The Design Correction

The design industry has been going through somewhat of a wobble in recent times. My estimate is that it’s been a 12 month wobble to date, with my guess at another 12 months still to wobble. That’s pure conjecture and guesswork on my part, based on nothing but ‘hunch’.

Stock traders talk of ‘sentiment’ when discussing markets and trading conditions and it’s a word that feels apt here too. There have been more ‘workforce reductions’ than there should under ‘normal’ circumstances, more people looking for work, more agencies ‘taking stock’ and huge ‘cost cutting’ axes coming down on in-house design and innovation teams. All understandably worrying for the industry.

I’ve spoken to lots of people about all sorts of different reasons for this downturn. No-one can quite put their finger on why, but everyone (bar a few exceptions) can feel it.

To my mind, it feels more than a downturn. It feels like a ‘correction’ – as I’ve decided to call it – something fundamental that is shifting in the tectonic plates of the creative industries. Again, I have nothing really to pin any of these grand statements on…just a murmuring in my gut…which could well be IBS.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to suggest some of the things that may have affected this ‘correction’. More to prompt discussion than state any hard facts, of which there are very few, if any at all. I’m sure I’ll come back and re-read this in 12 months and realise it was all piffle.

It’s also worth stating that much of what I observe is primarily UK centric. I’d be interested to hear if there are similar ripples happening elsewhere in the world.

1. Lots of smaller creatures.

A natural by-product of larger businesses making swathes of redundancies from huge design and development teams, is the emergence of a multitude of ‘mini-agencies’.

Following redundancy, those looking for jobs tend to swamp the market and with there being (typically) significantly fewer jobs than there are people looking, so a proportion have a few pints and some deep conversations and decide to use their redundancy fund to set up a ‘design agency’. It is entirely understandable, particularly for those who have ‘settled’ a young family or put down roots in an area – it makes a lot of sense. That coupled with a sense of freedom from having been given some license to work from home (not to mention the infrastructure at home to now conduct a serious business), makes it feel all the more achievable.

The ensuing landscape then becomes one of ‘many seniors’ which in turn tends to preclude any immediate growth in hiring, other than possibly some nominal juniors if they can sustain the hiring costs. You now have more people hunting in the same pond for arguably the same amount of work. As any ecologist will tell you, too many predators is never a good thing.

2. Political pause.

Politics has had a lot to answer for in the last few years. Whatever side of the political spectrum you lean toward, there has been legislative rigor mortis as we’ve tried to understand who was going to take over (or continue…if you were an eternal optimist!).

Businesses (and by that read ‘clients’) appear to have been sense-checking their books against potential future governments and what they might do in power. Just look at the wobble that has happened in the education system with Labour threatening to add VAT to private school fees. With uncertainty over the timing of the election itself, let alone the outcome (although many in hindsight will probably suggest it was as predictable as anything), I don’t blame big business for sitting in a holding pattern until they know more.

The Corporation Tax increase has already been an almighty kick in the nuts, so it is understandable that businesses who are anchored in the UK might start looking at ways to cut costs in order to compensate for future (highly predictable) tax hikes. This unfortunately tends to result in cuts to the ‘intangible’ aspects of a business, no matter how critical to their future success. Invariably innovation teams and strategy budgets get culled, project funnels get ‘pruned’ and stuff tends to get ‘improved’ or ‘refined’ rather than anything new being tabled.

As much as you can argue that it is possibly too short sighted and doesn’t do anything to protect your business from future market forces, it is as understandable as stopping your gym membership and buying cheaper, less nourishing food when you have less money in your pocket.

3. Cost of living trickle down.

There’s no doubt that we are feeling the aftershocks of the ‘cost of living crisis’ in the way that ‘design’ teams are now being trimmed or adjusted.

Obviously there are some design teams that grow in times of ‘cost cutting’ but these are rare. A good example is the rise of products like air-fryers that are aimed squarely at the cost-conscious consumer, so brands that can leverage this are going to do well…to a point…then it just comes down to flogging as many as possible. However, such examples are few and far between so most tend to get trimmed or simply stop spending with external consultants who tend to support upstream, insight led or ‘opportunity spotting’ activity. People are simply not spending so business funds are depleted. As always, the first to lose out is ‘new project activity’.

There also appears to be a bit of a kickback against the ‘startup’ fervour that has gripped the design industry client base for a number of years. Whether this is is by-product of investor reluctance given the number of failed ‘unicorns’ we’ve seen in the news, or simply that people don’t have the money to spend on new ideas because their mortgage has trebled or their energy bills have doubled. The startup landscape relies on personal individual wealth or investor ‘eagerness’. If those are in short supply, then projects reduce and the pond gets exponentially smaller.

Whilst there is huge opportunity for innovation in times of desperation or belt tightening (necessity being the mother of invention and all that), there’s a commercial reality that you can’t avoid. If everyone stops spending, shit happens.

4. AI.

I considered not including this here but it’s too big a ‘thing’ not to. Thankfully it hasn’t really made much of an impact on product/industrial design (from a commercial point of view) but it has certainly impacted our neighbouring industries and disciplines that work in more pure brand, strategy, graphics and digital. And I don’t doubt that AI is coming for ID too.

Good thinkers and genuinely creative practitioners will never be replaced, but in times of greater commoditisation and a feeling that some of the things that people charge top dollar for ‘could’ be done by a curated sentence string and a cheap graduate hire, it is a tempting morsel for clients looking for ways to reduce spend and justify their team size and value to the bean counters.

AI is not something anyone can ignore. You can claim it as a fad and carry on regardless but your work will gradually get eroded and you will find it harder to justify your fees for what you’ve always done before. It is time to adapt (if you haven’t already) and understand how you can utilise these new tools to improve what you do, speed up parts of the process or make what you do more ‘valuable’…however you define ‘value’ to your clients.

In the short term though, in attempts to ‘save money’, AI is certainly going to be used to replace some of the outsourced creative tasks that keep industry afloat. Whether it’s web banners, short form video content for social media, rapid marketing collateral where finesse isn’t the critical factor, or ‘idea generation’, there is certainly an opinion circulating that suggests this can easily and cheaply done by AI. And whilst we as creative practitioners will face palm and groan, consistently warning of the risk of short cutting, it is happening and it’s having a very direct impact on parts of the creative industries.

Of that there is no doubt.

5. The proliferation of instamatic group think.

As someone in the industry said to me the other day…”I blame IDEO”. And I tend to – sort of – agree. I am of course referring to the great and illustrious term ‘Design Thinking’.

I get what it means and I understand the reasoning for wanting to simplify the design process into something that can be easily communicated, drawn on a flip chart and decoded into neat phases of activity, but it feels like design has been prostituted to a level where anyone ‘can have a go’, which in turn (and somewhat ironically) hasn’t helped the industry.

Whilst involvement and democratisation is admirable, the danger arises when you simplify it to such a level that it warrants no sense-checking or believing it can be done in the absence of true expertise and by anyone with a pack of Post-It notes and a Sharpie (or worse, a biro!). It’s been turned into something that people can schedule a 2 hour ‘brainstorming meeting’ for, and genuinely expect meaningful results. And I don’t blame people for thinking it can be done as it is what has been sold and permeated across middle management slack channels.

For sure, it is a useful way to ‘describe’ the approximate process of a relatively robust design journey, but it is now seen as ‘ubiquitous fairy dust’ that you can buy from Tesco.

Don’t get me wrong, assembling lots of different minded people in a room with a singular agenda to discuss a challenge and spend a couple of hours tackling it is no bad thing (there are a few caveats where this can be detrimental but broadly speaking it’s positive), but the belief that this can somehow replace ‘design’ or substitute aspects of it is where the miscalculation lies. It also requires diligent preparation, sensible briefing and appropriate and educated capture with the knowledge of how the output can be best used afterwards.

I plan to write something about ‘workshopping’ in another article so I won’t drone on here needlessly. But my point is that if you commoditise your expertise too much, you end up becoming redundant…and for all the wrong reasons. A bit like allowing your slipper wearing Nan to drive to the shops in your Ferrari*. Without showing her how to use it. Sort of.

*I don’t own a Ferrari and my Nan has long since passed away. Just in case you were concerned.

6. Ironic lack of agility.

The one word I have grown weary of when working in ‘agency land’ is ‘agility’. It’s (mainly) bollocks.

Speed is one thing. Get it done quick because there is an immovable deadline approaching or a tradeshow we need to launch at…that sort of thing. Agencies are good at that. Throw people at it or work stupid numbers of unpaid hours to ‘impress’.

But agility is different. Agility means adaptability, collaboration and an ability to adjust to shifting sands, rising tides and other beach based analogies. Genuinely knitting with a client team in a way that doesn’t always fit with the traditional billing model. It’s an understandable reluctance from agencies as relationships can often disintegrate into an hourly freelance type thing where it gets hard to plan, difficult to resource and erodes profitability.

But clients and projects are demanding greater flexibility in the way they are run. There seem to be fewer ‘fence throwing’ briefs and more of a desire to assemble a team of people who can solve a problem. There is greater capability in-house and a desire to learn from the process than there ever was before.

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, but it certainly feels like the design landscape requires less ‘Who can do this FOR us?’ and more ‘Who can we work WITH to do this?’ And that is a big – somewhat uncomfortable – shift for lots of traditional agency business models, despite the rhetoric they spout at the creds meeting. I know…I’ve done lots of the spouting!

7. The rise of in-house.

There’s no doubt about it. The era of the ‘kick ass’ agency as the place to work is fading. Whilst there is always an element of desirability in working for a ‘consultancy’, there are much greater gains in working for a talented in-house team now.

It used to be that ‘development’ was done ‘in-house’ but the ‘creative’ was done by an ‘agency’. That’s simply not the case anymore. To my earlier point, there are instances where client teams may involve agencies in selected parts of their entire product innovation process, but the creative capabilities and leverage now comes from the client side (in cases where the client is large enough to have it’s own in-house design team that is). Agencies now have to better understand the client business, its infrastructure and its processes to win a place at their creative table.

Gone are the days where an agency can simply flex its credibility muscles and get the work. The balance of power has shifted and agencies (or ‘bought in’ design resource) need to work harder to prove their worth.

Much of this comes from a phase of talent migration from agency to in-house. Micro-versions of the Jonny Ive story. Poaching talented design leaders or recruiting design savvy managers to build internal teams with the right vocabulary and skills to compete with the best. This hasn’t always been successful and there are as many stories of failed internal design team builds as there are successes but combine creative impact with the commercial acumen that comes with living and breathing design within an organisation (plus having to engage with other departments on a daily basis) and you can see how the agency model gets harder to justify.

It’s also – ironically – harder to sell ‘design’ to another designer, particularly if they know it’s worth or value. Less snake oil. More cold pressed, hand picked, extra virgin olive oil.

Maybe.

8. COVID fallout.

I can’t really be specific, but it still feels like we are ‘correcting’ for COVID. I see the effect of it in the ways my teenage kids interact with their peers having spent all that time socially isolated, how graduates’ degree show work is different as a result of lockdown learning, how diaries and meeting protocols and expectations have shifted, how we expect our working patterns to be. It’s all a variety of societal adaptations in the way we do stuff as a result of a cataclysmic event. Yes, things have ‘returned to normal’ but breadcrumbs and legacies remain.

The same is true for design. So much of what is so powerful in design practice is the connection we can have as individuals…be they client to creative, user to researcher, manufacturer to designer, marketeer to strategist. But these connections are imminently more cohesive and formative in person.

Technology is brilliant and the ability to have a (relatively) seamless video call with anyone, anywhere in the world at any time is breathtaking. But all of the best electricity comes from direct contact and it feels like such contact is now the exception rather than the rule. Which is a shame.

Design is a visceral, tangible and yet simultaneously, intangible act. It’s little doses of magic and pragmatism mixed together in a powerful potion. And it requires some level of audience participation to be truly brilliant…and my (somewhat unjustified) fear is that the COVID working practices we have all adapted to have irreversibly resulted in a minor devaluing of design…or at least something that feels more transactional than magical.

Apologies…getting a bit sentimental as this article goes on!

Which leads me nicely to the end.

As I’ve said at the start, I have zero true evidence to substantiate any of the above points. There is anecdotal evidence and my own experiences (and of those I speak to) to support some of what I have described, but it definitely feels like design is undergoing some form of ‘correction’.

It might simply be adaptation. Or ‘natural wastage’. But something is happening and my middle aged gut tells me that if we ourselves don’t adapt, we will be left behind.

Hey ho. Thoughts on a postcard welcomed as always.