Design struggles to be born

Now that the dust around “design is dead” has settled somewhat, I want to revisit the theme. Not to beat a dead horse, but to assess the proposition with the clarity that only the rearview mirror can give.

Is design over — or has it not yet even arrived?

It’s hard to argue with the fact that the ZIRP period (roughly between the Great Recession and late 2022) was a golden age for designers. Companies suddenly had access to a lot of cheap money, and were looking for where to spend it. Smack dab in the middle of that period, the famous HBR piece proposed that design deserved a share. Executives began ramping up investments into design for the sole reason that everyone else was doing it. The same herd instinct that drives managers to invest in automation drove them to hire designers.

Of course, once the designers got there, miracles did not start to spontaneously manifest themselves. The managers didn’t know how to use the talent they had invested in. And so the question “what’s the ROI of UX?” started being asked by the very people who were supposed to answer it. Designers weren’t automatically doing the magic that the media promised they could, and managers blamed them for it.

Was this really Peak Design, a golden age that we ought to mourn? Or was it a confused scramble for the latest hype, rapidly abandoned for the next silver bullet?

Rather than a golden age, we can think of that decade-ish period as the era of Design Evangelism. The biggest personalities weren’t necessarily the best problem solvers, but those who were able to sell the idea design as a quick way to 10x your company’s product. They sold it not only to executives, but to practitioners as well, and the ranks of designers swelled with new arrivals from other professions.

But as design failed to deliver on these impossible promises, we hit something of a bifurcation of the cohorts — or trifurcation, since I think it’s really going three ways (the computer is telling me that this is not a word, but only because a machine will always lack my courage and clarity of vision).

The people whose only interest was in evangelizing have moved on to trumpet AI as the next big thing (often, but not always, with the vestiges of human-centered design process used to dress up a vision that is neither human-centered, design, nor a process). I won’t call out names, because you already know who they are.

The people who got on the bandwagon to Do Design thrived after the evangelists moved on. They had an answer to managers asking for the ROI of design — high velocity visual outputs. But their ascendance was short-lived, because they gained recognition through siloing design away into usability, tacked on after all the real decisions were made. This is the logic under which a “head of design” could be expected to spend 80% of their time on IC work.

The designers in this camp avoided politics and doubled down on design systems and templates for churning out artifacts quickly. Then managers decided that the systems and templates were sufficient, repeating the story of assembly-line automation.

But there’s another group in between, who believed in design but still evangelized it, because they understood that politics are unavoidable. This group is now starting to give up shouting into the void. Not because the message was not worth spreading, but because it was never a good use of their energy.

Instead of hyping up the next big thing, these practitioners are starting to think about how to leave behind the artificial barrier between “design” and “not design,” and integrate design into the way decisions are made. They recognize that design thinking is dying, but also that we are not dying with it.

No one has ever accused me of being an optimist, but I think that this is really the birth of design as a profession. Rather than being awkwardly bolted on to the side of companies that never really understood why, this new vision of design — chastened by the “ROI of design” years — begins with the case for why we are there. Not in terms of universal best practices and unwieldy frameworks, but calibrated to the context in which our skillset is to be applied. Rather than reaching for the same tools over and over (often because our stakeholders ask us for artifacts rather than insights), we are now mature enough as an industry to own the rationale behind how we choose to deliver value.

“Designs” are arguments in a debate rather than a meek record of its conclusion. Design is not a delivery process, but a leadership skill. Studies have shown that despite all the fluff around it, leadership is really just listening. And there’s no one better at listening than we are.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic