The end of the useful idiot

This recent piece in Fast Company was bothering me. I’ve been in work for almost 20 years soon and I’ve heard people talk about the lack of business acumen in design since I was a student. I posit that something else is happening as ‘design thinking as a service’ enters its mid life crisis.

• Design isn’t special anymore. Most people in the knowledge economy have had to sit through a post-it session of some kind at least once and they probably hated it. (I personally believe most post-it sessions to be largely performative, obfuscate power structures and a waste of perfectly good paper but that’s not the point I’m trying to make). So expectations of an ROI in design are higher as people now expect it to be worth the time and effort more quickly. Most commissioners of design would also love to ask someone to do some design work *over there* and never get involved. They’d love to treat designers like plumbers and see as little of us as possible. So we’re really irritating when we ask them to spend time with us to educate us about their problem. It’s especially grating when 5 different agencies have worked with them in the last few years, each of them deploying the same tricks and techniques. It feels like Groundhog Day. The magic is gone.
• There are no design apprenticeship schemes. There is no ramp between design degrees and fast paced, high stress work that needs to be done for an impatient client. Nobody wants to see a young person struggle on some live client work and nobody wants to pay for it. At my work, we had to create a graduate scheme to create such a ramp and I don’t see many others do the same. No young people in work means no experience for younger people means no healthy challenges of our approaches and ideas in design. We’re all just copying models set in the late 90s without challenging them. And the first generation of design thinking practitioners are starting to retire without helping younger people kick some bins around to keep things fresh.
• The death of institutional memory. I like public sector backlogs because it at least pretends that the internet is good at keeping an organisation’s collective memory alive. (It’s not but that’s not the point). Idealistically, if organisations had a record of decisions made about design on the internet, maybe they could remember what their colleagues who left last year thought about the bit of design work that was done. Maybe that diary of decisions, reflections, lessons learnt could lead to better commissioning next time. Wouldn’t that be nice?
• Designers hate politics. Designers understand change in terms of their own tools alone but don’t recognise how much they owe to traditional social sciences. The designers I hang out with abhor politics but to quote Ai Wei Wei, Everything is art, Everything is politics. The best design work is the work of convincing someone to change their mind. Everything else is technique. It’s detail. It’s the stuff you shouldn’t ever talk about except to other designers at niche conferences. But other designers don’t pay your bills. Architects and designers who work in advertising understand this more I think, but I’ve met too many designers who are in love with technique alone and often dogmatic about it. Yes it might get some things done, but someone has to change their mind about commissioning you to do it over the next guy.

I think all of these things contribute to some commissioning fatigue and a distracted boyfriend glance at AI. Maybe the computers will do design more quickly? They’ll definitely ask less questions. And they won’t have post-its.

(It’s late and there’s not quite a point here, but rage blogging is one way to spend a Friday night. As always I’d appreciate any comments below).