Design for the World of Future
or why designers should be capable of creating more than just interfaces
How did the main thief and murderer of the XX century, Adolf Hitler, take power?
He did so quite legally: his party won 40% of the vote in the 1933 parliamentary elections. After the victory, Hitler declared himself the leader of the nation, but the Germans didn’t mind much. Moreover, they craved to follow him.
But six years earlier, only 4% of Germans supported the Nazis. We could dive into studying his biography and speeches to understand the ideas he and his party promoted and assess Germany’s socio-economic condition at that time. But instead, I suggest looking at this story from the designers’ point of view.
The future Führer increased the conversion of his product tenfold in six years. That happened without the Internet and even television! And if most Germans had not supported him at first, why did they eventually follow him? What was the secret of his success?
For a designer, history is not just about names, dates, or significant events. It’s about people and their desires. Everyone has always been driven by their aspirations or passion, sometimes frantic and even stupid. Some desires led to devastating nonsense and death, while others caused great discoveries and victories.
Desires and aspirations. It seems that psychology might help us understand these phenomena. Then, let’s put the hats of psychologists on!
Hitler, like any populist, spoke rosy banalities. But he closed his eyes, covered his face with clenched fists, and, getting overwhelmed with emotion and excitement, spoke to the audience. The latter responded with ecstasy. Hitler’s success was that the Germans of that time were going through the same feelings as he was. Hitler assumed that everyone who lived in this humiliated country and who came to listen to him felt like a small, useless person who could not cope with their problems. A person like himself. Of course, in addition to being able to speak to people, Hitler also knew what to tell them. He was aware of the things troubling society and based his speeches on proposing simple solutions to their problems. He communicated the ideas of Nazism in a way that made them resonate with almost every German of that time. So Hitler’s success was not so much political as psychological.
Designers used to work exclusively on design. Their task was to wrap the functionality into an attractive form. But now, especially with technological progress, we see that the value of design is not just in the aesthetic wrapper. Design is about solving problems and creating communication between those with problems and those with solutions. And if we understand design as a way of communication, then we cannot stay exclusively in the field of aesthetics and beauty. Solving human problems is a complex task requiring a wealth of experience, extensive knowledge, and a variety of skills.
Putting the historian’s hat on, we can gain such experience and knowledge. With the psychologist’s hat on, we can find out what people feel today, what desires drive or, on the contrary, frustrate them. By understanding and analyzing this information, we can offer an effective solution where the interface is only one part of it.
It would seem that people of the 21st century should be rational, progressive, and intelligent. But no. Your users will include anti-vaxxers, homeopathy adepts, and those who avoid the number 13. And these are also behavior patterns you can’t discard.
It’s incredible what people can believe in: the gods on Olympus and Valhalla, the flat earth, UFOs, the great Führer, the communist utopia. Our beliefs will always drive our decisions, and there’s nothing that can put a stop to it.
Design tools and trends will change over time. It doesn’t matter if you work in Figma or Sketch; create applications in realism or functional minimalism. But a designer who knows how to research people’s desires and problems will always be demanded on the market.
My strong belief is that the world will be a better place when designers learn to be more than just designers. To do more than just interfaces following Nielsen Norman Group guides. To have a grasp of not only design but also history, psychology, natural sciences, art.
Here are a couple of my favorite examples of multidisciplinary designer teams already making the world a better place.
Neri Oxman, an American-Israeli designer and head of the Massachusetts University of Technology Media Lab, has a team of Pi designers (experts in two subjects instead of one) who work on various projects. Blending their knowledge of geology, art, and design, they created a 3D printer that builds structures out of glass. And their expertise in biology, architecture, and design, allowed the team to design the building dome made with a robot and 6,500 silkworms. This dome is an organic building created to study the biological structure of the silkworm cocoon in an enlarged size. To build it, Oxman and her team tracked the movements of the insects and developed the robotic arm algorithm.
Oxman’s design philosophy is about moving from consuming nature as a geological resource to editing it as a biological one. To achieve this, she argues that science, engineering, design, and art must be actively interconnected, and each discipline’s outcome will serve as an entry point for the other. For that, our world apparently needs designers able to do more than just colorize and move pixels.
Digital product designers are professionals who can change the future of humanity. I’m sure Don Norman will agree with me. He was one of the initiators of an exciting project that confirms this thesis. His team sent anthropologists to the regions in the United States isolated due to natural obstacles and the historical context of development, and they studied people living there. The team’s goal was to find the answer to only one question: why do these regions have the highest mortality rate in the country? The people living there had the most cases of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Eventually, it turned out they were getting sick because of their overweight problems. And they occur due to poor nutrition, smoking, and alcoholism, which in turn appear because of the lack of work (initially, the majority of locals were working in the mines, but the state has long shut them down) and, ultimately, boredom.
The situation changed dramatically after the provision of high-speed Internet to those places. It connected people with the outside world and allowed for technological solutions to improve the situation. A variety of digital products for communication, telemedicine, education, and work have alleviated the crisis in those regions.
Another striking example of creating a better world of the future is the Ukrainian team named Agents of Change. Kyiv has gained excellent navigation, an address generator, and several urban projects thanks to their efforts and wide design expertise. With their work, Agents of Change create things that bring the city’s communication with citizens to a whole new level.
Understanding history, psychology, physics, economics, geography, or any other science opens the way for designers to create the world of the future. It is impossible to work on our future without understanding how we have become who we are today.
Sure, in our time of clip thinking, when the wars are often unfolding not only for territories or wallets but our attention, we often lack the willpower to study art, history, or psychology systematically.
However, are there any appealing alternatives? Are you ready to spend your whole life looking at screens that take up more and more space just to create another digital experience? Is it possible to actually change something by remaining exclusively in the virtual dimension of pixels and letters?
The examples above prove that acknowledged designers of our time are eventually moving from virtuality to reality to change this world. And if you also dare to take this step into the world of the future, start with studying the world of the past.
Thank you for reading!
If you found this or any of my articles useful, you can support me on my Substack or by buying me a coffee 🤗
