Design is Changing [Part 3]

Designers may have to face up to the facts that we are not necessarily the one’s who will forge the future as leaders. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that other professions are acquiring the edge with leadership. At the minimum, they are learning new leadership skills that we may be ignoring or simply not seeing. This is kind of challenging to think about. After all, aren’t we the ones with all the ideas? Well - maybe not. Is this a problem – or is this a big opportunity? Despite the tendency to think of ourselves as leaders maybe we do not think of design as leadership. There is a difference there in case you missed it. Let’s look closer…

What is required of us in this new context? What is design leadership? How can we be involved in the process of leadership? These are important questions.

It is in fact all about increasing the scope of design – expanding our notion of design and what this ‘mysterious’ activity called design really is.

In traditional design education programs, we have tended to focus on the “how” of design. In other words, we have been focusing on tools, techniques, acquiring software skills, mastering the tactical responses that a designer can employ to solve discipline specific problems. This has evolved to include in higher-level programs, design management and planning for recognizable problems within the general terrain of the designer. However, we must now question whether this is adequate. The situation definitely suggests a renewed emphasis on the “how” of design - the processes and skills that enable designers to solve problems and generate innovations.

The “how” of contemporary design may be broken down into three structural components, of which two are widely acknowledged and utilized within design practice. A third category represents a new area of skills yet to be fully assimilated into what designers are generally perceived to do.

The first category of skill can be described as the mastering tools and technologies. This usually involves working with digital technologies; computers and peripherals [scanners, cameras etc] and software programs and systems: Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, HTML, AutoCAD etc. It could be noted that often this kind of work is carried out by individuals working alone.

A second category is the skillset involved with problem solving, as defined elsewhere in this article. This is acquiring and mastering the ability to work within the traditional territory of design process on structured, but mostly small problems on the scale of designing a website, advertisement, visual identity and exhibition etc. For the most part this level of work is normally carried out by individuals and teams comprised of designers working within a single design discipline. The process here utilizes the category one skills of tools and technologies.

Given the increasing complexity we are dealing with, a new and rapidly emerging need for designers with a third category of skills is now evident. At this point, there are more questions than answers about this. Globalization has brought with it challenges that make much of our previous work appear very simplistic – consequently there are skills required by designers that are new and not yet clearly defined.

We now need to become adept at working with unstructured problems. As alluded to earlier, many contemporary problems are difficult to define clearly. This means we need to be strategic in our approach. Synchronization and organization of parallel processing of complex, unstructured problems is becoming increasingly sought after by business requiring solutions and innovation from multi-disciplinary teams. We must ask questions about how we work with other professions and importantly about how we educate our up and coming designers – the future of our profession. If we miss this opportunity, we miss the possibility to lead as designers.

Training in this kind of process is missing from most design education programs. The point here being that other professions have already realised the trends and directions and are preparing themselves to cope with the inevitable changes. To make this easier to process, let’s make comparisons between where we are as a profession now – and where we need to head to as a profession.


©Ian McArthur 2005