02: Invisible progress

Not all design is art, but there are enough designed objects in museums that are detached from their original context and viewed as art to make this point. Design is visual, it’s meant to be seen, right?

The Western European design tradition, ironically some of the design that fills up museums, says no. Dieter Rams’s famous principles of good design make it plain, “design is as little design as possible” and “design is unobtrusive”. Design should feel natural, part of the space, like it always belonged there, design is invisible. You shouldn’t have to think about whether to push or pull that door. You should be able to check out in one click. This hyper minimalist approach to design has taken over the digital design world, and for good reason. When the goal is to reduce friction and get the user to convert, minimalism is a great way to do that. And if you can do it beautifully so that when someone does notice they are impressed, then you’ve got a winning combination on your hands, Jony Ive.

I started in design right around when design thinking was becoming more common in business and when “UX” became known by most tech workers. Design wasn’t about visuals, it’s about how you think, the methodologies you use, how you change the strategy of the business, how you change the hearts and minds of those at the table you just got a seat to. Maybe it’s because it’s what I was taught, but I agree with this definition of design. Design is being intentional, and intention requires thinking, organization, and methodologies. User experience is extremely important, but for most companies it’s invisible or boiled down to soft satisfaction metrics. In even more companies it’s still understood as “screens” because nuance is always lost when a concept like user experience is traded amongst job functions.

So why were so many designers hired in the past 10 years? While I truly believe most designers are doing true, deep design thinking and UX work, that’s not what most business leaders saw. Either because the designer didn’t have time to explain the depth of their thinking, or because the leader was separated 4 layers from the work, what they saw was a screen. Often a static screen, sometimes a prototype, rarely an HTML/CSS prototype that would probably need to be translated to React. But the output was a screen nonetheless.

Designing for something that isn’t a standard screen is certainly not new. I remember being interested in conversational design after college, but the job market was tough and designing screens was a safer bet and I had student loans to pay.

But now we’re all designing for conversational experiences. AI has fundamentally changed what many designers are working on right now. Either we’re being pressured to adopt AI for our screen generation or we’re designing how the AI interacts with the user through system prompts, harnesses, and evals. A lot of us are contributing front-end code, but that’s still a screen that some engineer has to connect to the real data. And you probably aren’t even writing that code, so are you really contributing code or is Claude?

I think this is going to be a tough few years for design. Not because we’re not needed, as an engineering leader reminded me, HCI has been around for almost 50 years, but the current expectations of the UX field are just a sliver of what HCI has to offer. We’ve been hired to create an artifact and we don’t need to create that artifact anymore, at least in the minds of other disciplines who are creating their own artifacts that look close enough. All of the UI generation tools, Claude Design, v0, Figma Make, Lovable, etc. are generating a plausible-looking screen, even if the design isn’t strong. I would argue we were never really creating that artifact to begin with. With all the tools provided by Figma, components from Design Systems teams, and infinite inspiration online, to say the output was created by a designer is hand-waving away a lot of work done by other people and things.

I’ve been interested in decentering design for a few months now and it has brought to my attention just how narrow my idea of design and ownership was. Yes, design is an industry that’s currently built on visible artifacts and “screens.” When those artifacts go away, LinkedIn lights up with accusations that design is dead. And most opinions I’ve heard about this are not that design is unnecessary, designers know that there is more than the artifact, but instead that the artifact is how we’re judged, hired, and promoted. Losing that artifact means losing our livelihoods. That’s extremely important, but the solution isn’t to double down on owning that artifact. Who was that artifact really serving? And who was it really solving for? A beautiful and incredibly organized Figma file never makes it into the hands of users. The artifact is for the designer, other designers who might admire it, and future hiring managers they want to impress. It is meant to highlight the thinking of the designer, but it does not bring forward the ideas of their collaborators, users, and the systems around them. I think we should follow the Design Justice Network’s lead and “prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.”

Design thinking doesn’t hide design; it brings many different ideas to the forefront and makes sure the softest spoken are still heard. In its best implementation it brings forth the perspective of the humans and communities interacting with the software. Dot voting, participatory design sessions, collaborative decision-making; these methods and many others highlight the value of design without requiring a screen and often the final artifact is less valuable than the conversations had during each session. The visibility of a system (through conversation) is more important than the ability to control or understand that system (through artifacts). This is not in conflict with Dieter Rams, or the broader Western Design tradition, but it isn’t harmonious with it either. It’s a separate way of viewing design, one that centers on the person rather than the artifact. And we can take this further, not only considering the person, but including the environment, processes, and systems our designs impact. Design should highlight what is typically ignored; design must illuminate.

I do believe design should become more visible, partly for the careers of designers, but also for the users they serve. But it’s a different kind of visibility, one that makes the system visible rather than the designer. Flows, diagrams, and journeys that highlight where a system breaks, who it fails, who it’s leaving out, and what happens underneath the visuals. It’s still an artifact, but one that reveals the seams rather than trying to hide them behind a beautiful interface. We should spend more time on understanding the impact our technology has and sharing that impact, not on how we can impose our will on that technology.