The Limits of Design

This attitude is infectious and inspires me to believe that even amongst the uncertainty, now is the time for us to commit to action. To stop righteously pointing at the problem and start doing the things that will positively impact our industry, our economy and our culture.

The Next Economic Wave will be Fueled by Creative Careers. John Boiler, Founder 72andSunny

This week I was lucky I spent some time with the team of Garaje de Ideas, a Design consultancy firm here in Madrid. We talked about how designers and creatives can surf over the demands of the new digital consumer to start changing core economic paradigms and challenge the current corporate status-quo.

Thanks to the new role of the empowered consumer in the age of abundance, businesses have to learn how to convince and engage people at new and deeper levels. Our hope is that companies willing to success in the contemporary markets will be forced to move beyond the transactional model that defines traditional capitalism (driven by self-interest), and start creating value with their customers, establishing lasting and meaningful relations (driven by shared-interest). This purpose-led approach is people-centric by definition and if it works it will have profound implications in the way businesses and society benefit each other. I believe this is the most important challenge and opportunity that us, designers, have in our hands.

The Limits of Design

Design is already playing a critical role in businesses and society (well more important that it may look from the outside). Once a company realises that in order to compete it has to build its offering around people's needs in the shape of great experiences, it is introducing new variables (and talent) in the decision-making process that may end challenging the very nature of the business. Design is the best Trojan Horse for business transformation I can think on.

Also, let's not forget that many of the most disruptive and successful digital businesses, from Airbnb to YouTube, have designers or creatives as founders.

But, when thinking about in-depth transformation, on challenging assumptions, on breaking barriers, finding new perspectives, new frameworks that would allow us to design business, institutions or services that are not only more useful but also more beautiful, meaningful and responsible. Them a question arise:

Is Design (in its current incarnation: User-Centric, Design Thinking-led) capable of embracing and leading change?

Or is it suffering from some dysfunctional limitations like the ones below?

Dependency

Design depends on other people's problems.

Design is defined as a problem solving methodology, waits for problems to arise and happily jumps in to solve them with a combination of processes and talent. That sounds great but...

1.  Things go so fast, that if we wait for the problems to arise, we will be always late and our approach will always be reactive.

2.  The answer of a problem emerges from the very formulation of that very problem. Whoever ask the question, owns the answer. If the problem that we are solving comes for the existing business or technology framework, the solutions will remain within the same framework. Design cannot be disruptive from the inside, because disruption emerges from asking the right question, not from searching for the right answer.

I guess that in order to mature, to emancipate Design, we have to be able to proactively formulate our own problems, not as anticipation of other people's issues, but as a reframing exercise that will challenge the definition of what really matters.

The Dictatorship of the User

Design is a methodology that builds solutions around people's needs. Our job consists on being the objective observers of user's reality and to co-create well tested solutions.

...fair enough...

But we may have forgotten a couple of things on the way:

1.  We use storytelling in our design process, the user is the hero. Our hero has to overcome a number of challenges to fulfil whatever material or spiritual need she may have, ideally just by herself. We remove the annoying middlemen and arm the user with the best tools for the task, but in the process it seems that we left someone behind, we forgot that every hero needs a mentor, every Luke Skywalker needs an Obi-wan, Karate Kid needs a Mr. Miyaki at his side, Frodo needs Gandalf and that wannabe kid had Ratatoulle under his hat helping him to become a Michelin rated chef. Relationships are a matter of two, brands (and design as the materialisation of brands intent) need to play an active role in the way solutions are built, they cannot become mere observers and react to the users needs, they have to become proactive contributors to the conversation, to have an opinion and a subjective intention, act as mentors that guide the user through the right path to success, based on their experiences, beliefs and dedication to the cause. The way this mentorship role is expressed is by adding purpose to the mix. A purpose-driven business is by definition people-centric in a non-reactive way, it doesn't need to wait for the user to ask for help. Purpose brings back some level of hierarchy, the missing principle of the expert authority, it can help brands go beyond just solving whatever need the user have, they still can do it while proactively providing meaning, enriching the relation, guiding and building trust. Something that the forced neutrality and objectivity of the design process has removed from the equation.

2.  Platforms that lack the figure of the mentor, that are built around the basis of empowering users without any major curation or ruling criteria are producing severe undesired outcomes. These user-driven platforms are not just scaling the benefits of empowerment, they are also scaling the flaws in all of us. For example, our craving for informational snacks, in the shape of funny lists or scandalous headlines, has opened the gates for click-baiting tactics, forcing the whole media industry to compete by lowering its editorial quality, and as a consequence is driving us into a world in which attention-grabbing fake news, within the hyper-personalised reality bubbles of our social feeds, end putting into question the very notion of a shared, common truth. The dream of the decentralisation of responsibility diluted all accountability and is producing really scary monsters.

Servitude

Finally, Design presents itself as a service, working mostly for three masters: the business, the technology and the user. The very notion of being and behaving as a service implies that Design always enters the room after the client and ultimately responds to the client's desires (is the client, at the end of the day, who pays the bills). This is the current model and has been working really well, the strategic importance of Design has grown at an incredible rate for the last 20 years, allowing Designers to access the previously forbidden realm of board meetings and investor committees. But I believe that this success comes at a price, it's possible that the disruptive and transformational potential of Design and Creativity has been tamed and shaped to fit inside the existing power structure, and is there somewhere waiting to be released.

In order to transform, Design has to lead.

This vision of an emancipated Design practise, that is able to make sense of the uncertainty and complexity of the contemporary world, transform the way business are built and impact society, is not a service but a new kind of leadership built on the basis of empathy, creativity and purpose.

Post-Design?

In this wonderful interview, Mariana Amatullo, VP of Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design, also points on the limitations of Design as a driver for transformation. While acknowledging its limits, she is working on the combination of three powerful paths to break it free:

Leading Social Innovation: Design is a powerful practice that gives form to a preferred future. Design is about purpose, intention and plan, and from that standpoint design does have the opportunity to bring empathic insights that can lead to positive change and innovation.

Focusing on Education: How we might educate designers for the future–and ensure they are bold enough to break free from current marketplace demands–is a real challenge upon us.

Opening Design: Fundamentally I want to believe that design is an important way forward, but design alone is not the answer. This is why most of the work we do and a lot of the research and areas of knowledge that we bring in to the work we do comes from fields outside design.

Based on this ideas, my guess is that in order to grow up Design needs an playground in which it can work by its own rules without the existing estructural constrains. It has to focus on acting not just as a field of knowledge or a practical discipline, but as a way of building a new kind of framework, a framework that will require the convergence of social sciences, management, technology, humanities and culture in order to provide a proper interpretation of the world.

Design evolved from a practise to become a mindset, a particular way of looking at the world. Maybe it's time for this perspective to be applied not just as a way of making existing business more human, and products more attractive and usable, but as a way of asking new, meaningful questions, that will provide new, unexpected and beautiful answers.

Just a thought...

PS. Please read the Guardian article on the topic of platform outcomes: we began to realise that one of the things that might get broken on Mr.Zuckerberg's quest for speed is democracy.

Thanks @Manuel Vázquez for the "scaling the flaws" idea