The carousel version
The best possible design is a direct result of collaboration and the best possible collaboration cannot be achieved through classical education, or education as we know it.
At the same time, people involved in the digital design world tend to be blind to the tribal way of functioning of our design community.
Most seek acknowledgement within, without putting in the work.
If you’re talking with people in UX, they’ll always think business people don’t offer enough time and don’t understand how important it is.
If you talk with people in Business, they’ll think people in UX are snowflakes that have no clue on how business work and they just waste critical company funds to prettify two buttons.
Funny thing? They’re both right.
— My Managing Director friend that deals with both worlds on a daily basis.
If you’re used to swiping carousels to get your information, the above should be enough to make my case. Otherwise there’s more below. — How’s that for passive-aggressive, eh?
Where do I belong, whom do I follow?
Driving conversation.
There’s a lot of buzz online, in the design sphere, to find a solution for a community that works. Up to this point most communities have failed. Why? Because you either post to promote your work, and I found this to come from the more junior designer, or you shut down other people. And I won’t lie. I did this a lot. Until I realized I have a lot more to gain by driving conversation. And I think this is the exact key ingredient that is missing.
I also think that design advice should work like the scientific method. You have your theory, prove it and get others to prove it so it becomes, in this case, a best practice.
Design works like a tribe. You have your elders that teach and your juniors that strive for attention and rebel before taking the elders advice. And this is the real world experience of designers that have dealt with pretty much all kinds of clients and teams.
I also think that design advice should work like the scientific method. You have your theory, prove it and get others to prove it so it becomes, in this case, a best practice.
The best work comes from collaboration.
In a more realistic conversation with
(owner of the popular Instagram page: uxgoodies) about this subject, we both leaned towards the idea of having a space driven by more senior people, outside of the social media preconceptions and geared towards the critical thinking setting.
Pretty sure there are at least two people, in every team, screaming for a breath of fresh air in the form of new ideas and conversations that are a lot more mature rather than what you find in an Instagram carousel.
A setting where senior designers invite other senior designers identified and vetted by the others based on their own experience.
So think of a setting where senior designers invite other senior designers identified and vetted by the others based on their own experience. At one point or another we’ve come across someone, being at your place of work, a meetup or online that others also acknowledge as a person they respect.
Getting to that level: Divergent and Critical Thinking
A while ago the rational and down to earth part of me that my girlfriend is, asked to watch Netflix`s “The Last Dance”. The story of Michael Jordan and how he got the Bulls to be world champions. One thing that stood with me and determined me to write this article, was when Michael admitting to have berated his teammates in order to push them to be at their best possible in order to play at his level.
One might ask, why isn’t critical thinking pushed as a must-have skill, in this and frankly any field. And the answer is simple: industrial, assembly-line education. — And here’s Sir Ken Robinson talking about this a lot better than I could. Oh, and it’s animated:
Sir Ken Robinson talked about this in the 2010`s
So how does this translate in our field?
To the normal employee, the attrition rates translate to “all the good people are leaving”. Competent people have chosen to leave, driven away by the lack of culture and inability to innovate due to poor management rather than poor compensation. Managers that measure performance by the hours you sit on your ass, molesting pixels at the office, rather than the work you produce, how you think and what you’re best at. Companies say they want unicorn employees, but they do nothing to attract them. Those employees that are unique in the way they approach things and more than that those that possess the superpower of ‘critical thinking’.
What you are running is a factory and you hired a bunch of people that took your assembly line job because they were trained to think that’s all they deserve.
When this happens, in Seth Godin`s words, it’s a sign that what you are running is a factory and you hired a bunch of people that took your assembly line job because they were trained to think that’s all they deserve. All those people that only say ‘yes’ and never even think to question a decision or an estimation set by somebody else for the work they’re doing.
This kind of way of working tends to be efficient and it might work because it’s consistent but it will never innovate and it will never produce true quality products.
Driving education
Education needs to change and by that I mean, we have to push for change by registering to vote and not waiting on others to do it for us only to complain that things remain unchanged for years.
School is often teaching you nothing but compliance. You sit through 8 years of school being forced to learn stuff that is boring and that renders you passionless. No wonder ADHD is a disease. You later end up an adult stating you learned nothing in school but viruses don’t exist and 5G is something used to control you, while you stain yet another t-shirt with ketchup and pass out in front of the TV.
Schools work under the premise of efficiency just like corporations. Here’s a course with 50 pages of cryptic gibberish, press “Done” and now you’re certified to do this job. It does nothing to teach you how to have a thoughtful conversation with the possibility of changing your mind. Humans learn by doing. That’s why you do that 101 day UI challenge and replicate design after design, page after page, workshop after workshop interview and interview and so on until you know what works and what doesn’t; like muscle memory.
When was the last time you were trying to figure something out or to better a design or a piece of code without turning to the ever available Google search bar?
In closing.
As designers, we need to stop acting like a service and enforce vitality and collaboration. We should strive for, request and model education based on doing and pushed by people that are active in this field. Like practitioners in a corporation, a start-up, that manage teams and do actual work before going on tour to various conferences with talks. Push for conversation before anything else.
