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Every time I give a talk on design, someone finds me afterward. They wait out the handshakes and the business cards, and then they ask a version of the same question. How do I make THEM do things the RIGHT WAY? Not as funny as the original, but you get my point. I hope. Maybe. Oh yeah, chatGPT helped. (this happens with other disciplines too, but it ALWAYS happens when I talk to designers.) I never have a good answer. Sometimes I talk about persuasion, sometimes social capital. But only recently I feel comfortable enough to say it is a cursed problem (more on that in a bit, keep reading.) I teach a class called Design for Behavior Change. But let me tell you a secret: all design is behavior change. We’re all selling something. Some of us, like James Montegomery Flagg, are doing it fabulously. I don’t care if it’s a book cover or a poster, an advertisement or a social media site. Everybody’s trying to change something. A huge percentage of the time, the thing they want to change is your wallet. If you are a designer, this is your fate. I know we talk all the time about beauty and balance, gestalt and saving the world. But most of us are just trying to get people to buy stuff. Is the poster better than the movie? Maybeeee. Which means that taking a design job is committing to change people in whatever direction the company wants. And if the company is a public one, what it wants is shareholder value. You can tell yourself you’re user-centered. You can tell yourself you’re making users’ lives easier, and on good days that’s even true. You can’t deny that the user research, the accessibility audit and the beautiful empty state are all in service of a number that has nothing to do with whether anyone’s life got better. B corps are better. As long as they stay B corps. (Look at Etsy.) Nonprofits are the honest version, almost restful in their clarity. You are definitely committed to behavior change there. It’s just that the behavior might be a social good… It also could be in service to fundraising. If you think money is icky, don’t be a designer. Money is oxygen for organizations. Fact: you never know who is really a mission-driven company until you’re on the inside. When I was at LinkedIn in the early days, it was very much a mission-driven company. Before LinkedIn you had to decide to quit and start job hunting to improve your lot in life. LinkedIn let great jobs find you instead. I’m not sure LinkedIn is still a mission-driven company. When I’m on the feed I feel like I’ve left Twitter for somewhere just as annoying and less authentic. It does have a lot fewer Nazis, which is nice. yep. Still relevent. Disappointed optimists Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal ran their second annual tech worker survey this month, and designers landed at the epicenter of the misery.
Highest exhaustion of any role. Sharpest sense of being asked to do more for the same money. Worst-rated managers in the survey. And, along with researchers, the least willing of anyone to tell a newcomer to follow them in. That last one is the strange one. Most of these people are personally fine. What they won’t do is tell a younger person to follow in their footsteps. Segal put it as a ladder: the tools (looking at you, GenAI) keep climbing the rungs, and they pull each rung up behind them as they go. If you’re already high up, you feel safe. If you’re near the bottom, the rung you were about to step on is gone. So a designer can be okay and still look at the kid behind them and say, don’t. The water’s fine. Don’t get in. Their own explanation is mostly about AI and about bad management, and I’d be misrepresenting the data if I claimed it proves my point. One line from the survey does stick with me, though. AI lowered the floor of what anyone can produce, but it didn’t raise the ceiling of what’s good. So you ship more and none of it is better, and if you’re the kind of person who got into this to make good things, that’s its own specific kind of tired. I’ve been watching designers be unhappy since well before anyone had to argue with a chatbot about a design system, so let me offer the older theory. I’d argue they’re disappointed optimists, and that the disappointment is part of the job and part of why they’re any good at it.
Designers always see the world as it could be. How could they be anything except disappointed that the world is the messy, sometimes corrupt, often moneygrubbing place that it is? It is a Sisyphean struggle to constantly try to make good things happen in bad places. How I feel about LinkedIn’s newfeed these days. Please preople, if you are going to use Ai at least do an editoral pass. It’s not me. It’s you. It’s a cursed problem There’s a great GDC talk by Alex Jaffe called Cursed Problems in Game Design. A cursed problem, in his definition, is an unsolvable design problem rooted in a conflict between two promises that can’t coexist.