January 21, 2021

Enacting (Acting) Ennobling

“Our worst comes out when we behave like robots or professionals.” Fernando Flores

“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.”

Brian Reed

“Why is it that when it comes time for a company to replace its CEO, every other department and discipline are routinely considered? Operations, finance, sales, law… It is almost never a creative person. Why? Well, organizations look for people and processes that provide efficiency, predictability and control. And let’s be honest, those are not words that leap to mind when describing the creative process, which is by nature inefficient, unpredictable and out of control. Companies want to reduce risks. The creative process demands that you take risks. But the irony is, for anyone who hasn’t gotten the memo on the 21st century, perhaps the riskiest thing any organization can do is to not put creativity at the center of its strategy and culture.” (Hirshberg)

The way professional design makes sense of its role in society is changing. Observing the roles professional design has played over the decades designers are making authentic personal decisions about whether to accept the roles they have inherited. Because designing is a pervasive human trait, every human being a designer, whether intentionally or not. If we understand creativity as a birthright and recognize that every human being by virtue of their choices and behaviors, is a designer of sorts (Fry, Kimbell, Manzini, Nelson, Norman, Oosterling), then the challenge for emerging designers is to invent and live into new creative leadership roles with respect to consumer society. This redistributed framing of design agency up-levels the role of the professional designer to one of strategic leadership that connects inner change to cultural change, and raises our expectations of the professional’s role across all the designed systems we touch.

Many designers in training are turned off by the thought that every human being is a designer, because it appears to make their role redundant —or at least less significant. And they are correct in recognizing that traditional roles of the professional designer — form-giver and stylist— are artifacts of the past, awkwardly out of phase with the needs of present times. Those reactive and tactical roles have designers responding rather than initiating. In developed nations, cultures of shopping and consumption have made professionally designed products and services prominent signifiers of success, lovability and security. In market cultures where not just the designed but also the designer are branded with a trendy celebrity mystique, professional designers occupy a uniquely public role. And although it may seem unlikely, the role of the professional designer actually parallels the role of the public intellectual because both design work products and design positioning hold the potential to both enable and to limit participatory citizenship.

In its infancy, professional design was a tool of industry and government. In these limited early roles, the designer role was limited to aesthetics and styling with little integration with other phases of the product development process. Guiding assumptions and decisive factors were determined, before the designer had any influence. In its childhood, professional design distributed the values of modernity— freedom and autonomy, convenience and speed, rationalization and efficiency, homogenization and globalization to consumers. As the design professions reflected various societal transformations, the designer’s limited role of form-giver eventually came to encompass not only beautiful and seductive objects, environments, graphic identities, and imaginary worlds, but also multivalent forms of public communication including interfaces, interactions, systems and product platforms, strategies, processes, programs, services as well as experiences. Professional design in its youth reveled in expression of relativistic lived experiences and celebrated the poly-versity of our desires, drives, pleasures and values. Now entering its early adulthood, professional design is reviewing and reflecting on its own history and becoming increasingly conscious about its role in society. As products of modernity themselves, the design professions are, evolutionarily speaking, growing up and growing out of adolescence and into the season of young adulthood, and in so doing, meeting the world in unprecedented kinds of ways that hold ever-greater challenges and possibilities for lifelong learning and expansion. As a result, emerging professional designers are less inclined to drink the designer mystique Kool-Aid.

The world has never been more in need of what design can contribute, yet for the current generation of young artists, designers and cultural workers, life during a paradigm shift means facing the challenge of quantifying the nature of what they are capable of, and how they will choose to contribute to the world at large. In a 21st century marketplace full of DIY design tools, what if anything does the word designer mean? As design thinking gains mainstream societal credibility necessary to contribute to social good. We have a range of tools, frameworks and practices that allow us to meet and often exceed market expectations for our offerings. In the global professional context, practice, strategy, and pedagogy now enjoys professional regard, having reached a stage that we might call maturing orthodoxy (King) and thus we find ourselves ready for the next leap.

If every human being is a designer, then the role of the professional designer has never been more crucial. By demonstrating that design is particularly suited to those social messes — the wicked problems that characterize our world today and that have no simple root causes, nor linear solutions, professional designers can enact strategic leadership roles and demonstrate the value of design to any challenge worth addressing. Because culture is a carrier for emergent societal memes, designers can help facilitate the necessary and inevitable coming shifts to a thriving and equitable society. Along with scientists, engineers and other experts, designers are needed on development and research teams for their expansive, non-linear approach to prototyping mediations capable of enacting our values and agreements.

As design thinking approaches and methods become increasingly diffused into mainstream business environments, there will be increasing opportunity for designers to have influence in C-Suite executive roles in the for-profit and non-profit sectors. These leadership roles will require expanded toolkits encompassing project and team management, collaboration and more. In his commencement address to the 2015 class of the UCLA School of Art and Architecture, “THE UNIVERSITY OF MY EYEBALLS, OR WHY”CREATIVES” SHOULD BE LEADING CORPORATIONS” alumnus and Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg, quoted above, urges creatives to think bigger about their leadership potential and their spheres of influence. His role at Activision is a preview of the decentering of control and command managerial styles in favor of dynamic nonlinear managerial approaches of the cultural creative. Hirshberg urges creatives to aim high despite cultural messages that creative types are not suited to executive leadership, and to not be content with being stereotyped as a zany but peripheral member of the organization.

“You’re going to leave here and start a creative career. And as soon as you do, you’ll see. There will be a department, or sometimes an entire industry who’s job it is to handle you, to manage you, to coddle you. They’re going to call you things like”The Creatives” or “The Developers” or “The Talent.” They’re going to give you a creative club-house to work in. And it’s great in there. They’ve got M&Ms in there. There are beanbags in there. You get to wear your flip-flops in there. It’s awesome. But it’s also marginalizing. Don’t take the bait. Don’t hide behind your creativity…Because what’s happening on the other side of that wall is that all of the really big decisions that have the most impact on your ability to do something amazing are being made without your voice, or most times ANY creative person’s voice at the table.” (Hirshberg)

In writing this from the point of view of a late Baby Boomer (middle-aged) design professional, I hope to convey my excitement about the palpable changes showing up in various design ecosystems today. By means of skillful concepts, communications, and propositions designers are in the process of enacting a new kind of professional, social and political role and in the process participating in the building of an ennobling role for the design professions. My hope is that we professionals in the design industries can leverage our situated cultural positions, and raise our social status from responsive servants to proactive leaders. In “growing up” professional design will become serious by engaging matters of ultimate concern. The collective project of healthy destabilization of design practice awaits us. Let’s get on with it.

Previous post Dying (Living) “Grief is not a feeling; it’s a skill” Stephen Jenkinson Tim Wilson’s achingly beautiful film Griefwalker is a close study of the Next post Enforming (Forming) “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. — Marshall Mc Luhan In The Human Age, Diane Ackerman considers the