The economy is tanking, and the market is flooding with experienced designers. It is now more challenging than ever to get a job as a junior designer. But the world needs you, please don’t give in. — My experience My first couple of years out of uni were a complete failure. I started an ambitious company that never got off the ground, I applied for hundreds of graphic design and UX jobs and rarely even got a response. …

The most important skill for our young people in the future is to be able to solve problems creatively. — The role of schooling Universal schooling is a relatively new concept. At some point, we as a society decided what subjects we thought were necessary for people to learn. These subjects (maths, literature, languages and sciences etc) were derived from what skills we thought necessary for society in general.

DesignOps to design orgs is like what permaculture is to gardens. Here are three takeaways from permaculture design to challenge the way you do DesignOps. What is permaculture and what can we learn from it? Analogies are powerful ways to innovate, so by utilising permaculture techniques for building design orgs, we can hopefully try something new and increase our chances…

The religion of moving fast and breaking things has stressed us out and left us broken. Is this the only way to successfully build a product, or can we use design to do things differently? — The religion of fast product As the Facebook doctrine for success goes, move fast and break things. This is a ritual practised by many of the most evangelical product companies out there, but all too often it ends up being the people that get broken.

The last 20 years will be remembered as the get-rich-quick age of tech startups. We have leveraged cheap money, cheap fuel and cheap users to get ahead, but all that is changing. Now is the time for designers to step up and shape the future of entrepreneurship. — Why are things changing? Many of big tech’s largest companies have just laid off significant parts of their workforce. Economic conditions are changing and these companies are forced to review their financing strategies. Cheap money is gone and so too will the companies that could only survive in those conditions. …

Despite specific programs and corporate promises, designers are not getting the training they need. Here are some of the issues behind it and some considerations on we can do it better. — So what’s the problem? In a landscape of rapid growth, where there is more demand for designers than there has ever been before, the industry needs to find a balance between extracting from designers and investing in them. …

Designers are passionate about their craft but sometimes their desire to excel gets battered by the pragmatism of doing business. — What is prestige? When I talk about prestige here, I am meaning a designer's desire for success, their desire for greatness. The desire that we as designers feel to create something of quality. The desire to show the world that we are valuable and become respected by our peers.

Designing for money alone is meaningless and boring. What designers want is to make a positive impact on the human experience, but to achieve that, they need a purpose they can really get behind. — What is purpose? Humans are funny creatures. We have developed in such a strange and complex way, all in the name of survival, yet with the tools we learned to survive, we began to develop a range of experiential sensations. One of these tools, storytelling, enabled us to make sense of what it…

How can we bring more playfulness into our work lives? — What is the designer’s soul? Designers are naturally curious, creative, and playful. They are not afraid to challenge the status quo or sink their teeth into a juicy challenge. It is this light-heartedness that lets us break free from our current, conditioned ways of thinking, and come up with game-changing innovations. As Einstein said: We…