A Designer’s Guilt
Before start reading I’d like to tell you that this post made me go out of my comfort zone. You can see it like a message in the bottle left in the middle of the ocean, hoping for some readers who can receive the message, who can receive the S.O.S. from a designer.
Let me give you a little bit of background of my story. I studied Product Design and got a masters degree on Service Design. 6 years ago this shift from product to service made totally sense because I wanted to see the bigger picture, be in touch with people rather than losing myself in doing technical drawings.
Now, I am a Design Researcher that means basically I do user research and concept development, giving design strategy to the business and pass it to Interaction/UX/UI designers to continue realizing the actual design.
So far, I was thinking that I did the right choices and working as a service designer is the right thing to do due to a lot of demand going on in the market. I have a good degree, there is job market for what I’m doing, I have years of experience so I easily find a job. Yet, something was missing. Instead of feeling blessed, I was feeling kind of purposeless as soon as I finish a project. I started to feel unfulfilled with what I am doing because of 2 reasons:
1 — In the context in which I am working, service design work mainly focuses on the business value of design. Sometimes I feel very disinterested and disconnected when listening to clients’ business objectives. Then I feel guilty about not spending my time doing something ‘good’ for the society and for the people. Maybe it is a main thing among designers of my generation (I graduated in 2012); we believe that ‘Design will change the world.’ ‘Design will solve the wicked problems of the society.’ and not be an evil tool merely to boost sales, to increase customer retention, to sell more and more, etc.
2 — I don’t feel like a designer anymore. The more intangible aspects I work on, the more I alienate myself to ‘making’ part of the design. I am glad that I studied service design and the world of services is infinite but I really miss the tangible part of being a designer; making my hands dirty, building a model, drawing with colors and feeling the materials.. As if, design has become too much digital to connect us with the rest of the world but at the same time, disconnects us from our nature. In the sense of both living in harmony with nature and building real relationships with people around us.
One thing I desire is to start working in the field of Social Design. I see so much interesting projects going on but they are mostly at academic or individual level. I am looking for some connections and possible new collaborators to make another shift in my career. I want to offer my product and service design skills for social design projects. And to be honest, I don’t know where to start.
