I have been going back and forth with this question for months the reason being as I draw closer to finishing my Masters in Digital Design and reflect on the people I have met and the things I have been fed the past year, I can’t help but wonder what makes a designer -a designer- in the first place as we shift from classical understanding of what a designer does. Can it be an anthropologist who is designing a research method to uncover some social aspect of a culture? Is it my mom when she makes patterns on a kibbeh tray?
Nowadays, designers relish to define themselves as problem solvers and decision makers in shaping a better world… Easier said than done though and while we’re at it, it is not something exclusive to designers. My sister has done an astounding job redecorating her house to make it look spacious and bigger. Would that make her an interior designer? If it does then great, but for a living, she works in shipping and logistics. Lets say she takes that success story to a new level and helped me and others redocorate and feel psychologically better about our habitation, would that make her a designer?
Many people have provided great design value. While they are the designers of something, yet… they are not designers in general or by profession and do not identify themselves to be so.
Surely, the understanding of what a designer does has evolved over time; And for the longest time, the stereotype -with a kernel of truth to it — was that designers make things with good aesthetic appearance and functionality. More so, even designers feel that their most predominant role is to spend hours within a design software making stuff. Yet, we have opened up to a new philosophy of what we do and became advocates for our added value. We are not only makers, we are problem solvers. We do not push pixels, we facilitate workshops. We might still pick color palettes, but we frame product strategies.
Do we?
Ok great, in that case what do product strategists do? Or managers?
If we are opening up to a new definition of what designers do from hereon by stating that we are problems solvers of complex ecosystems, then what makes us so unique? Seemingly, so many non-designers are designing these solutions as well (pun intended).
The fact whether these people qualify the label “designers” is not the issue I am pondering on, but rather the concern goes as follows: As designers shift from hours of crafting with their tools to solving problems of complex ecosystems where is their added value when many others are doing that job so well?
The most common joke among designers the past year is that the vaccine for Covid-19 was being delayed because the designer is not making up their mind about the packaging design. Funny. But this is what a designer classically does, assumes to do, and assumed to be doing. Whereas the fellows who are mixing chemicals, testing antidotes, prototyping a vaccine, testing on lab rats, refining then testing on humans, assessing results, and testing again, and implementing something called “Adaptive Design” are not designers at all but rather 2 physicians. And surely, fighting a pandemic cannot be done by 2 physicians in isolation but probably with an extensive team of medical researchers, scientists and engineers and more. But if there’s a designer on that team, then they probably don’t have a “designer” in their title -because they are something else or more- and if there is, they’d probably don’t have a good seat at the table.
So where does that leave us? Personally, a bit frustrated. Because I feel that we are suffering from megalomania. Let’s call spade a spade: the best solutions are not being designed by designers. And we can surely look on and admire them. But while we’re doing that, can we not pretend that we are the essence behind great creations?
