Design in the Intelligent Age
For designers to stay relevant, we need to stop acting like designers
Wrong estimate, right prediction
In my last post, I wrote about “The Changing Role of Design” and the reaction was swift and passionate. It’s become one of the two most shared and discussed posts that I’ve done this year. The other was a post called “How to AI.”
With generative AI suddenly becoming available for the masses almost overnight, there seems to be ample curiosity and anxiety about what the future holds for humankind at the intersection of creativity and technology. When it comes to our profession of design, that feeling skews way more towards anxiety than optimism.
We thought that the profession of design—or other types of creative endeavors such as writing, advertising, music, or filmmaking—was sacred. That our work was reserved for certain types of humans who possessed skills, talent, and in certain instances, titles.
We had an unspoken elitist stance on creativity.
Or at the very least, we thought our jobs would not likely be taken away from us by machines. Our work involved these abstract, mysterious, and elusive acts called creativity.
We thought our jobs were safe. Turns out, they weren’t.
“Your jobs will be taken away by computers in 5 years.”
A Microsoft engineer told me and my fellow designers when he and his colleague came to R/GA, a design/technology company I was working for at the time, to demo a design software product. It was back in 2002 or 2003 and I was in my early twenties.
His colleague was a lot more diplomatic. He was the sales guy between the two. The engineer was, in a good way, a lot more direct, and in a bad way, way more sarcastic and condescending. He didn’t seem to have much interest in helping designers. A lack of empathy, perhaps. Which is unfortunate given he and his colleague were there to do a product demo and sell us their software.
He was wrong in his time estimation by about 20 years (and his sales tactic since we didn’t end up signing up for their software) but was right in his assessment of the possibility of technology as it relates to design and creative professions.
Is design less important than technology?
In 2019 in his SXSW talk, design luminary John Maeda proclaimed that “In reality, design is not that important.”
I met John when I was 20 or 21 when I went to visit him at his Aesthetics and Computation Group in MIT Media Lab. In his thirties, he was already a leading figure in design and tech for bringing design and programming together. Ever since then, I’ve followed him from afar as many have. He is one of my key influences and is a big reason I pursued a career at the intersection of design and technology. John has been championing design particularly and specifically for the tech industry for over two decades. Since 2015, he’s also published an annual report called “Design in Tech” each year.
(Note: this is the abridged version of John’s talk from SXSW 2023. The SXSW 2019 talk doesn’t seem to be online.)
For obvious reasons, his statement caused quite a stir. I was startled, too.
In that year’s report as well as the subsequent interview he gave, John said that design should be like a supporting actor or actress to the lead characters in a tech company–developers and product managers. John defends his statement by saying, “I say, [what about] those movies where the best-supporting actor or actress steals the show?”
Many—most of them designers—revolted against his statement. They were protective and defensive of design, understandably so.
When we discuss the importance of a discipline over others, we inevitably compare the importance of people associated with each discipline. “X is not that important” can be heard as “People who do X are not that important.” And that is an uncomfortable thing to hear for those associated with X, in this case, design.
That makes us designers defensive. It pushes us into a contentious territory and causes friction. Debating whether a company should be “design-led,” “engineering-led,” or “marketing-led,” is not productive for this reason. In addition, as I’ve gotten to know John directly in more recent years, I don’t think I can be objective in critiquing or defending his statement here.
Having said this, if we were to consider the question “Design, what is it good for?” the answer is singular: Absolutely everything. I sound defensive, I know.
Absolutely everything we see in this world, not made by nature, is designed. And to that understanding, the world needs designers and design plays an important role in bringing an idea to life.
But that doesn’t mean that designers should or can take the lead role.
Being the bridge
“Let me see how I can explain this in a way you designers could understand.”
I was barely 25 years old when an engineer with a gray beard more than twice my age told me and my fellow designers at the aforementioned company R/GA.
Bob Greenberg, the founder of R/GA, was a legendary producer and a pioneer in using technology to enhance design for film and motion graphics. By the time I joined, they were starting to shift away from video production focusing on special effects to doing interactive and software design work. I joined in my early twenties because I wanted to learn how a designer with a technical background (I double-majored in art/design and computer science in college) could start building a career. R/GA was an early adopter in embracing technology in design and creating an organizational structure around that notion.
On the ground, however, the relationship between design and technology when I joined was confrontational.
The design department was mostly young designers in our twenties. While the tech group did have young people, it also had experienced folks who were old enough to be our parents or uncles (they were all men). The comment above exemplifies the sentiment, not only between those disciplines but towards one from the other.
Often, a common answer I would get from developers whenever I showed them the designs that were out of the ordinary that I wanted to create would be “No, you can’t do that.”
To be fair, developers were always worried about things breaking.
If and when things broke or didn’t work, developers, not the designers, were the ones who had to spend the time to find the bug in the code and fix things, often late into the night. They didn’t want other people creating extraneous work for them. We creatives and designers burnt the midnight oil because we wanted to look for more unexpected ideas and keep tweaking those pixels to make things look better. Developers worked efficiently and systematically so that they didn’t have to burn the midnight oil. They especially hated when things changed after they were coded and developed.
The key difference in the mindset between us, I realized, was that designers loved redoing things whereas developers hated redoing things.
My technology colleagues, at first, didn’t know that I studied computer science in college along with art and design. I knew enough to be, not only dangerous but a pain. Whenever I was told “No, you can’t do that,” I would try coding myself at night and see if and how it could be done.
“Can I show you something?” I would show them the little demos and experiments I built the night before.
I’m sure they found me obnoxious. The trick, I learned, was not to be forceful with my design vision but to learn to speak their language.
With traditional graphic design, it was about how things looked. With digital and interactive design, not only the aesthetics but also motions and behaviors became key. Back when digital was becoming a thing, designers didn’t know how to code and didn’t have tools that let us build motions and behaviors easily. But I could.
Soon, they would offer ideas and think with me of ways to build the designs I had come up with. It took some time but I was able to build a good rapport with developers. That led to not only some of the best work I’ve done but also friends I still keep in touch with many years later.
Getting the lead character role
Throughout my career, I’ve learned that the best strategy to do good work wasn’t to keep debating what discipline should lead. Rather, it was to learn to speak the languages of other disciplines, be willing to step into their territory, and become the bridge between disciplines.
For instance, there was a finance director at another company who was not the easiest to deal with. He had a math or economics degree from a top university in the UK so his intelligence coupled with the British sense of sarcasm made him a formidable presence within the company. All department heads, all Americans, had trouble getting the budgets they wanted approved by him, let alone getting along with him.
Even if they were speaking in English, they weren’t really speaking the same language.
I learned that to get a budget approved by him, proposing to him ways to cut costs first would ease his guard. After having worked with him for a year or so, he told me that I was the only department head in the company who would ask for less budget than he had planned on allocating. As a result, he gave me more to work with. Ironic given English is not my first language.
Eventually, the global CEO of the company asked me if I would be open to becoming a managing director in NY, one of the company’s key offices, and start being responsible for the P&L. By this point, I had moved up from managing the creative department in one office to overseeing creative across half a dozen offices in the US and Asia. The managing director role of an office typically belonged to someone with a business management background. Until then, the company had never let a creative be responsible for the P&L.
What followed was a challenging, real-time MBA crash course. Unlike an MBA degree, however, I had to deal with hiring and firing people, people getting unhappy and quitting, clients complaining and yelling at us, etc. No graduate degree can prepare you for those moments.
Regardless, I had become the lead character.
The Napster Phase of AI
With the announcement from OpenAI about GPTs (confusing and weak naming, btw), customizable ChatGPT agents, many people are comparing this moment to the launch of the App Store for the iPhone back in October of 2001. This comparison makes sense given we can now make our own AI agents that can do tasks for us and charge users for using them, like we did with apps.
I’d argue, however, that we are still in the Napster Phase of generative AI for creative fields. This may not make sense for those who are under 35 so stick with me here.
Before Napster, we were downloading MP3 files, often illegally, using various tools that I don’t even remember what they were called. Those tools did work but their interfaces and user experiences were horrendous, and I would spend hours hunting for music I wanted to listen to. It reminds me of where Midjourney is today.
But we were young, had more time on our hands, and didn’t have money. We were willing to endure painful design and user experiences to get something for free. Napster didn’t have a lot of aesthetics but it made it much easier to navigate and find MP3s.
But Napster was still for young people like us: a lot of time but no money.
Since then, we’ve seen the launch of iTunes and the iPod that made it legal and easy to download music, and take it on the go. There were other MP3 music players on the market, but many were clunky to use. “1,000 Songs in Your Pocket” was the tagline for the iPod. And it was the design of the iPod, both the hardware and the interface, that made it so easy to use. The click-wheel and the cascading navigation interface remain to be one of my favorite interface designs of all time.
To borrow words from my good friend and old colleague James Hilton, the iPod was not only useful and usable but also delightful.
Then came Spotify and the new era of streaming. iTunes and the iPod changed the way we accessed and carried music. Spotify and streaming changed the way we discover music and made it limitless. It changed the paradigm.
Along the way, design played an important role in making the experience useful, usable, and delightful.
With generative AI, I don’t believe we are there yet and that’s why I believe we have a few big waves of transformation coming. We are in the very early stage of that paradigm shift.
This brings me back to the main topic of this post and many other posts I write: What do creatives and designers need to do to stay relevant?
While being fluent in the language of design, not only do we need to learn multiple languages, but we also, need to understand how different mindsets of those around us work.
In sum, if you are a designer and are interested in becoming the lead character, do the following:
Think like a marketer.
Plan like an engineer.
Act like an entrepreneur.
Care like a designer.
Thanks for reading. Please hit reply if you have comments, questions, and feedback. I’d love to hear from you.