And what happens to big-D Design?

Well, the end of ‘The Digital’ absolutely didn’t kill off computer science, in fact I would argue it did the opposite: It elevated computer programmers, developers and inventors to prophetic, even messianic status in popular culture, it opened the doors to the tech boom as computers went into every home and people normalised putting screens in their pockets. Good things came of it too, like all the stuff I’m using now to type this out and share this and MSM Messenger. What if a wider, richer understanding of design and what designers do opens doors to time, funding, responsibility and respect that leads to greater innovations, research and developments in the field? What if, instead of sending managers off on two week courses, people actually seek out broadly experienced, curious and critical designers with years of experience that can only be gained through practice? What if designers aren’t a curious novelty, prodded and poked and, when push comes to shove, asked to make slideshows but are seen as just as legitimate as leaders as lawyers, accountants, political scientists and even engineers?

One more thing

Final thing and this really is another piece: The conflicting operating logics of design and digital. Remember how along the way Design ingested all that yummy gooey social theory? Well as it transitions into small-d design it’s going to take all that with it. All this social theory says that things don’t necessarily have or call for ‘solutions,’ that facts and artefacts are partial and subjective, that objectivity is a social construct, uncertainty and complexity are real and just have to be lived in, that computers can be wrong, that play, iteration, testing and failing are research and development tools. And, as we know from the Post Office scandal (and a PhD about the social construction of AI), the premise of digital is the opposite; certainty, solutions, prediction. And these two logics might increasingly run into conflict and fight for supremacy; do you, as an organisational leader (ok, suppose you are though) listen to your digital team who say the algorithm definitely says x? Or your design team who’s research suggests y with a bit of a z and, yes, some x.

Short Stuff

• IKEA’s visions for the future home are ‘semi-apocalyptic’ claims Fast Company. This is a sentiment I’ve encountered directly in some of my work; that images of a resilient, sustainable future in which we necessarily live, consume, travel and interact more sparingly are some how ‘apocalyptic.’ It was a common bit of feedback we got on Abundance; that it was somehow dystopian. I noticed it most across generations; older folks would generally see it as negative while younger folks might see it as challenging but exciting. ‘Dystopian’ and ‘apocalyptic’ are useful for labelling anything which challenges that status quo I guess.
• Speaking of, Thomas Klaffke’s deck on ‘alternative prosperity.’
• Alex DS here on the importance of spreadsheets for designers. Something that I’m also pretty zealous about. I think I’ve pointed out on podcasts that the real work of organisational change happens in the spreadsheet, not the slide deck. I also think she’s on to something that really it all comes back to spreadsheets when organising a team. I’ve tried a bunch of things and they feel like a lot of effort. Something about human logic works on spreadsheets, or maybe the other way around.
• Eryk Salvaggio has a new film out called SWIM. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a reflection or dig at Refik Anadol’s MoMA piece.
• Fun piece on why all websites look the same. This is more in that ‘the web is dying’ signal. I should collate these a bit more. Ok I started a collection here.
• I’ve never actually looked at the extend of NEOM on Google maps. Here it is. They’ve now got some architect to ‘design’ an upside-down underwater skyscraper in a mountain.
• The Apple Vision Quest is out in a week or so. Matt asks, in typical style, what the ‘fart app’ is for it. Really it’s an important point. The thing that lets people ‘get’ a technology is rarely useful or serious.
• Paris Marx has written about Musk’s latest labour struggles in Scandinavia. I’ve been reading a lot that has referenced collective bargaining and organised labour as a crucial component of green transition. E.g.; we need these new technologies and ways of living and that’s going to take a lot of work and people need to be fairly compensated but also greater voice in that process can drive green transition quicker.
• Also this piece from AI Now which connects labour rights, supply chains and climate justice in AI development.
• I’d never heard of the ‘Walt Calculation‘ – basically that some problems are so hard that it’s easier/more efficient to wait for technology to develop to help solve them than to try and solve them with today’s technology.

This one was hard to write. It’s an idea that has emerged a lot in recent conversations and talks and really works better in that format but this is what this is for; I have to write it down, to make it make sense in written words. Well I gave it a shot. I should point out that I was kicked to do it by a post about Silvio Larusso’s What Design Can’t Do (the post I’ve now lost) which he has sent to me and I have yet to read. But I was wondering how the cultures he’s critiquing might receive it. Would they recognise the critiques of design thinking? I need to read it first before reckoning on that I reckon.

I still use Twitter to post things I’m reading but there really is no interaction there. And Threads, copying a model that we’re all over seems to have struggled to pickup so other than WhatsApps I’m not really engaging intellectually much online, just posting. I’ve found that Twitter has a lineup of first-name-only female bots that like tweets and seem to rotate weekly. This week is Josephine and Hazel. Sometimes I glance into Discord but that feels like a full-time job.

I need to look at the layout of this place. Looks great on a big screen or mobile but in between it’s poopy. I’ll get on that at some point. Love you, speak next week.