Why Designers Need to Defend Meaning in an Age of Buzzwords
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Remember authentic?
There was a time, a decade or so back, when you couldn’t go two hours without hearing something described as authentic, or reading about the importance of authenticity. Cafes had bare brick walls and served water in Mason jars because it gave customers the authenticity they craved. We had copies of “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want” in the studio library. At one point, I overheard a creative director suggest that another designer lead a particular client call because she was best able to “speak authentically about the project.”
And now? I can’t remember the last time I heard the word, except in its original, literal usage: a website saying “please authenticate,” meaning, prove that you are who you say you are.
Like so many words, authentic has gone through a whole treadmill of currency, starting as an unremarkable term, then being seized upon by a small group of creatives and businesspeople, and then becoming the descriptor that everyone had to use.
Some small fraction of this had to do with the word’s actual meaning — there really was a post 9/11 backlash against overt branding, and a few brands with long track records of making good products instead of good marketing suddenly found themselves popular. The fact that they simply were what they said they were had a lot to do with that. But most of authentic’s popularity was, well, inauthentic. Like meaningful, artisanal, crafted, curated, experience, and engagement, it became an unimpeachable stand-in for nearly any positive quality you might want to express. Authentic simply meant good, when you got right down to it, and questioning that made you look dumb.
Throwing words around in pursuit of legitimacy is a necessary evil for most creative professionals.
Designers have always had a tense relationship with words. We’re visual thinkers by training for the most part, and (with all due respect to Donald Norman, Alisson Arieff, Khoi Vinh, and others) once you move outside of architecture, there’s not a very deep tradition of writing about or by designers.
Yet we have to deal with words every day. When we interact with clients, vendors, collaborators, and each other, it’s usually through the written or spoken word, and even the most brilliant design solution has to be explained and defended verbally if it’s going to see the light of day.
One way we deal with this tension is by treating words as another design material, shaping and molding them to suit our need, which more often than not is to be taken seriously by non-designers. Saying a visual layout looks “good” isn’t serious, but saying it “satisfies underlying emotional and structural needs among the target user group” is. Again, this is based on a kernel of truth: users need structure in a website, and emotion plays a big role in why we’re drawn to things, even if they’re supposed to be purely functional.
But it often plays out in a blunt Good Word/Bad Word dichotomy, as demonstrated in the authenticity example. We find a word or phrase that makes us look serious, or wise, or cutting edge, and we ride it as far as we can before switching horses to something less played out. If we can do this by coining a new term — design thinking, for example, or co-creation — so much the better. It’s a popular strategy because it usually works, giving clients something to say when evangelizing a concept, and keeping us from stammering during presentations.
But it also has a cost. It costs us precision.
Throwing words around in pursuit of legitimacy is a necessary evil for most creative professionals. Clients expect it, consumers embrace it, and publicity demands it. But no amount of neologizing or conflating changes the fact that words are still our most powerful tool for communicating ideas, even in a highly visual world. Words plus images are even better, but there’s no doubt that the fastest way to get to a precise expression of something that doesn’t yet exist is to write or talk about it (IKEA assembly instructions notwithstanding). And the more we turn specific words or phrases into buzzwords, diluting their meaning, the less powerful that tool gets.
OK, but what do you really mean?
As creative work becomes more distributed, this issue takes on new urgency. For an organization like Group of Humans, where a project team might consist of six people in six different time zones, the vast majority of communication is via Slack, Zoom, email, Trello, Skype…words, mostly written. The whole creative world is headed this way. So it’s on creative professionals to protect this crucial tool. We have to get better at using words with precision, and resist the temptation to stretch their meaning to sound more legitimate, or to conflate two terms because one of them’s fashionable.
No amount of neologizing or conflating changes the fact that words are still our most powerful tool for communicating ideas.
Distributed is a good example. It’s often used interchangeably with remote, as in “two of our developers are remote/distributed,” but they have different meanings. If you have a core team sitting in an office in London, talking with two developers in Hungary, those two are remote. But if your whole team is set up to be non-geographically specific, then it’s distributed. We use both at GoH, though since our entire model is centerless, distributed shows up a lot more often. Occasionally, if a project team sets up in a client office for logistical reasons, and needs to engage a distant member for a specific task, then that person is remote (for the time being). Remote is relative; it implies a center to be distant from. Distributed is an objective description of an entire group.
Whether a group of people constitute a network or a community is another source of confusion. In a recent episode of the Human Interest podcast, founder Rob Noble describes the Group as a “network of networks”, since members are connected to one another, and serve as a point of entry into other networks of which they’re a part.
In an earlier episode though, strategist Ale Lariu describes SheSays (which she co-founded) as a “global community of women in the creative professions”, despite the fact that it says “network” on the website. Why a community and not a network? Because there’s a shared purpose. Not only is everyone in SheSays a professional creative woman, they’ve all joined it because they want to achieve some common goals: erasing the gender pay gap, elevating women leaders in the creative professions, creating mentorship structures to counteract the challenges women often face in these fields.
A network means people who know each other, and are able to communicate directly, often about work. A community is a network that also shares beliefs. If everyone you were connected to on LinkedIn also practiced meditation, and wanted to discuss its benefits and how to do it better, you’d be a community as well.
For the moment, Group of Humans is a network in the process of building a community, by hosting in-person gatherings and knowledge-sharing webinars, by interviewing each other, and by collaborating on side projects. It’s a lot of work, and it’s important, and it highlights a key reason to avoid conflating the two terms: they imply very different expectations of behavior, and levels of effort. There’s a reason we refer to the act of starting casual conversations at a conference and handing out business cards as networking, and not community-building.
The irony is that buzzwords often arise out of a desire to appear legitimate, but it’s exactly their overuse that degrades legitimacy in the long run.
There are countless other word pairs that get smushed together in our eagerness to join the buzzword bandwagon. For many, the distinction between a feature and an experience has been lost, as the latter becomes a catch-all term for anything we want users to do. Sustainable has expanded to take over from more appropriate words because of its positive environmental connotations; an effort to reduce food waste or fuel usage is a sustainability initiative, rather than the more mundane-sounding (but more accurate) waste reduction or efficiency improvement. And there’s always authentic, which in its heyday got used in place of legitimate, appropriate, credible, accurate, effective, and even knowledgeable.
Clarity is the buzzword we need.
As a writer I’m probably more sensitive to these abuses than the average person, but as a designer I worry they’re actively harming our profession.
Lax usage brings down the level of discussion when we collaborate remotely, but it’s also a big reason why creative professions still sometimes struggle for credibility. The irony is that buzzwords often arise out of a desire to appear legitimate, but it’s exactly their overuse that degrades legitimacy in the long run. When executives and engineers roll their eyes behind the backs of creatives, it’s often because of our convoluted language.
This kind of imprecision might once have been justified, in the name of grabbing attention long enough for a concept to be explained. But it’s less necessary now than ever. As a lot of you have noticed, design has a seat at the table these days, which means that the work truly can speak for itself sometimes. We don’t have to use the right collection of terms like an incantation in order for a solution to be taken seriously, we just need to say what it is and show how it works.
This makes one word especially relevant: clarity. Any good journalist can tell you that explaining something complex using clear language is monumentally difficult. It’s certainly harder than dancing around the truth using cliches.
But clarity is also absolutely necessary if you want to convey real information. And in an era of accelerating change, where decisions about what to make and how to make it have to made on ever shrinking timelines, by people spread across the globe, clarity is the standard we need to hold ourselves to, too.
