Our role in shaping a brilliant future
What is the future of design? Us.
Let's design a better future, together.
Design can be defined as problem solving. To do that we need to know which problem to solve and how best to solve it. There are also ethics to be considered, are we making decisions that will affect people’s lives? The answer is always yes, and requires is to adopt a more inclusive approach, working collaboratively with the people we serve to more deeply understand the nature of the problems and to invent new solutions, anticipating their efficacy. In doing do we not only uphold a commitment to the people we serve but we also reduce the risk of investing in something that won’t hit the mark.
But design is not only about problem identification, democratized participation and systems understanding. It is also about creativity, imagination, and idea generation. What kind of future are we trying to create? What is our social contract with the people we serve and how will we manifest our brand promise? What does it look like and feel like. How will it work? How might we chart the path to get there? What systems will need to change to make it a reality?
We, as designers in the technical revolution have focused on the craft of weaving and shaping the digital medium. We shaped the internet, piece by piece. But we know that even as technology has helped to solve many problems, it has created new problems, and it has yet to offer solutions to the largest problems facing humanity.
We, as individuals in a larger society are dependent upon the systems and organizations that provide us with jobs, food, healthcare, and security. Leaders who run businesses and policy makers who govern are in a seat of power and often are not aware of, expert in, or invested in different methods of looking at and solving problems. Business is focused on optimization, value extraction, and profit in service to shareholders and often misses out on its potential role to have a larger impact on people’s lives and envisioning new ways to serve society as a whole. Folks working within business are leveraging their analytical skills to plot a series of tactics and often lack a clear, unifying or inspirational vision that their organization is committed to working towards.
This is where design adds value. Design is generative as opposed to reductive. It is creative as opposed to analytical and is open to ambiguity and risk as opposed to relying on oft false perceptions of reality and general risk aversion.
Design has a history of moving through many mediums and permutations from sculpture, painting, and architecture to interiors and aesthetics, to typography, graphic design and desktop publishing to brand, advertising and digital design and we're on the cusp of a new revolution.
The new era of design will not involve pixel pushing, inventing new digital doodads, agile attainment of MVPs, or analyzing how we might manipulate constituents into performing the tasks a business wants them to do.
The new era of design will involve a grassroots commitment to serving the masses, to reshaping business, to imagining new futures, to designing new systems. To do this we will need to opt out rigid roles as much as our obligations allow, or attempt to evolve them from within, while also infiltrating leadership and business roles.
The new era of design will leverage social science, behavior science, systems thinking, futures thinking, ethics, philosophy, creativity and even meditation. Our activities will be research, convening for co-creative idea generation, story telling, vision work, intervention design and systems design. Designers will be infused in government and the organizations who let them chart the path will achieve great success.
The new era of design will weave us into the act of making good on all that we believe. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness - the upholding of human dignity and true equity. A commitment to reducing harm and suffering, considering consequences, and maintaining a focus on human wellbeing, relationships, and experiences. We will design for joy, for peace, and for lives well lived. We will design for people to thrive within the bounds of what our natural home will support so that future generations as well as those in the present can live as vibrantly as possible. This isn't tech optimism; this is human optimism. Gloom and doom are everywhere, let's chart a path for the future we want to live in.
We are not servants of the economy even as we are dependent on it, we are the ushers of a new way of thinking and we won’t be beaten down. We will find glimmers of hope in people who believe as we do and when we deliver success, it won’t be measured in profit, though that will come, but instead on human flourishing. This is my hope, the future I would like to see.
