Excerpts from “Dear Designer,”
Your responsibilities to humanity, culture, and the future.
These are a few central excerpts and ideas from my essay titled “Dear Designer,” published in UX Planet on 14 July, 2020. Click here to read the entire essay.
You are a visionary, a social servant, a mediator, a gatekeeper of a better future. Through your craft, you unite the humanities and the sciences, the logical and the emotional, the beautiful and the useful, the experience and the human. The possible and the impossible. The flip side of this coin is often forgotten — the responsibility that comes along with this power, and that’s what the focus of this essay is: your responsibilities as a designer — to humanity, to society, to culture, and to the community. The work you do, the joy you bring, the powers you possess, and the dangers of misusing these powers.
Design is an attempt to complete the flawed, unfinished specimen that is Man, the project God left unfinished. The attempt to give people superpowers, in the words of Michael Gough. Design grapples with the inadequacy of man and the suffering that characterizes his life, and empowers him to confront it. It extends our collective human ability by satisfying individuals’ needs and solving real problems. Design strives towards resonating with our humanity and pushing the human race forward.
The utilitarian goal of design isn’t simply to create a solution to a problem but to properly integrate the solution and the human, to remove all possible barriers between human and the solution — to unite the interface and its user, to make the experience feel like an extension of the self. To make the experience resonate with our humanity. This is the impossible goal that all design aspires towards.
Every problem you solve is nested in many higher-level and more general problems, which lead all the way back to the human being and their primal desires. The solution you design must solve not just the immediate problem at hand but also incorporate the solutions to the higher-level problems it inherits from, all of which have already been solved by someone else, somewhere else.
Design is a collaborative effort between you and all the designers who came before you. Make changes only at the level of the problem hierarchy that you are attempting to manipulate in order to create your unique solution, and leave the rest intact.
Design is all about finding the sweet spot between all of these conflicting issues so as to achieve all of your goals while solving a problem. Identify your constraints and go as far as you can within the limitations they produce. Serve the biggest possible small portion size of food. Design thrives within constraints.
The solution that you yourself design is also not going to be permanent — it is going to come with flaws that won’t be apparent until newer technologies are developed or another designer in the future assesses your solution and identifies scope for improvement, and refines the designs you offered, nesting a new solution within the constraints that your solution creates. Your solution is going to impact the lives of not just all of its users, but also of every human being who comes after this and deals with the same problem you worked towards solving. Every solution is just one tiny slice in a set of a large number of solutions to the same problem that span over all of time, each solution building on the successes and the failures of the solutions that came before, moving us closer towards our collective goal, the goal of design, the impossible state of utopia. Think and design for the whole world, as Uber Design’s brilliant book 77 things put it. By creating a solution you are setting precedent for how a specific problem should be solved henceforth, and, if successful, all future solutions to this same problem will be nested inside the notions your solution puts forward. Your work doesn’t just resonate with humanity but also extends the definition of humanity — of what it means to be human. You are partly responsible for the direction humanity moves in. Design for everyone who is and everyone who will be.
Submit to collective betterment and allow your designs to exist in the world and be bettered and refined by the community. It is your responsibility to do the same with other designers’ work. Only if we all submit to collaborating and working towards the same overarching goals do we have any hope. Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo and kill solutions that most already consider good enough. Take inspiration, improve what exists, and move on. Expect no less from others.
Designers for generations have argued that “form follows function”, and many treat “the beautiful” and “the useful” as contradictory categories, but there will be many instances where you will find that the beautiful is often nested inside the useful — the experience you design often needs to be beautiful for it to be truly useful.
You have the responsibility and the privilege of crafting the world human beings interact with, and it would be an abuse of this power if you don’t try to integrate Beauty in the human experience in any way you can.
Design is never complete because the culture it is designed for is never stagnant, and thus the constraints it exists within are always changing.
Empathizing with your users doesn’t just mean understanding their interaction with the problem, but also the culture they exist in. Your work is creating a window into your culture for generations to come. It is your responsibility to create an honest reflection. As long as you root yourself in the reality of your users, the cultural aspect should take care of itself. Don’t forget the world you’re designing for. Design for the world, design in the world, and design with the world.
As long as there is suffering, there is design.
And thus design pulsates in the endless dance, the dilemma of being maximally connected to humans today but not tomorrow, and designers in the never-ending pursuit of an impossible goal: aspiring towards the unachievable perfect harmony between human, artifact, and idea, harmonious only until further harmonized, perfect only until further perfected, always aspiring towards a less painful tomorrow, always striving for a more complete experience.
You may read the entire essay here: https://uxplanet.org/dear-designer-c8f94eef5667.
