A Design Turn

Designers are anxious. Layoffs have not let up, AI has seemingly trivialized our magic skill of making things, and practicing designers describe the assembly-style nature of software design as soul-crushing.

A student of history will recognize these as patterns. Companies have always treated employees as expendable, technology has always changed our relationship with our craft, and designers have historically found self-preservation in being misunderstood. But something about this feels different.

Layoffs feel worse, perhaps because they aren’t tied as explicitly (or at all) to business performance like they were in 2000 and 2008. The companies seem to be doing fine, but designers are still being fired. This may be because the field of user experience design grew too big, too fast, with bootcamps creating an oversupply of designers, and companies hired against imaginary needs and budgets.

For designers, AI feels overly aggressive because it makes making trivial. For many designers, making things is the hardest part of the job, and if we’re already doubting our abilities, AI is provoking existential questions about what value we can provide at all.

And as software development has matured, the processes have become more streamlined and pipeline-driven. Those who still have design jobs are experiencing an assembly line optimization of creative work that wasn’t there a decade ago.

I think we’re experiencing a turn.

Social science literature often finds itself experiencing turns. The ontological turn, for example, happened when anthropology as a discipline shifted from viewing ethnographic research as an objective, removed activity of cataloging and assessing to one that is embodied, steeped in culture, and welcoming of different lived experiences [1]. This type of disciplinary shift forces introspection, creates controversy, and ultimately reshapes “business as usual.” Interaction design has experienced a number of turns, including a turn away from usability engineering, a turn that recognized ethics and accessibility as integral to the job of designing, and a turn that presented design as fundamental to strategy.

I think we are in the middle of another turn, this time toward design literacy (and away from design making). To explore this, I want to revisit a formative text that was prescient in arguing just this, Richard Buchanan’s “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” from 1992. I don’t want to focus on either the Wicked Problems or Design Thinking ideas, both of which have taken on a cargo cult of their own. Instead, I want to focus on Buchanan’s argument of design as a “new liberal art of technological culture” [2].

The liberal arts are generally recognized as the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Some degree of knowledge of these topics and ideas is considered nonnegotiable for people to meaningfully participate in society. Buchanan defines a liberal art as a “discipline of thinking that may be shared to some degree by all men and women in their daily lives and is, in turn, mastered by a few people who practice the discipline with distinctive insight” [2]. We should all know how to read and write; some become expert readers and writers. But more than that, we should all know about reading and writing. What is reading, and what is it for? Where did writing come from? How has it affected history, and how has that history affected the present? Knowing about reading and writing is more than simply having literacy in communication; it is also about knowing what power is invoked by words, who benefits from that power, who is left out, and how those words affect the way the world is run. The same is true of history, economics, and music.

Most of us view technology as something clearly separate from the liberal arts, likely because we think of technology and computation as one and the same. Buchanan, citing John Dewey, presents a different view of technology, one as an “art of experimental thinking” [2]. A computer is certainly technology, but when viewed through this new lens, so too is a physical material, or an organization, or a law. Something that’s experimental is usually new and strange, and so a technological culture is one that is strange to us. A new travel ban by the president is a strange technology; how do we react? A new corporate policy allowing working from home is a strange technology; how do we consider it?

Put together, a new liberal art of technological culture is a broad, universal ability to know the new, strange technologies that we find ourselves surrounded by. It is literacy in looking at the strangeness from various perspectives and analyzing it critically. Who wins with a new technology? Who loses? Is it something we want in our world? Why?

If design is a new liberal art of technological culture, it means that all people in our world should have the ability to be critical of design. They should have developed a vocabulary to understand something that has been designed, to analyze it, to discuss it, and to judge it. The “it” need not be the computational part of a computational technology. TikTok is software; the role it plays in our world is far, far more expansive than lines of code. To critically analyze the technology is to critically analyze pretty much everything except the bits and pixels. A self-driving car is computation, but its technology is much better understood as one of laws and norms and market share. The technologies people encounter have meaning, and, as Buchanan explains, “All men and women require a liberal art of design to live well in the complexity of the framework based in signs, things, actions, and thoughts” [2].

I think the growth of design talent was a signal of our desire for this design literacy (intertwined, of course, with the promise of a big salary). When we explore our technological world and find ourselves illiterate, some make attempts to learn, and as Buchanan describes, that literacy enables people to “participate more directly…and contribute to its development” [2]. People have gained an interest in becoming design literate for all sorts of reasons. One may be because “designer brands” are no longer out of reach when they take the form of apps. Unlike an expensive Versace handbag, Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify appear to be free, at least to use. Another reason may be because of the prevalence of reality makeover TV shows, where people get to see what appears to be design happening, and it seems fun and interesting. Another reason may simply be the intimacy we have with digital products.

Whatever the reason, people are seeking to participate in the field. But as market conditions have shown, the field may not be open to that level of participation and engagement in terms of jobs and careers. Wanting to work at Spotify doesn’t mean there is a job for you there. But the field is, simply by existing, inviting an understanding of it, and this is design as a liberal art of technological culture.

Rather than viewing design as an applied craft, a liberal art of technological culture recasts design as a way of understanding our role in the designed world around us. It’s difficult for many practitioners to imagine this, because making things is so integral to the idea of design, and embedding design in the humanities is very different from viewing it as an organizing principle like the humanities. But if design is not about making things, but instead about understanding the things that are made, vocation is no longer a goal of design education. Instead, knowing about the world as a context of designed things is a set of lenses to bring to any other job and to look through.

Design as liberal art is similar to a humanities discipline, one that studies designed things in the way literature examines texts. As a liberal art, students of design read, discuss, and write about designed artifacts—interfaces, services, systems—rather than prototyping them. There are still “methods,” but they look familiar to those used in art history, anthropology, or media studies: archival research, comparative analysis, close reading of visual and interaction elements, semiotics, and rhetorical analysis. Students don’t design interfaces. They explore metaphors used in early graphical user interfaces, unpacking design decisions without ever opening Figma.

And they do not become practitioners. After a design turn toward design as a liberal art, there are still designers doing design, but there are fewer of them (with fair critiques of elitism permitted). Instead, most people become design literate and are able to participate in the discussion and criticism of design, without designing.

I think we are experiencing a turn toward design as a liberal art of technological culture. We are in a place where we need fewer people to design, and many more people to understand design.

As a craftsperson and a maker, I don’t like the way this turn feels, because it appears threatening to the fundamentals of the profession. Understanding design without making things seems impossible. I don’t like this development as an educator either, because it means my students, trained to be practitioners, may find no design jobs, despite getting a very expensive education.

But as someone observing the various trends chipping away at what is actually meaningful about being a designer—our ability to humanize the dysfunction of technological change—I am drawn to this turn. It offers permission for people to like, discuss, engage in, appreciate, critique, and immerse themselves in design, while not being designers.

This turn says that we don’t need more people to make things. We need more people to be thoughtfully and meaningfully critical of the things that are made. And as Buchanan writes, without this broad design literacy, “there is little hope of understanding the foundations and value of design…in an increasingly complex technological culture” [2].

References and Works Cited

1. Heywood, P. et al. Ontological turn, the. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2017.
2. Buchanan, R. Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues 8, 2 (1992), 5–21.