Design is Cultural Invention: This is a matter of navigating politics.
“I just want to do the work.” I have heard a lot of designers make this statement. Learning and doing the craft is probably the most important part of building a design career. And by craft I mean the methods, frameworks, mastery of tools, and storytelling. Nowhere in the mix do we categorize managing the “politics of the work” as part of the craft.
As I have navigated my way through the masters’ program at the IIT Institute of Design, I have had the opportunity to speak to alumni that are making their way into great in-house and consulting gigs across the world. Though people have been grateful for their practice, there is this sense of frustration when design work is not valued in a firm. In some of those instances, the point of resolution seems to come from the thought of building an individual practice. When I consider my experiences, I have certainly done contract work for organizations where the idea of “innovation” sounds interesting but not valued. Those situations have been a rude awakening and made me realize how much of a bubble I have been in. This bubble is not just in working with design firms, it’s also working in cultures where design work is deeply intertwined with technology and innovation. Eg. startups, technology companies.
But also, I learned in those situations I failed to grasp the current state of the culture and also what people are trying to accomplish. I am in guns blazing with so many assumptions about how a company should work. In all honesty, it made me judgemental. But I soon realized that part of the power of design work is to make it accessible. The storytelling aspect of the work we make is not just to tell a good story about the work itself, it’s also to tell how the hope of the insights translates in context. And to make a dent, we need to evangelize until it can make a significant enough dent to move the work forward. This requires patience and perseverance.
Jack Schulze, CEO of UK-based design consultancy Ottica and Berg in defining design work said, “Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously, designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.”
If design work will be propelled as a cultural inventor with business and technology innovation, managing the politics of an organization will have to be at least as important as the craft. We have to think of ourselves as leaders of craft and navigators of politics in the spaces we find ourselves in.
