The design community is no longer grounded anywhere, anymore.
Dribbble, Linkedin, Reddit, Discord… where are we, anyway?
Meetup has become a ghost town. Designers are now grifters, selling classes for up to $150 a pop (an actual thing I have seen on meetup), and companies are deciding more and more how we spend our time having conversations about the future of our field. What’s going on? The landscape of design has changed into something unlike what we were once accustomed to. Even worse, people spend more time talking about problems than actually doing something to solve them, and now we’re seeing the death of real design discussion, in real time. It’s a serious problem that merits discussion — it could even be considered a larger and all-encompassing social phenomenon.
The tricky business of working against ourselves
We don’t think much of it, but the nature of our work requires that we question the conventional nature of things while also contributing to the conventional through the subtle grooming of market dynamics (think agile processes, work performance reviews, and corporate culture — and how they all indirectly contribute to the propping up of stock prices and the drive for higher consumer demand.) This contradiction causes some serious problems: we work against our best interests, even when we are doing the work that we attend to every day. Within a company, there is a status quo — one that must be upheld by management. This status quo is, in effect, parroted throughout the entire corporate structure and, in a sense, is necessary in order for the organization to function as a whole.
The problem comes when we step outside of these organizations — then, we must have real conversations beyond the homogenous corporate lens.
Going beyond the corporate lens means going beyond the interest of branding and recognition. It means the end of salaried interests and the desire to please the bosses and make ourselves useful to someone else. It also means seeing things in plain sight — getting to the real, unfiltered, and timeless principles of design, the kind of principles that do not and can not pander to any company or manufactured form of meaning that comes from social media influencing.
This kind of stripping of labels makes the effort to step outside of corporate homogeny nearly impossible — so difficult in fact that I have observed many design talks being held with corporate branding and under the corporate structure, even when the designers holding the discussions are outside of their working hours. This led to me asking myself the question, can designers really go anywhere that is not defined by corporate interests? It seemed like every meeting I went to, every discussion I attended, was headed by some larger company which acted as a sponsor or figurehead. The reality is, for some designers, working for the company really does not end when they stop designing in the office — in effect, they live and breathe the company and its values.
Why this is a problem, and why designers need independence
Social media companies — namely, Dribbble and Linkedin — have nullified the real discussion power that designers have in favor of face-value spiel and pretty UIs. By prioritizing pazazz over real discourse, these social media outlets reward creatives for what they can make other people feel more than what they actually express. Thus, marketing becomes the primary means by which actions are taken and what results is a buzzword-laden, profit focused scheme where everyone’s rise to the top is only inevitable — at least in their minds — if only they could just post more, design more, or be more.
We need a space where real conversations can happen
It’s not about profit anymore — it’s about our priorities. What is the design community doing that sets it apart from others? What can we do to increse our value not just in the workplace, but beyond the workplace? How can we build legitimacy in the tech industry without over-explaining ourselves and trying to justify our existence through processes and buzzwords?
When you peel away the layers of illusion in how we communicate as a whole, real conversations start to happen. When you look past all of the how-to guides and articles veiled as teaching something new instead of the same concept in a different format, you get to the heart of the knowledge that creates a real and lasting benefit.
The design community must also be more insular if it is going to survive
At first, we were very welcoming. We gave space to everyone — product management, engineering, and those transitioning from other spaces— and allowed them to come, giving them the tools to succeed without question. And while this created a very diverse community of people (whose backgrounds only add to the collective knowledge of design practice), it has not led to any overall improvement in how we practice design. We are still using methods commodified and discarded by corporate management. We are still stuck in a loop, fighting for customer advocacy and justifying our design decisions. Now, we have to keep our knowledge secret and guard what we know if we are to transform ourselves from being job seekers to job creators.
The new spaces we create must combine these two things
If we are going to create a new space for conversation and with new meaning, the space would have to occupy two domains: the domain of reasoning and the domain of intellectual ownership.
For example, the new space would have to allow designers to keep their design assets, even after they leave a company. The company would have to request special permission from the designer and even pay to use their assets — because even if the designer used the company’s design system to create the workflows, the design concepts are uniquely the designer’s. Thus, the designer themselves is the owner of the workflow and should be respect as such. This would allow for the insular effect needed to keep designers in a place of value beyond the transitory nature of corporate downsizing, and allow companies to see the real value of design. Because right now, we are being thrown away, our work becoming more or less another overlooked part of the whole.
If another designer or engineer were to do this, it would revolutionize how design is seen as a profession.
Our future is in our hands
As designers, our creative and technical knowledge makes us incredible valuable to any team — it’s time to make that value apparent to the companies that overlook it. Instead of sharing our knowledge within the walls of companies that profit from it, why don’t we share it within a space where profit is internal rather than external? It’s because the world we live in teaches us that the only way to profit is through the external — recognition, promotion, and attention. To overcome this, we’ll need to focus on what matters — the real conversations and principles, the ones that don’t need a company’s brand or sleazy, trend-focused marketing to be seen or heard.
