2015 Design in Review
Q: What happened in 2015 that excited you as a designer?
By all accounts, 2015 has been tough. To stay abreast of current events meant committing yourself to a seemingly never-ending stream of bad news. But from that also came the year’s most exciting development: Designers giving a shit in record numbers. By my completely unscientific sampling, I’d wager my Twitter feed is half design, half progressive activists and journalists. As the year drew on, it became increasingly difficult for me to tell these two sides apart.
Gone were the days of the loudest voice in the room belonging to those showing us how they’d have designed the latest logo. In their place were designers raising money for Planned Parenthood, increasing awareness for Black Lives Matter, and pressuring representatives over gun control. We love telling ourselves that design can change the world. But this claim often comes from designers with a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world actually works (redesigning homeless people’s signs doesn’t help solve homelessness). This year, however, as the hits kept on coming, designers gave me more reasons to be proud of this profession than ever before.
— Joseph Hughes, Designer
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2015 had plenty of excitement and I’ve narrowed it down to three things:
- Earlier this year I became a member of the Society of News Design and attended their annual conference in Washington D.C. The event was held at the cathedral for editorial design, the Newseum. Each day was filled with lectures on typography, editorial design, and the future of journalism. Among the fantastic roster of speakers was Roger Black, Richard Saul Wurman, and Ian Adelman. I walked in an editorial design fan boy and left a fan man.
- Later in the year, I joined a brand new team at IBM Design. We are developing a program that brings together newly hired designers with IBM business units to work on future products and services. During our cohorts, there are 70+ designers in a flurry of design activity. In 2015, I lead six teams, working closely with forty designers from around the world. The energy is palpable, infectious, and very exciting.
- I finally bought FF Franziska.
— Greg Storey, Design Practice Lead, IBM Design
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Seeing a lot more discussion and collaboration between designers and developers. Both sides realizing they share the same goals, and instead of being adversarial and keeping walled gardens, teams are beginning to work together to create a better end result for all involved, most importantly the client.
— Andrew Norcross, Lead Product Developer, Reaktiv Studios
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I feel like 2015 was the first time that we started to really pay attention to how we communicate with robots. Whether through text, email, or Slack, suddenly I’m looking forward to my robot interactions, rather than dreading them (“operator. OPERATOR. Human. I WANT TO TALK TO A HUMAN…”). AI has always been this amazing but distant idea, conjuring up thoughts of Deep Blue and fear of death to us all, and somehow it seemed like an embodiment, either in form or voice, was a prerequisite. But now I’m just thinking how our new friends will get rid of a lot of crappy experiences with content (and humans) and bring a new dimension to design that we haven’t even imagined yet.
— Juliette Cezzar, Designer, educator, author. Associate Director of the Communication Design Program at Parsons/The New School in New York City, President of AIGA/NY.
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In-housing. This isn’t specifically a trend for 2015 as it’s been true over the last couple of years. By in-housing I mean the purchase of design firms by larger entities. When it’s called this, the connotation is negative. Design firms are selling out! Independent design is going away!
Bullshit.
Design is being recognized as a crucial part of doing business by companies all over the world.
So when Capital One buys Adaptive Path, or Facebook acquires Hot Studio or even my own firm, McKinsey announced the purchase of Lunar this year, I think that the real winner is design in general. Because by making these purchases, companies are saying, “We value design and we think it’s a crucial part of doing business.” And if design is valued within these major companies, then designers are valuable. It means we can stop crashing the party and instead, get invited. It means we get offered a seat at the table instead of just standing on the sidelines. It means we can lift our heads out of Photoshop, take off the headphones and be heard if we speak. So if you’re at a company who hasn’t bought a design firm, you can turn around and send your managers these articles and tell them it means design isn’t just a thing “creatives” do, it’s how business is getting done. Design is increasing shareholder and company value. Design is helping make products better, peoples lives easier, and contributing to the bottom line.
Dave Hoffer : Executive Design Director, McKinsey & Company.
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At the risk of repeating what my colleague Joseph Hughes already said, what Joseph Hughes already said bears repeating.
This year was a shitshow. The implosion of the United States is no longer a question of if, but when. Our children are being murdered in schools and their murderers are being propped up by a domestic terrorist organization. One party’s political front-runner is advocating racial violence and religious intolerance at a level not seen since the fall of the Weimar Republic. And the other front-runner — the one I’ll probably end up voting for — is in the pockets of Wall Street. And if we’re lucky Greenland will melt and raise the ocean levels by twenty feet before some of this happens. So you’ll pardon me if I don’t give a shit about the latest minor tweak to yet another typeface made by old white men. You’ll pardon me if I’m not excited about your new tool that promises to fix my design process.
2015 was the beginning of designers realizing they’re a part of society. Again. 2015 was the beginning of designers understanding they don’t get to opt out of the coming reckoning. 2015 was the beginning of designers understanding that what they do needs to get political.
We’re not special. We’re screwed. Just like everyone else. So we have to fight. Just like everyone else.
Mike Monteiro, Design Director at Mule, future NRA victim.
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In 2015, what excited me as a designer was personal. This is going to sound really dumb, but stay with me.
I made design decisions that I’m proud of, like organizing my garage and setting up a system of checklists for house chores. I saw that design decisions I made earlier in life continue to be successful, like the reminders I set to enjoy time with my kids, and a monthly budget for holiday spending.
By making decisions like these, I designed the peace of mind and sense of order that I now feel at home. My stress level is at an all-time low. When unexpected stuff happens, I can think. When instead everything goes as expected, I have time to — design.
As my personal life becomes a well-oiled machine, I can direct more of my attention toward issues that are bigger than myself. That feels more important every day.
— Tim Brown, designer
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The rise of UX has been coming for years, but the user-first momentum seemed clearer than ever in 2015.
Smart teams have realized that user experience no longer conflicts with business goals, it is the business goal. We’ve even introducing new experiences to the party: customer experience and brand experience, with more certainly to come. Yeah, they’re buzzwords, but they represent a legitimate shift in the way companies see their users: with value and scarcity, worth building a deep relationship with.
With experience becoming a key differentiator, we’re seeing an explosion of design leadership and culture at companies both new and old. Startups with design founders. Enterprise giants going on design hiring sprees.
With design and experience on center stage, we have an opportunity to work across team lines, distilling input from every corner of the company into a solid, considered product. Designers are being called to do more than ever, and that’s pretty exciting.
— Clark Wimberly, designer at InVision
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For me, 2015 was the year that design started getting political. We saw several instances this year of the decisions that designers make being thrown sharply into focus and those decisions themselves becoming talking points. We had Facebook rolling out their Safety Check function during the Paris terror attacks and we asked why that function had not been available to those in Beirut a few days earlier who had experienced their own terrorism. We saw Uber fighting its drivers while at the same time being told how beneficial Uber was to them and the economy. We saw Airbnb throw a significant number of dollars behind the campaign to reject Prop F in the local San Fransisco elections, touting the benefit of short term rentals to the city whilst offending almost everyone with some rather tactless advertisements. We saw individual designers create imagery in support of free speech after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. Finally, we also saw political movements embrace design. From Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to the Everytown campaign for gun safety which created its own Creative Council.
For years, designers have been asking for a seat at the table. We’ve been asking that design be taken seriously and for good design to be treated as the solid foundation upon which successful companies are built. Hell, good design can even get a president elected. Well, we now have that seat at the table, and with that seat comes responsibility. 2015 was about designers starting to recognize that responsibility and taking our first, faltering steps along a path where we realize the power that we have at our fingertips. How we choose to wield that power will be critical.
Stewart Scott-Curran, Designer.
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This was the year that boutique shops had to decide what business they were actually in. When they said they were in design, what did they mean by that? Strategy? Research? Execution? All of the above? As the barriers to entry for execution become lower and lower, design execution has become either a commodity or an insourced task.
As design gets baked into business (rightly!) the pool of work available for external agencies is shrinking. The agencies that have thrived are those with skills in research, strategy and advice that most businesses just can’t justify having on salary.
Ross Floate, Floate Design Partners.
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2015 was an exciting year.
For my past two years at Adobe, I have mostly been working as a researcher in the design tool space (and meeting a TON of great designers along the way, like all the fabulous knuckleheads here on DDS). Its been great fun — the space is totally unstable and shifting but that also means a great deal of exciting energy and creativity. New tools, workflows, and projects are popping up weekly. It really is a great time for design and designers. Especially because all that bubbling energy is changing the way things are done at places like Adobe. This year I was fortunate to be part of a great Photoshop team that stepped into this milieu and, building on work that started in 2014, delivered a number of great new features and workflows. The team, and Adobe at large I think, worked and is continuing to work to align itself with prevailing design communities, conversations, and trends (open source Design Space anybody?). Having the opportunity to experiment in different directions, and deliver new experiences to designers was definitely my professional highlight in 2015.
On a more meta level, the drumbeat around design thinking is getting louder and louder. IBM, for example, in a huge effort is revamping the way it works to incorporate design thinking and design-led innovation. See Greg’s awesome post above ^. As I see it, one of the key attractions for many to design thinking is that it privileges starting all work with the users, with people. Understanding real day-to-day lives and problems is the key to designing and building successful products and solutions. I see a lot of energy here, and a great opening for more ethnography and research. Of course I would argue this, but connecting with people is where the real meat of a design thinking approach is. I think 2016 will be a great year for more deeply building out the “how” of design thinking and user engagement.
Charles Pearson, design anthropologist at Adobe
