Don’t worry, I am not mad at you…

Design distills business requirements and customer needs, synthesizing them with technical capabilities and constraints, then filtering that through usability and aesthetics, to manifest a cohesive solution that is feasible, viable, and desirable increasing the overall value to both the business and the customers.

At any point in the last twenty years, if you have read or listened to anything from designers about the practice of design, that should sound all too familiar.

But do you believe it?

Do you think that design creates value? Or makes products better? Does design impact top-line revenue?

Now, ask yourself those same question again, but this time instead of design, ask them about engineering, product management, and marketing: Do you believe those professions create value? make products better? impact top-line revenue?

After talking to hundreds of people, face to face about this, I would bet that you agree value creation, quality, and revenue are impacted by engineering, product management, and marketing. But while you may have worked with a designer or two who contributed to a product’s success, generally speaking, you’re not clear how (or if) the profession of design really impacts value, quality, or top line growth.

Don’t worry, I won’t get mad at you if that’s the case: you see, I blame the profession of design.

The act of design is to take abstract ideas, things like business objectives and customer requirements, and turn them into something tangible; transforming ideas into artifacts that can be held, touched, and experienced. However there are two schools of design, one is the little d, and the other is the big D.

Big D design is what most people are familiar with. It is the fun, fashionable, expressive one. Its the one focused on looking great, of being on the cutting of style. Its bold, eye catching, and memorable. By contract little d design is focus on solving not just the problem, but the right problem. When its done well, you likely don’t even notice it because it seems self-evident. Little d design is what makes touch interfaces feel natural, or websites that make you feel seen.

Over the years Big D has gotten a lot of attention, and is commonly seen as being based on innate talent unattainable by others. ”Oh you are so creative! Can you make this look good?” is the most common opening line heard by Big D designers. Meanwhile, the little d designers are often seen as annoying, since they tend to ask a lot of questions about why are we doing this? Why are we making it this way? Why aren’t we doing this instead? Little d challenges assumptions and break expectations and focuses on how something should work and how to make no just meet the needs but to delight.

While I acknowledge Big D has a role to play, I feel it has greatly contributed to the degraded perception of design. With its focus on the superficial, it has helped solidify the view that as a profession design doesn’t play a role in creating value, or increasing top lone revenue. Little d design meanwhile, with its focus on determining how something works, can often be confused for product management or even engineering.

Yet neither of them are really focused on what matters: the creation of strategic artifacts. Design when practiced in its true form can reach across time and synthesize the ambitions of the organization, its growth, blending cutting edge technologies, and reaching into yet untapped markets, to bring back objects from the future, byproducts of their investigations into what could be.

These artifacts represent one or more potential futures, that in turn can be evaluated against each other and the desired outcomes, allowing for rapid iterations to both the artifacts and even the strategies which drive them. More than PowerPoints or theoretical algorithms, design can demonstrate the capabilities and impact of technologies before they are built within a range of contexts to help ensure both the technology’s successful adoption and circumscription; Changing a nascent technology from merely feasible to something desirable and highly useful.

Not unlike unlike the “many worlds” interpretation of Schrödinger's thought experiment, business strategies and technologies are both full of infinite possibilities, design opens the box; Design determines the deposition of the potential. But unlike Schrödinger, the same box can be opened a thousand times by a thousand different people with a thousand different results. Take GenAI, everyone has their box, and they want their box to contain the prize; that is their cat is not only alive but its the best damned cat you have ever seen. While all of these boxes contain the same potential, it is only by opening the box—that is designing the specific solution, that the fate of their efforts is determined.

Here is the tricky part; do you need a designer to do that? That is, do you need someone who is professionally trained as a designer to open the box? To design your solution? To build the prototype? No. But then you also don’t need a professional product manager to manage and sell what comes out of that box. Nor do you need an professional engineer to write the software for what comes out. Those things can be done by anyone with a passion and access to the internet, just like design. And yet, for a CEO, the idea of someone writing code who is not a trained developer is inconceivable. Likewise, having someone not officially designated as a product manager, manage what is pulled from that box, would frankly be irresponsible. And yet, design—that transformation point from potential to reality, from idea to value, is most often left to whomever opens the box rather than by a credentialed professional.

And that brings us to why I blame the design profession.

Design has done very little to control the preconceptions of the profession, working to ensure that no CEO would ever consider allowing someone who is not a professionally trained designer to open the box, to determine the deposition of it contents. While an argument exists that when it comes to design it is the person and not their role, the fact is there is a strong pervasive, preconception of which roles deliver value and which ones do not. (Refer to your answers above.) It is the shared preconception of a profession that determines hiring priorities, project staffing, development processes—but more importantly it determines who is there when the box is opened. And design, as a profession, has done very little to ensure it is an invaluable member of that cohort.

And because they are there, engineering, product management, and marketing, not only determine the fate of the box’s contents, they define how things will proceed, the processes and skills needed, to achieve their definition of success and define the metrics by which their efforts will be assessed. Without design being there at the moment of determination, its contribution—and the evaluation of that effort, is defined by others.

So then what is holding design back? What is keeping design from being part of the cohort that opens the box? Indeed why is design not opening the box? Here is a hint: I don’t think its the other folks in the cohort. I think design needs better leadership, better self awareness, and a lot more shared self-respect. If designers spent as much time focused on building up the profession as they do tearing each other down, design would be well positioned.