Why is the design industry so misunderstood?
By: Shambhavi Ojha
Tags: Design, Team Collaboration, Design Thinking, UX, Education

I recently came across an article titled The fetishisation of UX design, authored by Amy Rogers, on my feed. Being an Experience Designer myself, the headline caught my attention and I immediately clicked on it. It started off as a criticism of certain aspects of the Design Sprint, talked about the hidden hardships of the UX design process, and ended with advice on how we as designers can do our bit to diminish the misconceptions in our field.

I deeply resonated with several points that Amy made and while she was absolutely right, I still wasn’t sure about the precise reason behind the fetishisation. This got me thinking about my own journey as a designer and the kind of challenges I had to overcome to achieve my understanding of the profession.

Is poor design education the cause of fetishisation?

When we graduated D-school as graphic designers, my classmates and I were quite confused about our role in the professional world, despite having studied design for 5 years. Terms like “design thinking” were often thrown around in casual conversation but what it was or how to think like a designer was never really elaborated upon.

Our curriculum chose to focus on building hard skills and encouraged us to solve every possible problem through the limited lens of graphic design. But not every issue can be solved using a beautifully typeset poster and not every story needs to be told through quirky illustrations. This sounds like common sense but it was a mindset that many of us had to actively break free from, once our schooling was over.

Can we blame non-designers for not fully understanding design when we ourselves needed so much time to figure out that the worth of design is not a sum of its visible outputs?

I am thankful today to be in a role where I get to be so much more than a creator, but aspiring designers, design students as well as young graduates are consciously or subconsciously told to limit themselves to their technical capabilities rather than being encouraged to form an analytical or thinking mindset.

Is poor design representation the cause of fetishisation?

Like Amy accurately points out, the overwhelming number of social media posts suggesting that good design can be achieved by following a few golden rules from a holy design bible, definitely does not help in dispelling the ill-conceived notions about design.

Meanwhile, a new category of design work has also popped up on social media, solely to cater to the eyes of other designers. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working on made-up projects and sharing creative explorations, but the lack of larger awareness about the design process leads people to believe that design is the creation of attractive visuals. This is not the individual creator’s fault but a systemic issue.

What looks good in pictures on the net is not always the right solution for a problem and the abundance of artistic explorations posing as design projects does not help. Most practicing designers can usually identify hypothetical projects because countless budget, technological and user constraints have to be kept in mind for real-world design, but perhaps not everyone can make the same distinction. Non-designers and even designers themselves, constantly confuse works of design and art with each other, which is detrimental to our professional integrity.

Are Design Sprints the cause of fetishisation?

Amy’s article seemed somewhat critical of the involvement of non-designers in the problem-solving stage. The cross-professional collaboration, which forms the basis of a Design Sprint, was described as “self-sabotage” for designers; and that stood out to me because my experience has been the exact opposite.

Admittedly, I have never been a part of a Design Sprint in Jake Knapp’s sense of the term, so my opinions should be read with a pinch of salt; but I have been a part of multiple teams where stakeholders of design, development, marketing, sales and business have come together to solve problems. I’ve found that collaborations of this nature have led the team members to give more value to what the others bring to the table.

My colleagues have realised that I am not only a maker of images and screens. As a designer, it is my job to identify and understand all kinds of problems, not just “design” problems, and think of ways to solve them in a manner which is meaningful to the user and the business, regardless of the solution having a “design” output.

The same has been true the other way around. I now have much more clarity about which problems my coworkers can solve or help me solve. Thanks to our constant collaborations, we are able to derive the best of each member’s expertise and also be more empathetic to each other’s requirements while planning projects. No one has ever felt that they can do the other person’s job better, in fact it has led to the creation of mutual trust.

The more we respect each other’s expertise the better we’ll work as a team. This will lead to better outputs and better outcomes, which in turn will make users happy and the business successful.

Perhaps, one perceivable downside to a Design Sprint is that it makes it seem like problem-solving is a five-day job and can be easily done by anybody, but working professionals as well as readers of Jake Knapp’s famous handbook will know that is far from the truth.

So what should we do about it?

Even though the majority of our work is done using critical thinking, the output is usually tangible. What others see is just the tip of the iceberg and our work is reduced to the colour palettes, font choices, layouts, grids, images and so on. While these are undeniably important components of good design, this is just one leg of what we do.

A lot of design work isn’t photogenic and social-media friendly. It is found in scrappy scribbles, convoluted mind maps and cluttered whiteboards. Our job is to first create these information and idea rich charts, then to simplify them, document them, pitch them to stakeholders, plan projects, ideate, prototype, test, change and finally solve real problems for real people. These aspects of our work need to be showcased truthfully for us to claim our worth as designers.