Design is a big field. It’s many big fields. Not only are there a lot of different types of design, there are vastly different experiences and challenges within each field. There’s graphic design, user experience design, UI design, brand design, service design, game design, experiential design, type design, urban design, landscape design, architecture, interior design, lighting design, packaging design, publication design, set design, fashion design, textile design, industrial or product design, furniture design and doubtless many more. There are fields like organizational design, program design and facilitation that stretch the term but incorporate the same abductive, constructivist approaches rooted in culture, synthesis, and planning. Each field has their own domain, discourses and hierarchies. There are different industries and markets to design for, each with a different character and status. There are also concepts like speculative design, sustainable design and design for transition that span across any of these. Are all of these included in conceptions and discussion about design? Do they talk to each other? Does it matter?
There are positions and positionality within each. There’s the student – whether at the prestigious private school or the portfolio mill or online boot camp. There’s the driven young designer struggling to get their first job anywhere or the affluent, well-connected grad easing into an unpaid internship with a prestigious studio or well-funded NGO. There are those overwhelmed as the only designer in their company or department, their day-to-day controlled by a boss who doesn’t understand, value, support, mentor, or advocate for them. There are those leading corporate design from the C-suite at the forefront of design scale and complexity. There are full-time employees, freelancers, juniors and executive directors. There are those promoting their “studio” or consultancy or product who have yet to find a paid client or customer while they work less glamorous jobs they don’t talk about. There are volunteers trying to use their skills for good in a space that has never worked with designers. There are those pushed out by change or a hostile environment or because they happened to live past 40. Or those who walked out on their own, fed-up. Those who studied design but never found the opportunities they expected or had to take care of others before getting to focus on their career. And then there are the millions of designers who are busy at work, but clock out at the end of the day and opt not to take on more unpaid work in self or industry promotion, already busy with family, friends, other interests – or hustling more directly for their next job.
The bigger the gap between your experience and the popular conversation, the harder the work to communicate about it. Push boundaries more than a little bit and it’s disorienting, or threatening. Even if some of these different folks thought anyone would want to hear from them, many don’t have the capacity or incentive to talk about it anyway. We might hear from the unlikely ones that make it against the odds, but not from the embittered ones who thought they were set up for success but never seem to get there.
We actually end up hearing from very few who are perhaps more similar than not. We hear from the ones at the right place and time decades ago, the big agency principles, tenured professors, design stars, and perennial award-applicants/winners. The 20- and 30-something specialists from high-profile companies speaking at conferences, writing best practice articles in the well-known blogs, chatting on their friends’ podcasts. Academics, disconnected from the job market or sometimes even their own conditions struggling in academia. Thought leaders passionate about spreading ideas remarkably compatible with dominant political and economic sensibilities. We see the platform influencers hustling at cool effortlessness as they work 24/7 on high-production images and videos. The well-connected career coach promising to help you find that the perfect, high-paying, value-aligned, emotionally fulfilling position you deserve (assuming you’re already pretty well established and can pay their fees). There’s the actually-talented and good-natured principal who happened to get lucky and the all-talk incompetent director with a demoralized team commiserating at the local bar after work. We hear from the very driven and the very online.
The demands on professionalized workers today is such that there is no space to talk about the hard parts. There is little distinction between a big boss and an exploited intern in the “good” fight for “good” design. If you need help, you need to be well-positioned to ask – already doing ok, with boundless energy and resilience, scrubbed of the slightest whiff of desperation. You have to be up to looking at all the cringe on LinkedIn, ready to play the game without wanting to curl up in a ball or punch someone. Other designers remind you to always be learning, changing, adapting. You start wondering who is it they’re really talking to and what’s driving that. You gotta excel at business, and networking, and sales, and technology. Maybe you should go back to school – if not for a masters degree in design you should learn to code, or get an MBA.
The approaches I usually see when I read high-level discussions about design today are often either how to best play the current game successfully or some academic or optimistic hypothetical ideas about how practice could/should be. Those things can be useful, but only to a point. And while the latter can help point to something new, the core work of getting there has been forgotten or left to others (who never seem to materialize) such that it’s become more of an abstract, escapist distraction.
And in terms of “design for good” or more socio-political directions, ideas and initiatives can be even more fuzzy, either boiling down to an elitist mashup of self-promotion and charity (with a speaker available to help you save the world with a paid partnership) or it’s more of a sales pitch for workshop/classes targeting other designers (you too can save the world, learn how!). It feels like the same dynamics of individualism, competition, monetization and brand-building common in private sector work.
What I don’t see is building collective, authentic awareness about the position of one’s work or profession in society and the economy, how it’s changing and how it can or should go differently. The state of design isn’t infact a design problem. There’s no defined brief that someone will pay you to execute on. It has to do with power and economics and requires confronting forces outside of our fields. Demanding more power and looking at business critically will not win you business – which for many current voices would likely negate the whole point to speaking at all. Its full of risk and vulnerability and uncomfortable interactions with people totally different than you. It requires more listening than talking, a lot of humility, and confronting the possibility you don’t have all the answers. It requires openness to see different paradigms, not just new signifiers – with the understanding that whatever you try to do, if successful, will be adopted, subverted and turned back into empty signifiers. Consequently, it all gets very slippery to talk about. But we gotta try.
Current “winners” are not motivated towards substantial change. That’s always inevitably the case, yet that’s who in front of us. That’s who has the time, energy, connections or access to reach us. That’s who’s easier to find, feature, and fund. That’s who’s already got a platform to take new ideas bubbling up and filter and reframe in traditional ways. Sometimes this process is even more unconscious than nefarious. It’s familiar and comfortable and where many of us long to be.
Instead of following ambitious thought leaders, it’s perhaps more advantageous to connect to people at your workplace or those in your field in your neighborhood, city, or metro area. That connection could grow into something deeper in the spirit of solidarity and actual change instead of competition for a worsening status quo. It might be good to hear from the losers, even those who haven’t polished their tone or got all their talking points in order or mastered all their leadership cues or isn’t in a position to do something for your career. Change often comes from those who are hurting, helping each other and growing power together. But it’s admittedly hard to find others near us oriented to that kind of work. Organizing is a lost practice, very much out of sync with many who consider themselves politically aware. It was always a lot of work, but at least people understood what it was. Any particular political stance, especially dogmatic ones adopted wholesale from strangers on the internet, actually may have very little to do with one’s likelihood to create impact, or help anyone at all.
I hope more designers can think about who we’re hearing from instead of just what they’re saying. Get critical about the logic of what people are aiming to do, who benefits and what the likely outcomes are. Instead of always looking up to those on top, be open to those around you in a similar position, those adjacent, or even those struggling. Try to be open to and aware of the conditions for grassroots organizing instead of mistaking social or industry media consumption with change or connection, no matter how subversive or radical or life-affirming it sounds. Those messages might be a path, but it certainly doesn’t work for everyone, and it may not ultimately go anywhere at all. We are all the experts of our highly specific experiences and we need to create more spaces conducive to talking about them with those around us. Those kind of spaces will actually feel like something different and may lead to the outcomes we say we want.
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