The [Near] Death of Craft in Digital Design

If there was ever a golden age for design in business, it probably rose from the Bauhaus as it made its escape from Germany to the United States in the 1930’s and profoundly influenced the evolution of architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design and typography for decades more. It expanded notably with the work of Charles and Ray Eames in the 50s and 60s and continued with Paul Rand into the 70s and 80s and their work with brands such as IBM, and design titans such as Steve Jobs.

Eventually, the ascent of systems thinking and the publication of “Design Methods” by John Christopher Jones in 1970 merged the practice of design with the application of technology and the discipline of craft that was instilled in every Bauhaus trained designer.

This discipline of craft was a realization that a focus on the details, a sense of style and a passion for skills were the essential requirements that every design practitioner possess. We see this in the work of all major designers from the era. Examples include Dieter Rams, Jay Doblin and even the disparate styles of Tibor Kalman and Joe Duffy in later years.

Design, though, is a victim of technology and change as much as any other profession. The discipline of craftsmanship survived many challenges and was refined with the rise of Postmodernism a realization that did not go unnoticed in the design community. Eventually, as technology replaced many of the physical implements of design, the notion of craft began to fade away.

As our digital world rose around us, design often failed to explore and embrace new techniques and metaphors instead dragging along the conventions that worked so well for us in the physical world.

2016 was another year of reinvention for design in business. It saw the continued acquisitions and mergers of some of the biggest service firms in the innovation design and digital advertising space. Firms such as Salesforce, IBM, McKinsey, Capital One, Accenture are continuing to embed and integrate the tenants of design thinking into their DNA. Advertising holding companies continue to deepen their technical capabilities with acquisitions such at SapientNitro and its merger with Razorfish.

The smaller and mid-size professional services firms saw an increase in access to capital that would have been unheard of just a few years ago leading to rapid growth and acquisitions among smaller players. But we can find validation elsewhere as well. Some of the newest, most disruptive and valuable startups in the world put their best foot forward with design.

Today, the design discipline has never been more valued. As Andrew Crow states in the introduction to Org Design for Design Orgs, “Our methods and thinking are valued and respected. We not only make things but we help create the strategy that brings the things to life.” The challenge is that many designers do not understand the fundamentals of how digital alters the landscape of craftsmanship. How big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence can influence our work or how key the understanding of human perception is to creating effective experiences leveraging virtual and augmented reality.

These deficits in knowledge and a recent focus on historical professional services that decouples designing from building means that designers are attempting to solve problems with solutions no one can implement or operating with a poor to non-existent understanding of the enabling technology that would allow their work to be more effective.

The acquisition cycle we’re currently seeing is an attempt to address this, but it may, by accident, wind up leaving out the discipline of craftsmanship and the accountability that comes with it. The loss of that accountability creates a new problem for many of these firms. It was expected that designers of the 30s, 40s and 50s had a deep familiarity with the mediums in which they worked…an understanding of textiles, photography, etc.

Whereas perfection is often the enemy of good in a small independent studio, in the world of public companies and shareholders, the enemy of good quickly becomes good enough.

This will be challenging territory for many professional services firms that claim design expertise in a world where the products we develop are so intertwined with technology and services as to be indistinguishable. Where good enough simply means not good enough to succeed long term. More importantly, good enough design can often create problems in designed systems that are unanticipated and have big consequences.

Time will tell if the enterprise can truly address these shortcomings as they attempt to integrate design and designers into their core culture. There is a real and great risk that design may suffer the same indignities that the practice of mindfulness is currently experiencing where the enterprise is simply co-opting the easy parts.

2017 will bring success to the professional design services practices that can ship what they create, understand the medium (technology) with which they work and promote the practice of craftsmanship in service of the people that they create for.

These opinions are my own but thanks to Nate Burgos, John Geletka, Jim Jacoby and Jeff Smith for reading drafts of this.