Towards a renaissance for design

Routes out of the doldrums

Kevin McCullagh

Published on LinkedIn5 Dec 2024

Design is in the doldrums. Budgets have been squeezed, and for now, there are fewer jobs, projects, and career prospects. It’s a time to reflect and renew.

We need a clear-eyed diagnosis of how we got here. We need to be clear about the distinctive value design brings to business. But, if we have the grit to develop new know-how, design will flourish again.

Where we are

Design tends to be in a permanent state of flux. Designing today is barely recognisable compared to what it was when I entered the industry in the early 1990s. Back then, the only screens in our lives were TVs (and maybe a PC at work). And my presentation toolbox was full of markers, Conté crayons, lighter fluid and acetate! So, while the top-level design process hasn’t changed that much, what we design and how we design has changed massively. We’re currently in a state of high flux.

Over the years, we’ve adapted to economic shifts, such as globalisation, the 2008 crisis, the digitisation of business, and tech changes, such as digital modelling, visualisation and remote collaboration. We’ve integrated new approaches, such as Experience design, Business design, and Lean start-up methods. We’ve also adapted to social shifts, like sustainability and diversity agendas. In one way or another, all these changes brought design closer to business, which progressively brought its design activities in-house as its value was realised.

We’re now grappling with how to best use AI and adapt to a less forgiving business environment. To make headway, we must learn the lessons of the past and be creative about future opportunities.

How we got here

For two decades or more, we’ve been on a roll. By the late 1990s, design had moved from a cult to the mainstream, epitomised by the growth of IKEA and Target. In the new millennium, the phenomenal success of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive’s partnership at Apple turned the heads of boards towards design. By the 2010s, Design Thinking took the stage at Davos and was pitched as a magic five-step process, whether the challenge was a mobile app or a healthcare service. This coincided with the digitisation of the economy, as ‘software ate the world’ digital transformation work ballooned and corporations staffed up with huge UX teams.

The growth of design ground to a shuddering halt in late 2022, as swingeing layoffs made by Big Tech culled many designers. The big management consultancies soon followed; IDEO cut a third of its staff, while McKinsey shuttered its design team earlier this year.

It’s not just designers having a tough time, of course; the global economy is in the Doldrums, but some of design’s woes must be laid at its own door.

Design was often sold as a process centred on user research, journey mapping, ideation workshops, iterative prototyping and testing. This degraded definition of design was learned by enterprising non-designers.

To a certain extent, design is suffering from some of the unintended consequences of its success. The most obvious one is that most businesses now have a working knowledge of design, and by definition, it has lost its ‘shiny new thing’ status of the 2010s

More consequentially, design was often sold as a process centred on user research, journey mapping, ideation workshops, iterative prototyping and testing. This is all well and good, but not only is this a degraded definition of design, but much of this can be learned by enterprising non-designers. And it was. This, in turn, led to the blurring of boundaries between designers and consumer researchers, engineers and product managers – so when the cost-cutting began, designers found themselves on shaky ground.

The most damaging consequences flowed from senior management’s perception that too many design leaders had over-claimed and under-delivered. This less palatable truth came through loud and clear in the results of a survey I ran in August 2024. It asked: ‘Why is Design in the Doldrums?’. Here are a few of the shorter answers I received:

‘We haven’t delivered the expected value.’

‘Design leaders have failed to create the expected value for their function.’

‘Too much talking the talk and not enough walking the walk. Verbose justifications for samey designs.’

‘Disillusionment with design as a competitive advantage.’

‘Design Thinking packaged creativity as a repeatable, staged process with guaranteed results. The reality of design is much messier and unpredictable.’

Too many walked through the doors that Design Thinking opened. Too many were high on their own supply. Too few realised that design needed to up its game to deliver on the inflated expectations that underpinned their generous salaries.

Routes forward

Getting back on our front foot will mean acknowledging past missteps, reframing our core expertise, and extending our skills.

Realism

If we accept that many execs believe that design over-claimed and under-delivered, reconnecting with reality would be a good place to start. For example, let’s drop the idea that we have a special gift for creativity and empathy. This design exceptionalism is delusional, naive and frankly demeaning to our non-designer colleagues. There are plenty of creative problem solvers and user/customer-centric people across companies. Designers would be well advised to focus their empathy on their colleagues to better understand their challenges and figure out if design might be able to help. As well as harnessing their colleagues’ creativity and insights.

Reframe core expertise

If I were to point to the most fundamental thing that designers can change, it’s how we articulate our distinctive value. Sure, our processes and tools are important, but they’re not what we spent our 10,000 hours honing. What good designers excel at is vision, judgement, and craft – primarily in the realm of experiences.

Vision

Designers see the future in higher resolution than our colleagues. We spend a lot of time thinking in detail about how the future could be better. We immerse ourselves in the latest social trends and technological innovations, and we have the visualisation and prototyping skills to make concepts tangible.

Envisioning potential futures and bringing them to life helps colleagues in strategy and engineering to picture and assess them. Vision projects are best co-created with other parts of the business and situated in a future context of informed foresight assumptions that give the vision credibility. This gives them more chance of making an impact on the future of the business – beyond becoming PR collateral.

Judgement

We have a finely honed sense of what ‘good’ looks like and know how to achieve it. Others might recognise quality when they see it, but we better understand why that perception is formed and how it could be made even stronger. We also discern if a design fits with a company’s brand, and if it is likely to capture the moment with particular target markets. We are experience connoisseurs with an expert vocabulary to match.

Craft

Great user experiences with high-performing products and services are made still greater by finely crafted details. These can remove friction, imbue character and harmonise different parts of the user’s experience into a coherent whole. Designers understand and sharpen the refinement of details, while others tend just to form overall impressions from of the end product.

These are our fundamental skills and much more important than processes and tools – but they are less tangible, much harder to explain and less easy to point at. Positive and negative case studies and other well-honed stories help bring to life and demonstrate the business value of vision, judgement and craft.

This is not to say that designers should retreat into a back-to-basics bubble. Quite the opposite. Designers need to lean into developing new skills – while being crystal clear about the distinctive core capabilities they are building on.

Renew skillsets

Vision, judgement and craft are not the whole deal, of course. To succeed, designers must add technical, interpersonal and business skills.

In tough and turbulent times, acquiring new skills will be more vital than ever. Squeezed teams value adaptable members with broader expertise. Beyond the Generative AI tools, there are less obvious but more consequential skills that many

designers would benefit from, such as influencing, workshop facilitation, data fluency and organisational acumen. All are general business skills that colleagues share in other business functions, but add value to our role. Most importantly, stay close to the business, be proactive and opportunistic, and focus on delivering value efficiently.

Design diffusion

For the foreseeable future, the advances of AI, a tough economic climate, and a less receptive business environment for design will all amount to significant headwinds. We may even have passed the peak number of designers in employment – in the West, anyway.

Some business-savvy design leaders are branching out into design-adjacent roles such as innovation consulting, change management, product management, and head of innovation. They’re still using many of their design skills, but ‘design’ or ‘designer’ often doesn’t appear in their job titles. To some who see design as a vocation or calling, this may sound like a sell-out or betrayal, but those who have made these transitions talk of growth, more impact, and better career prospects.

Another way to see this development is that it’s the start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact – and open up more career tracks for designers.

Design can thrive again, but now is a time for realism, clarity and conviction. Yes, design is a critical element of success, but it’s not magical or special. It’s part of the business mix. There will be no recapturing of a past golden adolescence. Design will continue to evolve, specialisms will blur, and new roles will emerge – including those without ‘designer’ in the title. It sounds grown-up, doesn’t it?

The start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact

Kevin

Kevin founded Plan in 2004. Before this, he was a director at product design consultancy…