Der Neue Designer: How our good intentions hurt our profession

Digital experience design has been strongly influenced by three classical design disciplines: Architecture, Industrial Design and Graphic Design. These design disciplines have brought in centuries of learnings and practices that helped us very quickly build our discipline.  

At the same time, we also inherited the historic debris that these disciplines have accumulated in the past. We have creator’s egos, we throw tantrums when our designs don’t get implemented exactly how we envisioned it. We look down on other disciplines that serve us. We crave designations that we don't deserve. We demand a seat at the table, often without doing the necessary work to earn that seat.

And all of this hurts our profession.

We need to reflect on what it means to be a designer in our current world, a completely new ecosystem. In this talk, I compare the Old and the New Designer, and offer personal tips about how we can rethink the role of the designer in digital experience design to be more inclusive, responsible, transformative, and humble.

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