Design is a job

We are hallucinating ourselves that we are “exotic creatures”. We look at those beautiful things, pretty screen, lollipop-filled posters and all that jazz and thinking: “Yeah, that’s the job of a designer”.

And that myth of we are that creature is destructive and “inhumane”. We reduce our job to a title like pixel-pusher, screen-maker, button-creator cough, someone who just “draw” their way to success.

And then the era of Abundant Intelligence dawning upon us and our foundation is already on the verge of collapse ever more.

It also make life harder for us. Yes I know that we love being a designer, but I don’t like being called as those labels above. You already received those kind of “critiques” like: make it wow, make it pop, make the logo bigger, “I like this color better”. And with the era of Absolute Intelligence*, our jobs are gonna be worse and at worst, become “irrelevant”. I like solving problem, I like listening to other people’s problem, I like how to explain them in plain language (and other lingoes) to different people to communicate and work on a common ground for a solution to those problems (still having trouble how to explain my job to my parents after all).

We as designers should strive for the better. We deserve honest feedback, real criticism that help our growth. We should strive more to learn how to communicate with other people, other workers in the team. That’s not going to happen when we still accept that we are those “mythical creatures” living off pipe dreams and don’t see ourselves as equal stakeholders.

So what does a designer actually do? Let’s dive in.

A designer is a worker a-designer-is-a-worker

As what Mike Monterio wrote in his book: “Design is a Job”:

You are a worker with a certain set of skills. Both parts of that sentence are important.

Oh, the things we can do with “skills”. The fun part, where we decided to become designers, and it’s why people hire us (warning: those skills are not actually define who you are.) But I want to discuss the “worker” part. The professional part of being a worker. It’s about how we use the skills, how we collaborate with the people around us, and how we treat ourselves.

It’s also about how we see ourselves in this big system we call it society, or a smaller scale like neighborhood, or company, or bigger one like economic system. Our work have impact on those systems, and those systems also have impact on us. The way we choose to use those skills on where, when, how and for who is one of the most important aspects of our jobs.

Let me repeat what was said again: you are a worker with a certain set of skills. But we don’t see ourselves as such. We let others control us, saying that “those skills are useless now”. We saw ourselves as lucky that they hire us to be in the company. We saw ourselves as order-takers (someone who only know how to do as they are ordered and no question back.)

“We are workers, and we work alongside other workers.”

A designer solves problems within a set of constraints a-designer-solves-problems-within-a-set-of-constraints

Constraints come with many forms and never alone. They can come from a lack of material or no working material to work with (limited bandwidth, limited budget, limited time); the audience that the design should serve the solution as intended (kids, users who aren’t computer-savvy, those who have a different culture); and business requirements (style guides, brand guide, shareholder relationship that we must keep track of).

A designer understands goals and collect information about them a-designer-understands-goals-and-collect-information-about-them

You can’t design something without knowing what purpose it serves. You can’t make change to existing designs without knowing why you should change them. Any design task we undertake must serve a goal (or multiple ones). It’s our job to research, gather and understand what those goals are.

That’s the first step of designing anything: ask why. Why are we doing this? Why are we designing this thing? Why are we design these “smart devices” to surveillance and spy on us? If the answer isn’t clear, or just doesn’t exist, stop working. Yes, stop working and put your hands out of the keyboard and mouse. Now.

We need design goals, we need to gather as much information as possible to make sure we are designing the suitable solution that will fulfill those goals. Anything that help us do our job is part of our job. If those goals already existed, great, let’s work toward them. If not, just develop them and help set those goals.

A designer creates novel forms a-designer-creates-novel-forms

Finally the fun part of the job. This is when all your useful collected information about the goals will help you to form your design solution through artifacts and systems like screens, components, buttons, content and etc. This is the part of the job that most people will recognize as “design” because it is visible and involves pictures and animations and such.

As long as we remember that our designs must serve the goals of the business (like help a new clothing store sell new pants) without putting additional strain on other things that may harm the business (or our beloved users). Else, those “novel forms” are dangerous (like those LLM hype agents trust me they are more than just dangers).

A designer communicates to clients and stakeholders a-designer-communicates-to-clients-and-stakeholders

The second most favorite part of some designers (or most dreaded for others). No matter how good the work is, if we can’t sell them, they are gonna be discarded for good, and we will stuck in that “fun” phase above.

I’ve got a quite fair share of this: either through whiteboard interview, project walkthrough, for some other designers it will be design hand-off to the engineering team, formal critique meeting to get approval and more. Some designers even didn’t get the opportunity to sell their own work, which is well very unpleasant and harmful both for the designer and for the company.

Selling our work directly to stakeholders or in smaller scale convince the team about your design decisions is already extremely important before this LLM era.

People want to know what our thoughts which went to our decisions made for the designs, people will giving us feedback and critiques why our designs need some changes in some areas, and we have to be the designer who know why we made those decisions and receive firsthand feedback to decide which direction our works needs to go next (and also have courage to ask why). We don’t want to be in the awkward position when after some meeting we didn’t know, our work come back to us with all the changes we didn’t understand or when our designs go into production we realized that the final version is so different from our work.

These are our works, and we must take responsibility to make those works deserve the recognition (and feedback) for selling our works. Only after the check is written you can get all credit for good work you did.

A designer care and take responsibility about the impact of their work a-designer-care-and-take-responsibility-about-the-impact-of-their-work

We are responsible for the work we put in the world. This is not a joke.

We are humans. And humans create impact on things around them, whenever we like it or not. We have power to choose to make the world better than we found it. Be the advocate, the supporter for the person or a community who will ultimately buy, use, or experience what we are designing. We don’t have to volunteer in non-profit or mission-driven projects to make good things, people will happily buy things that genuinely improve their life in large and small ways.

We should have our own point of view. Our strongest value comes not from how well we using the tools in our toolkit (yes I’m looking at you those claiming “AI-native” titles), but from being at good at knowing when to use the tool, to what end and even ability to reject using the tool if they are harmful to society. Sometimes the best design is saying out loud: “No. We aren’t going to design this thing” when someone got a shitty idea like those LLM that create pornography of women online (and sadly that shitty idea is already went out of the public.) We have limited resources, whether natural, financial, or cognitive. Don’t contribute to people wasting them on shit that both wasteful to those resources and harmful to people.

Design is a verb design-is-a-verb

Our toolkit should contain tools for input (what things should we make?), activity (make the things!), output (sell the things) and impact (who benefited or got screwed by those things).

Our work starts way before we open the Figma (for some designer it will be other things else) and ends way after the things we created brought into the world. Throughout our career, we’ll work on small teams, big teams, we might take a lead in every or even any, part of the “design process”; we might have to work alone.

But even when we don’t own a particular process, we need to let our voice, our opinions be heard and be respected. The more we know, the better our work will be. And the better our work is, the more our communities can benefit from our work (sustainable business, happy customers, we got the sense of fulfillment in the process and of course, money to keep us comfortable spending).

I highly recommend designers, whether they are UX designer, or industrial designer, or furniture designer, or even people with titles like engineer, product manager, product leader to have a read of “Design is a Job” by Mike Monterio. The book covers fundamentals that are often be left out of traditional education about design, whether we learn design from university or from a boot camp course, that are necessary for any designer or anyone who want to their job value - and to truly understand their professional value. Mike’s book filled with hopeful feeling and a gut punch to anyone who still daydreaming of being a designer or abuse their value in the workplace. I hope that after reading this you will filled with the same hopeful feeling as I am, recognize your own value as professional worker that are good at what you do and never back down from forces who try to yell to us that we have to accept the future they want.