What ‘Design’ needs to do

There’s been much talk of what everyone has experienced in the design industry of late. A downturn. A lack of engagement. A dissolving of belief. A ‘malaise’. However you choose to define it, there’s no arguing that something has happened in the last 12-18 months to erode design’s place in the wider commercial and business landscape and I’ve written previously articles on the possible causes of such erosion.

It’s been playing on my mind for some months now, so I thought it might be interesting (if only for me) to put forward some solutions to this. I have absolutely no doubt that many will challenge and disagree with (possibly quite a lot of) what I’m suggesting, but it’s easy to say that things are a bit rough without any solutions proposed. But if there’s something to aim at, then people might start firing.

So here goes. Some stuff that I think we need to consider if we are to reinstate or reaffirm design’s place….wherever that might be.

1. Deal in common currency.

Design deals in imagery. Beautifully crafted, meticulously staged visual storytelling of work completed. Usually digitally created and rarely being used as things would be in the real world. And I get it. I’m as guilty as the next of curating product case-study ‘porn’ to whet the appetites and stir the loins of the next potential client.

But the reality is that we are really only doing it for ourselves. And by that I mean the design community. We are arm wrestling with staging, lighting and composition to create the best ‘brochure’ content we can. We do it because it outwardly demonstrates our abilities to ‘craft’ beauty and style. Making sure the image highlights ‘that’ line that designers spent weeks curating or ensuring that the lighting showcases the subtle little backlit led glow behind the power button.

But much like hotels or holiday destinations, there’s only so much you can seduce with imagery. It’s certainly a big initial draw but not enough to sustain any meaningful conversation. Watercolours can only go so far….no matter how stunning.

We now live in an age where beauty is now second guessed. People from all walks of life are starting to realise that much of what they see is ‘generated’ and not often by humans. The sheer volume of tools available on commonly purchased smartphones that do the kind of stuff we as designers took pride and effort in completing is now ridiculous. Our skills are commodities. Photoshop what? “Hey…look at this action figure of me I just created!”

And I think it might be a good thing. Maybe we need to move away from the currency of ‘designers’ and start to talk in more common currencies that business understands. Move away from ‘pretty’ – which has forever been the self enforced curse of the industry – and move towards ‘relevance’ or ‘commerce’ or ‘impact’.

We’ve too long been an alien race attempting – like a stubborn Brit abroad – to force the apparent ‘ignorant masses’ to understand what we are saying by saying it louder and shoving things in faces with fingers and thumbs. Maybe we need to start learning a different language. One that resonates more with industry and less with peers. It’s clear that the masses have got a bit fed up with our ‘designer bleating’ and have decided to crack on without us. Are we the metaphorical toddler who has had one too many tantrums? Possibly.

I can hear the apoplectic roar of justification in the distance. Many will argue that they complement seduction with rationality and commercial substantiation. I get that, but I still argue that the primary vehicle for design messaging is ‘beautiful imagery’. And because a lot of what we believe in and train ourselves to do as designers is visual then it feels the most natural thing to use. It’s also ironic that most experienced designers looking to recruit young designers will default to suggesting that they are first and foremost looking for ‘thinking’ and ‘curiosity’ and ‘experimentation’ and not ‘polished renders’ but the large proportion of case study content on design service agency websites is ‘polished render’ or heavily doctored visual porn. Go figure.

2. Grannies and eggs.

I don’t know if it’s a by product of influencer culture or a need to ‘have a voice’ in design land, but the amount of banal ‘how to’ shite is baffling.

People telling me how to sketch. People showing me how to 3D print a f**king hinge. Why prototyping is important. How to go from sketch to render in 2 minutes.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good YouTube tutorial if I’m stuck. I pretty much learned most of my Photoshop skills (now pretty much redundant!) and some of the tricker SolidWorks stuff from many a well meaning YouTuber. I am very grateful. But if I need that stuff, I know where to look for it. I don’t need my LinkedIn feed filled with banality, fuckwittery and egg sucking.

There seems to be a need for everyone to say something, but given that many of those attempting to speak are relatively early in their careers, the majority of what is pushed is elementary, rudimentary or plain obvious. And depressingly, it appears that platforms like LI tend to promote and prefer platitudinous ‘how to’s’ over anything with any contentious bite. I know I sound like a jilted boyfriend right now!

The result (as a result of the absolute numbers game) is that the broader message spreading its way across the business ether is that design is simple, a little bit vacuous and inherently superficial. Design has come a bit of a cropper through social media, at least in terms of its credibility and clout. We need to elevate what we offer – not in a smug, elitist way – but to a point where our skills are demonstrably valuable to the buying business community. Not simply a nice to have or something to ‘turd polish’.

This aspect is heavily linked to another topic I cover further on in the article.

3. Stop telling me how you got where you got.

We seem to be living in an age of ‘what I dids’. People who ‘do the circuit’ telling every young podcaster their life story and ‘how they made it’. I fully appreciate the slight irony of this point I’m making as I’m not one to shy away from ‘oversharing’*, but my issue is with people who seem to think young designers have to follow their formula to succeed. Do what I did and you’ll also be a success. And by ‘success’ I mean the perception of success, as many of those permeating this ‘follow me’ culture are often never quite as ‘successful’ as they might like you to believe. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors.

The major glitch in the machine is that design now is very different to design then. Like unrecognisably so. Their success was ‘of a time’ and a by-product of all manner of circumstantial events – a dash of nepotism, a dollop of white middle class privilege, a sprinkle of patriarchy, a cup of luck, half a teaspoon of brown-nosery and probably a misdirectable ability to sketch.

To presume that career paths can be ‘followed’ is futile. I once had a student contact me who was recently graduated and looking for a job. He had attended the same University as me (albeit quite some years later) and wanted to get a job in the same ‘two bit’ medical manufacturing company I had worked in after graduation. His logic was that because I had studied where I had and worked where I’d worked, then he would be able to follow the same path to a notable agency in London. Go figure. I made sure he was clear that my route was based on zero logic, an unscrupulous boss, some little white lies and some uncomfortable swagger when required. There was no path worth following.

We need to move away from ‘listening to (often old) white guys’ telling us their ‘journey’ and believing it’s the yellow brick road. It ain’t. Focus on design as a discipline. What it can do in the here and now…and more importantly in the future. Stop listening to old codgers pining on about ‘all nighters’ and Letraset. That’s what pubs are for.

Having said that, don’t fall into the trap of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because someone looks or sounds ‘out of date’, don’t automatically dismiss their opinions or thoughts as outdated. Listen to what anyone says, regardless of age and ‘experience’ and judge it accordingly.

*I feel the need to justify myself here. Those that know and have worked with me hopefully will say that I tend to only use my anecdotal past experience as an example of where I’ve made mistakes or as a way to illustrate a point, not as a path to follow or mimic.

4. ‘User centred’.

Welcome to the most over used phrase of the last decade. It has usurped ‘innovation’ as the most earnest but least delivered watchword of the design community and has become somewhat of a battle cry for every designer attempting to define their worth. I used its sibling – ‘human centred’ – for many years as a way to pull away from the emergence of ‘product design engineering’ in talking to clients. It did a job in making clients feel that you were more connected to the direct human experience. It worked…sort of.

And if you genuinely do have a user centred process, then fair play to you. But I’d warrant that – much as most innovation isn’t innovative – so the majority of ‘user centred’ thinking is far from centred on the user. I would suggest that aside from a bit of insight gathering and a clutch of over crafted personas, the user takes a relatively back seat in the arduous and compromised journey to launch, despite arguments and spittle foamed justifications to the contrary.

From my experience, intentions are broadly ambitious and well intentioned, but move past the bit where users’ lives are mapped and journeys have been illustrated and you typically find a world where genuine usability and the consideration of user’s needs play second fiddle to cost base, brand story, part count, manufacturing resistance, supply chain and the personal preferences of the senior stakeholder(s).

And this corrosion of intent is not always down to the vacuous morality of the design team, but the position that design has in the pecking order. Design is left to ‘play’ at the start of the process. We get our 15 minutes. But then as it moves down the rollercoaster of development, the consideration given to the original user needs are often forgotten. I’ve seen so many projects with noble intentions, quickly lose sight of the core user ‘non-negotiables’ as the development team get bigger and suppliers get involved. It’s much like seeing your child grow from an agreeable, compliant, smiley individual into a homogenous, complex, disagreeable teenager. The principles at the start were easy to comprehend (despite a lack of sleep) but become muddy and lost as the project develops. It’s easier to agree to a reduced part count and find a system that is easier to source than it is to fight tooth and nail for the usability you had carefully and rigorously defined at the start.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a project that kept user centred thinking at its core throughout a project. It’s not that I disagree with the principle. In truth, I couldn’t be more of an advocate for it. It’s the proliferation of the phrase which I know to be unfounded that gets my goat. I would suggest that the larger proportion of businesses using this phrase in their core messaging are highly unlikely to be practicing bona fide ‘user centred’ processes.

This again erodes faith across the industry. Again, like ‘innovation’, the business community interacting with the design community sees these words and believes them to be enacted, but the reality is that they are just experiencing ‘average’ design. Straightforward concept generation around a series of predictable constraints, resulting in a slightly better looking version of what came before, simultaneously claiming to be ‘innovative’ or ‘user centred’.

If you are going to use this phrase, do what it says on the tin. Stay true to the user. Fight for what matters. Be a pain in the arse. Or don’t. But don’t claim to be one thing and fake it.

I await the next version of this phrase as this one fades into ubiquity and superficiality.

5. Live with AI …but sensibly.

We’ve finally moved past the ‘shock of the new’ with AI. My whole family now uses it in various guises for all manner of stuff. Everyday shit. Planning holidays. Refining prose. Working out what our pet dog would look like as a human child. That sort of thing.

We are now being sold specific applications of AI rather than simply ‘AI’ as magic potion or fairy dust. Our computers, phones and TVs have AI embedded in them as standard. It’s here whether we like it or not. In fact, it’s been here for quite some time but we haven’t always known about it.

We need to move away from arguing whether AI has a place in design and instead state ‘how’ we are using it to deliver better work. More relevant work. More cost effective work. We can’t keep bleating on about ‘how AI is stealing our jobs’ and start looking at how ‘our jobs can be better with AI’.

Like computers or photoshop or 3D Printing, we need to absorb the best bits, find the advantages, adapt our processes and invest in learning. We need to start looking for new talent who have a proper grasp of how to incorporate AI tools into creative thinking. This isn’t about funky images or rapid iterations, but using what is available to optimise efficiencies, support decision making, eliminate ambiguity and crowbar more time for design folk to properly think. To do the bit that AI can’t (yet) do. Empathy.

Yes there’s still a huge discussion raging about copyright and artistic ‘origin’ neatly captured by the Studio Ghibli and Open AI example. I can still do amazing and whimsical things with a prompt whilst sat on a bus. That stuff is going to get ever better and more jaw dropping, but remember that CGI didn’t improve storytelling, it just gave us more of a certain thing….mainly superheroes landing the same way…. but the ability to craft and tell a brilliant story is still in the minds of the creative humans. And the two are not mutually exclusive. Christopher Nolan makes stupendous movies with storytelling at its core, but uses CGI brilliantly to make us believe his stories and characters.

We still need to work out how we communicate the bit that humans do best whilst using the AI tools to go faster or more productively, but without looking like we are cheating!

6. Magic is fine, but reality is better.

Design has traded on magic for centuries. Many of the skills that we demonstrate in ‘creative acts’ are those that many find confounding. The ability to draw with realism, or imagine fanciful things, or make things look real, are all from the designer’s top drawer and easily traded to impress and jaw drop. I know…I’ve done it for years. And for years it has worked really well.

But we are now in age where people who would normally be gobsmacked by our talent are now suspicious that it might be AI or somehow ‘created’ by machines. They even assume they can do it themselves with a few carefully worded prompts and a willing teenager. And with suspicion comes doubt. And with doubt comes devaluation.

I’m afraid the magic that came with ‘visual mastery’ has gone up in smoke. For sure you can still impress people with your ability to ‘actually draw’ but those opportunities are rare and – in most instances – a little irrelevant. Most work is remote or digital. Whilst still maintaining the level of visual finesse expected of us, we now need to demonstrably share our other abilities. The real superpowers of designers. Thinking. Imagining. Connecting. Fitting. Compromising. Empathising.

You could potentially argue that AI can do some of this, or maybe even all of it. But not all together and not whilst staring at a sheet of paper with a tatty old pencil, drawing an apparently disconnected curve fourteen times in the same direction. Or staring intently at a CAD model, unmoving for 20 minutes while your brain considers all the little domino falls and bits and pieces that result from adding a boss here or flattening that surface there. The imperceptible nudges and tweaks that designers brains do at ninety miles an hour that result in harmony and balance. The invisible smoke.

Things that can be often be described but rarely realised.

We need to shift to demonstrating actual value. To quote every single maths teacher in the land…show our working. Share ‘how’ we got to the result. Not just whipping the Dali-esque satin sheet away in a big reveal. Those days are gone my friend. Sorry.

7. Stop promising. Start doing.

This is aimed at whomever fits the cap (I’ll leave it for you to decide), but most of these typically reside in the upper echelons of corporate organograms. The ones with titles like ‘global something or other’ or ‘chief creativity bod’. The ones that attend ‘conferences’ or ‘global forums’. They take humorous, smiling selfies with equally ‘expense accounted’ peers and talk about ‘meaningful change’ or ‘global impact’ when referring to yoghurt or carbonated drinks.

I have no issue with people enjoying the perks of seniority, the luxurious hotels, illustrious company and fabulous venues, but please can you actually do something with that power and influence, rather than just bloat your own self importance and sycophantic following. I fully appreciate I am bundling well meaning, pro-active folk in the same bucket but design industry leadership as a whole is suffering from over representation and gross under delivery. To quote Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben “With great power comes great responsibility!”…although I should probably and rightfully attribute that phrase to Voltaire.

We seem to have moved from a time of ‘fighting for a seat at the table’ to ‘finding the seat’ and now ‘this seat is comfy’, but with little to show for it. I can’t quite equate the column inches of self promotion and rhetoric with the lack of evidential change and impact in the businesses these folk represent. For the decades that some of these businesses have installed ‘design leaders’, there is a remarkable similarity in the products I see in the supermarket and at large to those many years ago.

I appreciate (measured) change takes time and I don’t doubt the levels of convincing and ‘stakeholder management’ required to change the direction of travel for many of the businesses in question, but there has been enough time, plenty of education, lots of ‘reports’, oodles of discussion, bucketloads of discourse and a thousand slide decks. Where is the actual – and oft cited – ‘meaningful’ change?

It can’t just be about the cult of personality. It has to be visible change as a result of design influence. Where is the meaningful impact? Where is the mind shift from design as ‘superficially nice to have’ to ‘core to everything we deliver’? We are in danger of sounding like politicians who every time a camera is thrust in their faces, talk about ‘real change’, when in fact they just mean ‘I want power’.

8. Know your place.



This is something I’ve firmly believed for quite some time but it’s never a particularly popular opinion. That design isn’t as important as the design industry would have you believe.

 If you listened to ‘pure’ design voices you would think that design is the saviour of all mankind. That it can solve all our woes and elevate our lives beyond compare. Leverage the power of design and all will be well with the world. Read all the reports on design and it’s clear that business simply can’t survive without us.

But it is this somewhat belligerent attitude that can push people away from the genuine power of design. It can sounds a little too eager and over enthusiastic to the point of disbelief. Of course, as designers we understand how powerful the application of creativity and empathy can be, but to ‘non-designers’, it can sound like almost ‘cultish’ evangelism. And that never ends well….unless you happen to have an orange tinge.

I’m all for sticking up for the use of design, but within the wider context. Where can design add genuine value and how important is it to the ‘success’ of the product or service? Sometimes, design need only be a light touch to support getting something bootstrapped and off the ground. It is clear that quite a lot of businesses do very well indeed without even the first consideration to anything anyone might call ‘design’ at all.

We should never position ourselves in a haughty position above responsibilities like supply chain, finance, logistics, formulation, marketing, manufacturing, procurement, category management or others. For sure they seem much less sexy but can have profoundly greater impact on the bottom line and the penetration of the product in market than anything design can do, much as we might like to complain to the contrary.

 Our industry is often guilty of assuming we are a one person show, striding in to ‘save the day’ and then getting our noses put out of joint when people tell us we are not needed or not valued. We should probably instead see ourselves as just one member of an acrobatic troupe. Sometimes we are the strong one at the base of the human pyramid, sweating out of sight. Sometimes we are the guy holding the crash mat and getting pummelled minute by minute. Sometime we are the little one doing 4 spectacular spins and landing at the top holding the flag, taking the spotlight and the glory. It all depends on so many things.

Importantly, we need to not only understand our place, but understand how we interrelate. We are not the puzzle, we are just a piece. The more we whinge about design not being taken seriously, the more we risk the business community simply cracking on without us. Something that is becoming evidently more true as time marches on.

9. Less ‘frivolous’ design.

This is linked to my earlier point about ‘Grannies and eggs’. The abundance of what you might call ‘simple’ or seemingly ‘frivolous’ design projects. Things like lamps and chairs and water bottles.

Now before you rip me a new one, I fully appreciate that there is often a huge amount of effort and work that goes into designing these things. Sometimes they are bona fide genius, but not always to the casual observer, who statistically isn’t likely to be design trained.

My issue isn’t with the subject matter or the ability of the designer in question, but in the proliferation of design as a ‘perceived’ superficial and relatively simple output. Designers will know that a carefully designed chair will do many things on many levels and take exorbitant effort to get right, but the outward impression is that design is a ‘styling’ exercise. The same can be said for lamps or water bottles…or countless other examples. Particularly if you now overlay AI and watch how simply others (with little or no skill) can effectively create more fanciful versions and post freely.

If you take all the other stuff I’ve mentioned in this article into consideration, we need to move the ‘perception needle’ from one of ‘wow that looks cool’ to ‘jeez that’s clever’. We need to elevate our skills as way more than simply visual and styling. We need to demonstrate that as much – if not moreso – thought goes into the unseen as the seen.

Make no mistake. I’m not criticising the designers of chairs, lamps and water bottles, but the more we share of this, the less our worth ‘appears’ to those who know and judge design on superficiality and taste – something we can’t necessarily blame people for. I don’t know how to fairly judge a good financial controller or a human resources expert or an electronics engineer to a level that they feel is accurate and representative of their standing within their own discipline, so how do we expect others to judge us deeply and fairly enough if we continue to share what appear to be ‘shallow’ examples of design styling? Is the language of chairs and lamps and water bottles in danger of devaluing our craft.

There’s no real order to the points I’m making. If you’ve got this far, you will see that many of the points interweave and overlay significantly and I’ve intimated as such throughout.

Overall, I think we need to shift our modes of communication from that which suits our own vanity and senses to ones that better suit the expectations of the people we want to convince. It’s somewhat ironic that a discipline that prides itself on understanding the user, often fares pretty badly in understanding the people who need to ‘buy’ design and still perpetuates a broadly visual, semantic, emotional, tactile and superficial version of the discipline. For sure, these aspects are hugely important in the ACT of design, but in the communication of design value we may have to adapt our language and means of validation a fair bit.

Even people as fundamental to the cause of design as Jonny Ive. Do people in the wider public understand him to have shaped the ‘way’ we use computers, or do they think he’s simply the ‘stylist’?

We need to share examples of design as more commercially impactful than simply visually impactful. We have to lead with the language of others, not of our own.

As I said at the very start, I expect many people to disagree with a lot of what I’ve written. I’ve taken a fairly lumpy stick to the industry and rightfully expect some backlash. But I also think we need to be a bit more honest with ourselves with the way we are and what we expect of other disciplines when they think of us?



A bit of self reflection and ‘user centred’ thinking maybe? 😉