03/2025: Everyone is a designer

Image © Jose 2025

Design as a profession is fairly new, solving problems, thinking creatively, crafting solutions with your own hands goes back millennia. This whole thing of specialized education, professional organizations and a sense of identity among practitioners is 150 to 200 years old. Around the year 2000, when Design Thinking and user-centered design started to become popular, ‘everyone is a designer’ gained momentum and design frameworks filtered into business schools, consultancies, and tech companies, the idea that grew was that design is not just about specialized skills or aesthetics, rather a universal human capability for creativity and problem-solving. And as demand for problem-solving grew, add to that the democratizations of tools & knowledge, value of empathy and collaboration, collaboration and cocreation and you arrive at where we are today.

So, if we agree that human and planet centric problem-solving is universal (or should be), that many have embraced design thinking (even if just for a weekend), and participatory and co-design movements are theoretically being applied (…), what is the role of the professional designer?

I tend to say that it is a combination of things. Our job is, and will probably be in the foreseeable future (even with generative AI spreading), about strategic partnering, embracing complexity and systems thinking, visionary facilitation, ethics and people/ planet considerations, while embracing technological evolution.

Throughout my entire life I have had the privilege of working with many very smart people, and while I have never encountered someone that said that Design has no value and that she/he hates design (designers, maybe…), at one time or another, ‘everyone is a designer’. And I always had some guidelines for myself and that imprinted in the people I worked with:

• Ensure your customers/ partners understand the difference between an opinion and a professional recommendation.
• Present alternatives, but don’t do it for the sake of doing so, good alternatives must be hard to choose from.
• Independently of how many alternatives you present, always elaborate in terms of pros/cons and always have a professional recommendation.
• Never express your recommendation in terms of an opinion, don’t ever make it personal.
• Always present your work with enough information to explain why you made the recommendation you did.
• Your job is to present the alternatives and the recommendation, their job is to decide on what to do, it’s their prerogative.
• If you realized you didn’t know something important, critical, and that knowing it changes your recommendation, admit it. We are not supposed to be perfect and know everything.

In the professional domain, this has helped me. But honestly, and after > 35 years of experience, I’m still doing this daily, it hasn’t necessarily become easier.

In the personal domain, it’s even harder. Let’s say you bought a house, and while it is a place that I will call your home and therefore might have opinions, wants, even aspirations and dreams, it’s when you try and wear the hat of the designer that things get complicated. In a professional domain, when I am facing frustrated designers because, while they are doing everything I suggested above, the customer/ partner keeps on ignoring the recommendation, I remind the designer that the customer is either paying (us and for his mistakes) or is ultimately accountable (meaning, if they don’t do the right thing, their head might roll…). In the personal domain, it’s a bit more… fuzzy.

It’s the contractor who has a lot of experience (never mind if they are interested in doing what they ever did, reduce risk and improve their margin by using their typical way of working), it’s that family member who renovated their home (never mind if their house is a multimillion dollar home and/ or if their taste does not align with ours), it’s the partner (wife/ husband) that rightfully has their own opinions, wants, even aspirations and dreams, perhaps even the experience, and even some natural qualities that make them a designer wannabe. What do you do then? You may try and manage all these people like customers/ partners, you may want to step back and act like you are the hired designer (not the co-owner or similar), you may want to disconnect from the process all together or become frustrated and upset because no one seems to be listening to your professional recommendation. I’m finding out that the best solution may be to define for yourself how and where/ when to influence others around you, to find the right balance in letting everyone express their opinion and defining what is critical for you as someone that needs to call the place home. Most of times, you find out that people, the people that matter, are listening to you, and that you don’t need to shout or get upset, you just need to express your professional recommendation. And then, if there is something you feel it is critical to you, express that clearly, explain why, and state what you would expect to be the outcome. Then pause. Breath. I am finding out most of the time things flow as you’d expect, it’s just more convoluted and it may be that someone else claims they were the influencers. All good.

From my tone, you might figure that I hesitated in titling this post “everyone is a f***ing designer!”. Glad I didn’t.

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From y PhD research:

“Designers have self-organized in professional associations since the 1800’s in Europe, following the steps of civil engineers who published their first charter in 1928 (Lees-Maffei, 2008, p.5). In the US professional associations date to the early 1920’s driven by the early design consultants like Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss who promoted industrial design as a creditable  profession, but as John Maeda adequately portrayed in his CX Report in 2020, we presently have two design associations  for graphic and industrial design (AIGA founded 1914, IDSA founded 1965), the Service Design Network founded in 2004, and three more organizations (CXPA, IXDA, UXPA) dedicated to business, design and usability splitting the market and definitions of design and none of them providing any kind of accreditation or regulatory power, not like in the field of engineering, finance/ accountants, marketing and legal. Though we do not have comparable data for other parts of the world, there is some evidence that this might be the case, which leads to a suggestion that perhaps designers and their individualism pose certain barriers to class structuring and organization.”

…” The term “industrial design” first appeared in America in 1919, but it was only when a generation of young designers emerged as industrial designers, among them Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, and Egmont Arens, that the discipline gained legitimacy. Carroll Gantz, an IDSA Fellow and former President of the IDSA, wrote many articles and at least 2 books about the history of the field. In his book, “Founders of American Industrial Design” he notes that “In June 1936, Carnegie Tech graduated the 1st 5 students ever to receive a college degree in Industrial design” (Gantz, 2014, p.85) He does not state whether it was a 4-year program or something less, but certainly, by the mid-30’s programs had begun. Many other programs followed at different institutions around the country. Pratt Institute in NY had graduates in 1939 from a 3-year program. The University of Illinois established a BFA in 1937. The California Graduate School of design in Pasadena opened a 2-year program that same year, the 1st in the country offering a master’s degree in Industrial design. Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit began a program in 1937 as well. This means that we have more than 80 years of design education in the US.”