The vanishing designer

An Article by Chuánqí Sun

Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.

  1. ​The same, the same, the same​
  2. ​Design as an engineering problem​
  3. ​The heat death of design​
  4. ​Design with courage​

This essay is so good I basically had to quote the whole thing.

  1. The same, the same, the same

    Look around us. Every business is an app and every app feels the same, because every designer has the same resume, follows the same process, graduates from the same program, uses the same tool, scrolls the same Dribbble feed, reads the same Medium articles, expects the same career outcome, lives in the same ideology bubble.

  2. Design as an engineering problem

    The Silicon Valley giants, testifying with their runaway success, claimed to have “solved” design as an engineering problem. The solution substituted the human essence of design — intuition, ingenuity, and taste— with the tangibles, measurables, and deliverables.

    Companies say they are “design-driven”, but designers are actually driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU. We rigorously run tests, studies, experiments as if innovative ideas are hidden in spreadsheets, waiting to be extracted by data scientists.

  3. The heat death of design

    Losing the design diversity means falling into a singular narrative of how design must be done, which grants unfair and self-reinforcing advantage to the mainstream while discouraging, stifling, or even punishing the idiosyncratic designers who bring unorthodox but remarkably innovative processes to the table. The true opportunity cost is the diverse future that humanity can no longer access.

    A future without diversity is fundamentally stagnant: imagine designs so standardized that you can’t tell them apart. While every design is guaranteed to be good, none will be great. New designs are marginally better than previous ones with the rate of improvement eventually approaching zero. We have reached the heat death of design.

  4. Design with courage

    1. Make a bold decision (that is controversial).
    2. Make a mistake (as a result of a bold decision).
    3. Challenge “conventional wisdom”.
    4. Challenge authority (that preaches conventional wisdom).
    5. Challenge hierarchy (that perpetuates conventional wisdom).
    6. Ignore the committee (and the need to converge).
    7. Decide who your clients are (and aren’t).
    8. Ignore clients that aren’t (especially those who pay the most).
    9. Cultivate clients if none exists (instead of compromising your design).
    10. Be a generalist (and ignore your job title).
    11. Be a specialist (who specializes in being a generalist).
    12. Design things from scratch (and build them yourself from scratch).
    13. Design things that no one wants (yet).
    14. Design freely (and think freely).
    1. ​The boldest decisions​