Core77

An exceptionally thought-provoking piece went up on Design Observer today, in which Michael Bierut asks a sort of unthinkable question: do designers really, honestly want to move up the decision-making chain?

Given the amount of talk over the last few years about getting designers involved earlier in the decision making process, its a question that goes right to the core of what the future of design will be. This past April's IDSA Western Regional Conference featured a keynote talk by John Barratt, President of Teague, specifically on this potential: by leveraging the current association between designers and executives, he posits, we can establish ourselves as a potent decision making entity independent of our traditional caretakers in the engineering, marketing or executive departments. Such a call to action is perfectly in line with articles, talking heads and BusinessWeek covers of the past decade, arguing for an ever increasing role in corporate strategy for designers.

Bierut sums up this strategy nicely, through his own experiences as a graphic designer to large corporate clients:

The client asks you to design a business card. You respond that the problem is really the client's logo. The client asks you to design a logo. You say the problem is the entire identity system. The client asks you to design the identity. You say that the problem is the client's business plan. And so forth. One or two steps later, you can claim whole industries and vast historical forces as your purview. The problem isn't making something look pretty, you fool, it's world hunger!

But he quickly makes a detour into some raw terrain. Drawing on parallels with the "pretty but dumb" stereotype so pervasive in Western culture--borne out by last week's highly entertaining Miss Teen South Carolina "our children need more maps" debacle--Bierut suggests that perhaps the current vogue for elevating designers into decision-making positions has less to do with our fitness for the task, and more to do with our need to feel relevant.

It's a surprisingly convincing argument, especially since it doesn't specifically counter the prevailing wisdom that designers have the capacity to make good strategic decisions. Rather, he asks if this is what we really want to be doing, and why we feel it's not enough to create compelling images, intuitive tools, forms that touch us emotionally. Perhaps it's something as simple as designers being human and needing to be loved, as Morrissey sang, just like everybody else does. Or at least recognized for doing something worthwhile. Perhaps it's because for many sub-disciplines of design, career advancement requires being interested in things like business plans, or at least pretending too, and therefore relinquishing some of the hands-on aspects of the job--how many design managers have you meant who lament the paucity of opportunities in their current position to simply do some occasional sketching?

Bierut's solution, as much as there can be one, is a simple acknowledgement that making things look good is a necessary and worthy part of the product development process, but it might be broader than that. Perhaps it's also necessary to meet designers halfway, by recognizing that just as an understanding of the business process can benefit the flounciest of creatives, an understanding of the design process could benefit the most staid of John Hodgeman-esque suits. Visual and tactile communication can, in fact, be as valid and useful as numerical and verbal forms, and I for one wouldn't mind not being the only one in the meeting who knows how to draw.