What shape are designers?

There is a long and dearly held assumption in the part of the design industry in which I work, that being T-shaped is a prerequisite for long the long term success of individual practitioners. And why not? The idea of the ‘T-shaped designer’ makes a lot of sense. Here it is defined by IDEO CEO Tim Brown in an interview as:

“T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.”

Sounds great and makes sense.

This does however leave the door open for a problem to arise. Specifically when a company, wilfully or otherwise, distorts the T-shape and starts to insist either through it’s hiring process, or it’s culture, that the depth of the T should be a design discipline. That a design education somehow denotes a superior breed of design thinkers.

My experiences over the last two years have shown me that large parts of the ‘design toolkit’ I gathered during my design education and on through the first few years of my career no longer satisfy the challenges I am being asked to solve. When tackling increasingly abstract and cultural questions, those tangible skills struggle to find a grounding from which they can start to build a solution.

And I am unconvinced that pure strategy has the answer either (think-tanks anyone?). As that method seems to start in the abstract and stay there – struggling to come out of the clouds except in the form of 'recommendations' – which notoriously hard to design against.

So, imagine if the vertical part of a designers T is strategic thinking.

Making strategy actionable is the most important vertical skill in any T these days and people who can translate between the clouds and the ground are becoming the key member of any design team these days.

Ross.

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User led can mean users last.

So I have just finished possibly one of the hardest projects I have taken on so far. 

Phew ...

And it reinforced something I had been vaguely aware of for a while. Which is that sometimes it is easy to confuse the logistical version of user led design, with the philosophical version – with the result of delivering a well thought and soundly backed-up 'me too' run of the mill solution, rather than something truly different. 

In other words, it is sometimes better to speak to your users at the end of a piece of work, when you really understand the challenge and know what to ask them, rather than at the beginning, when you might be more likely to ask the wrong questions. 

The challenge of course is recognising when you are in that situation, and finding a way to get to the right set of questions (for example, in this case we spoke to sociologists to help us through the fog).

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Just a thought ...

For a designer to be of benefit to his/her/their clients, getting paid is the most important element. Not just in the Maslow way ... but because it affords us the opportunity to 'practice'. Clients give us a focus, a problem to solve, that stops us becoming self indulgent, and projects give us the vehicle or channel to push our craft(s). Payment sets a value on our offer, gives us a tool to express that value when all else is intangibe, and defines the boundaries of the profession. Boundaries that we can then push, knowing that there will be the push back from others that shows us context and keeps us honest. 

In this context, the craft of design can be any tool that solves the problem at hand – talking & thinking, drawing & building – and it's the opportunity to practice these that seems most valuable to our clients. This opportunity has been afforded by people matching our valuation of the benefits we bring, which means that if people are willing to pay, we must be doing something right, right?

RT

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