On Friday 8th September, I’ll be in Berlin to give an introduction to this topic. This talk is for seasons designers, business or design leaders, and those who are using or creating design culture within organisations.
For the past four years, I have been conducting a series of research activities, interviews across the industry. It’s lead me towards a hypothesis of a design singularity.
The talk will cover, 5 hypothesis why the design singularity is near.
The accelerating progress of the design industry is resulting in unfathomable pace change to the practice of design.
To borrow from the ‘Technological singularity’; there has been a triggered runaway design demand, which entered a ‘runaway reaction’ of improvement cycles to attempt to meet this increase.
These improvement cycles are affecting the practice of design at its core. As design advances, it merges and blends with other practices; commercial strategy, organisational change, continuous development delivery, and growth solutions. But is it an evolution or a dilution?
Reason #01 — Accelerating demand for design
The success of ‘Design Thinking,’ aiding design in getting a seat at the business table. There is a huge surge in demand for design services and design driven approaches.
The result is a need to rapidly scale design offerings to supply the increased demand, through building internal capabilities or acquisition.
Q. What is the impact of such rapid scaling, finding the next million designers?
Reason #02 — Diversifying opportunities
Design faces increasingly complex and uncertain challenges solve and opportunities to explore. Which are entangled in interconnected systems across multiple business silos, often needing to move the business beyond the category it operates.
These opportunities are enriched by commercial business needs and demands, requiring more impactful outcomes and measurable return on design investment.
Q. How can you shape and approach to an uncertain problem, assembling a multi-skilled team with multiple probable outcomes?
Reason #03 — Design process entropy
Design has been described and promoted though it’s process (double diamonds, 5 steps, etc.), its success is in its simplicity of communication, the challenge is in the intricacy that comes with the reality of design work, it is a practice, not a process.
The practice of design is challenged at every stage, from volumes of individuals informed how to facilitate design thinking workshops. To digital services deploying updates hourly, and multi-variant testing design possibilities.
Q. How do you evolve from a design process to a design practice? And how do you govern quality in a continuously updating world?
Reason #04 — Design talent lifecycle
Scaling the design industry requires more designers at all levels, (i.e. ‘the next million designers’). There is a sharp increase in responsibilities for designers, as the challenges the practice of design diversify, so does the expectation of what a design needs to achieve.
These growing expectations and responsibility diversification, are couples with new designers in education of fresh out of education. Traditional education institutions are slower to change than the industry, creating gaps for new education training companies to fill.
Q. How do we grow practicing designers, without crushing them with new, unfamiliar responsibilities and expectations? And how can we ensure that new designers are properly onboarded and supported to succeed?
Reason #05 — Design culture equity
There should be no doubt that the culture of design is highly attractive; it has a sharp contrast to corporate or consulting culture. The purchasing of design companies for in-house, management consultancies, IT companies, and alike, is an acquisition of design culture.
If the press surrounding importance and success of ‘design-thinking’ is to be believed, design culture could well be its secret sauce. The practice of design developed and evolved a strong culture which enhances the work, supports people and shapes the environments where we do design-thinking and design-doing.
Design led transformation programs have a fundamental impact on organisations. Their technology, process and revenue models can be transformed. However, it’s changing the organisation’s culture, in which the bigger shift needs to happen to maintain a transformation. The human factors are often hardest to shift, the need to reimagine the employee experience.
Q. What is design culture in a shifting landscape of environment, process, and people? How do we develop a deep culture for the practice of design, not just lip-service superficial culture delivered through ‘perks’? How can we create authentic, sustainable design driven culture for our clients
