Why the 'decade of design' may mean design as we know it will die

I can't help but think that we (designers) haven't exactly been helping ourselves. In the struggle for perceived relevance, we have built up a mystique around ourselves, hid away in 'design departments', wore different clothes than everyone else, and invented jargon apparently aimed at competing with engineering in complexity and inaccessibility. Playing a game of thrones, we've been taking care of our own and each other, perpetuating the mythology of divine creativity while remaining notoriously unable to express the value of our work in the only way that matters: money.

It is thus that I should not have been as surprised as I admittedly was when Aleksandra Melnikova, Head of Design at Publicis Poke, told me in an interview that, finally, User Experience Design was dead - accompanied by a big smile, an almost super-villain like laugh. Indeed, this is not news to be down about.

Earlier this year, tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced their investment in Figma, the company behind the design asset creation and collaboration tool of the same name. In the press release, the company announced that this was a move in recognition of the 2020s being the decade of design - following the decade of code.

Really? How can these apparently polarising views by respected experts be reconciled? Could the marginalization of designers of the past finally come to an end? Not just that, but could design become as big as code? Yes and no. There are a few sea changes that have more or less quietly put the industry on a new trajectory.

1. The business value of design

The impact of design, or the lack thereof, has never been successfully quantified by direct means. Yes, we can stage A/B tests to show the revenue increase caused by different implementations of a feature. What we can't do though, is run such comparisons on a larger scale. How would a product, team, business unit, or company perform with or without design and all else equal?

In 2019, some members of the community finally decided that design-led companies had been around for long enough to do exactly that. Most notably, studies published by McKinsey and Invision had a go at conducting essentially comparative cohort analyses of companies with different degrees of design permeation and found what made intuitive sense: Enterprises that are, at their core, driven by creating value for real humans through empathy, customer-centricity, and an acknowledgement of emotional needs such as desirability consistently and by far outperform their competition. We still don't know what the ROI of a designer's time will be per hour, but now, at last, the world knows that there is monetary value in leading with design. All the while, customer-centricity has become a mainstay in the business world in the form of Design Thinking. But that's already an old hat.

2. The operationalization of design (or Design as a commodity)

Every practice that grows in complexity has to, at some point, invest in operations. And so, following in the footsteps of engineering once more, after DevOps we saw the advent of DesignOps. Job titles were invented, MeetUps held, podcasts recorded, featuring a swathe of creatives who now - often without additional time or budget - took it on themselves to scale their impact, creating kick-ass designs by day, and developing best practices, processes, and design systems at night (You know who you are). Tech companies were fast to respond to the need and gave us integrated solutions to these problems like Invision Studio and DSM, and, of course, Figma.

It's taken some time, but as more and more reusable work has been created it has become time to reap the rewards in the form of time saved on repetitive activities, and through mature processes. Or rather, time spent differently. Instead of creating the same buttons and research scripts over and over again, there now is time and headspace to focus on new challenges. And it won't be long until AI-driven tools such as Microsoft's Sketch to Code or Uizard transform the delivery functions in design even further.

3. Designer's search for meaning and advocacy to 'outsiders'

With their accelerated and increasingly commoditised workflows, designers have been branching out to remain relevant. An endless flood of articles coercing them to learn business or coding - in essence moving further up or down the value chain of design delivery - is a symptom of them branching out in search for increased impact and purpose. What really matters here, though, is not the upskilling of designers, but that their movements in traditionally non-designer domains has led to increased collaboration and dialogue with other colleagues, helped establish a shared language, to break down departmental walls, and allowed for ruthless collaboration. Gone are the black turtle-necks as we've been handing Sharpies and Post-Its to managers and analysts, wrote user stories and performed quality assurance reviews (QA) with developers, and, in the process, educating everyone around us on how to create technology that matters to people.

What's next

(BOCTAOE: Of course, there are many companies and even industries that aren't quite there yet as the aforementioned reports illustrate. But those are either industries that will never change (until AI replaces them, that is), or they haven't yet had to compete hard enough. Elsewhere, design no longer is a great to have, but a commodity, a must-have. Like accounting, it is no longer feasible to operate a flourishing business without it for any meaningful amount of time.)

But what about designers? What are we meant to do in a world where what we advocate for has been sufficiently advocated, and execution is increasingly commoditised by operations and novel tooling? You want to put yourself out of a job, you said; that's what success means, you said.

What we earned through our hard work and drive to innovate, is harder work. Maybe more interesting work, more varied work. Here, maybe the metaphor of metamorphosis is more applicable. It is time to curl up in a cocoon, dissolve into protein mush, and hatch as a beautiful butterfly. Many different butterflies in fact. Multi-faceted. With 'standard' user interfaces taken for granted, some of us will expand the limits of visualising data and interacting with it. Others will set new paradigms in new dimensions such as voice interfaces or virtual reality (No, AR won't be a thing anytime soon). Others again will double down on product psychology, management, and business, finding and solving even tougher challenges at the frontend of innovation.

So yes, if you are running design as an isolated department or service only, and think of UX primarily as wireframing and usability optimization, then yes, design is dead. For everyone else, the really exciting times are only just about to begin. Long live design.