Why I never stopped fighting for Design
This month, I’d like to touch upon a topic that is very close to my heart (and I’m sure it is to many of the design practitioners out there!): DESIGN.
I started my career in design long back when I was in university and I never once regretted my decision. Stepping into the real working world has also shown me opportunities that design can help to fill, to make our world a better place. Too many articles out there have touched upon the topic of business value of design, redesigning departments with design etc. However, design is still not widely understood in the market, and I believe there are many out there like me who are trying to make it better. Evangelising for the value of design is not an easy job, and it’s easy to give up. Not many would understand the twists and turns of the journey as well.
Here, I’m going to break down my experience so far, and this is purely from my perspective and how I’ve been inching closer to where I think design can be, in my environment.
Design has been largely misunderstood in the past
These are some verbatims I’ve heard before:
“Design is easy right?”
“Can you do this in 15 min? It’s a simple change”
“All design is the same, why should it be different?”
You get the point.
Understandably, design has traditionally been known largely in the creative field, and focus was on aesthetics and creativity. That has not changed. What has changed, is the fact that we’ve expanded what design actually entails. So many segmentations of design has appeared in the industry over the years, and in my environment, I focus on building on the creative aspects, as well as the product aspects of design.
We have 2 very distinct functions in Design, Creative Design and Product Design.
Are they both design? Yes!
Are they the same? Not necessarily.
Creative Design in Circles.Life focuses on Branding, Campaigns, Creative thinking, Consistency in marketing collaterals and more.
Product Design in Circles.Life encompasses end to end customer journeys, Design system, Design thinking, Test & Learn, Prototyping and more.
They are not the same in deliverables, KPIs and projects. However, what is similar about them, is the values and principles that we upkeep as a team. This has not changed since Day 1. Inherently, the end outcome of design translates directly to our customer experience and that should always remain as the top priority.
Design was only viewed as a ‘Creative Shop’
The term creative shop is commonly used in Facebook and some other companies, where it’s used to describe where all the creative individuals are in a team together and viewed as an ‘internal agency’. Tasks would come into the ‘agency’ and disseminated to the team. This is traditionally known as the centralised team structure. While this works for agencies and some other companies, having this dilutes the clarity of the team members where it may be viewed as design is ‘all the same’.
There are several other team structures that I’ll be looking to explore - namely the hybrid embedded structure. This structure simply means that the team reports into a centralised pod, but members are dedicated into their respective streams and squads. This helps to keep the design spirit intact through both technical and career development, and the cross-collaboration and movement of members is available whenever needed.
There is no right or wrong structure, but getting to a better place for the team will require experimentation + trial & errors in any organisation.
Designers don’t only do pure design
This may very well be an ironic statement as we want team members to evolve and grow as a designer, but this is what I mean by saying don’t only do design.
Every designer should aspire towards becoming a T-shaped, or even better, W-shaped designer. What this means, is that being T-shaped requires breadth, and W-shaped requires more depth in the breadth areas.
https://www.uxbeginner.com/i-x-and-t-shaped-designers/
You can define what type of designer you want to become, and define the skills you’d need to get there. This then depends on your passion area, your capabilities, and what you’d like to challenge yourself with. Everyone’s growth path will be different as a designer, and you’d need to find your own space in order to help yourself shine.
For instance, I’ve learnt that I’m a designer with (hopefully) a sound business mindset because I’m curious to know. This means that I’m able to translate business problems into solutions that can be done through design. I may not be the strongest technically, but as part of breadth, I’m able to now tackle business problems in my own way. A different team member may be completely different from me, and that’s perfectly okay.
I hope that in time to come, more will start to see how much value the design team can provide to the growth of the business. To carve out opportunities to allow that side of design to be shown to the world, is now on myself and the team to continue evangelising, both internally and externally! After all, we are always striving towards creating the best customer experience in the products and communications we provide :)