Designing to do and be better

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Designing to do and be better

Looking at the recent news and reflecting on some of the conversations I’ve had recently, I’ve paused a bit to think about a question I get asked all the time.

Why do I like working in design?

When choosing what to do at university, I had to choose between design or psychology and I actually decided against studying design. Why?

I wanted to become a Clinical Psychologist and to help people with their mental health and disabilities. (Turns out I don’t have the patience for how long that would take…)

Two things from my studies have really stuck with me as I’ve moved back into design:

1. Psychological health conditions can often be a response to mental and physical stressors that people experience in their lives.
2. As well as helping people with their mental health, Positive psychology can help people move beyond coping to human flourishing

These have become underlying drivers for a lot of my design work. Whether working on new services or redesigning how organisations work, there’s an opportunity to create a world that reduces stressors on people and can create environments that nurture human flourishing.

So, why am I in Design?

Because I believe the world can and should be better.

If we aren’t designing things that are making that world better, then what is the point? It can be better, we should push for that.

When working on new projects, it can be easy to lose sight of this. We’ve been given a brief and we dive into the challenge in front of us. We love solving problems, but we need to create space to step back, and consider the context and direction of the work we’re doing, and the impact we want to have.

There are some existing expectations of what ‘good’ design looks like, like W3C accessibility standards. These can be a helpful nudge or add accountability for specific things, but this should be seen as a minimum and not the aspirational goal.

We need to push outside of our comfort zone to make things better.

When working with clients on financial products, we can create things that help people improve their financial security and can make it easier for people to build a future for themselves.

When looking at how teams and organisations work, we can create environments that enable people to be more creative and problem-solve, and create spaces that support human flourishing instead of being a source of stress.

At frog, we’re weaving this into our practices. We’ve created public tools like Cards for Humanity and are rebuilding our internal design toolkits so that sustainability is considered at every stage of projects, rather than being an afterthought or only when clients ask for it.

Even with all of that, clients are usually the final decision-makers, so we need to help them understand potential positive and negative impacts so that they can make well-informed decisions.

Now there’s obviously nuance and complexity when you get into knotty problems. There are many different views on what a “better” world looks like. If there was a simple answer to that, we probably wouldn’t have to have a conversation about it in the first place.

But just because there are different perspectives and complex problems doesn’t mean we should shy away from them. How can we expect to actually make things better if we aren’t going to take the time and effort to understand what “better” means and looks like for different people? When we create new things, we need to form a grounded, informed perspective on it, and be able to explain and be accountable for why we did what we did.

We won’t always get it right and we should be open to feedback and critique, but we shouldn’t hide from this and just gloss over difficult topics with a nice user interface or a chunky profit margin.

So, why am I writing a blog post about this, extolling the importance of doing work that makes the world better? I’m not the first person who’s said or thought this, far from it.

As I said at the start, I’ve recently reflected on why I’m in design. It’s all well and good personally holding these beliefs, but I also feel the need to be more accountable and responsible for them. This should be something that people know about me and can hold me accountable to them. I’m not perfect, but it’s easier to let things slip if other people can’t point out when I’m letting them slip, or can’t call me out if I’m being a hypocrite.

I can also be a better example to others. I’m in the privileged position of being in a senior role at a respected design company and I should use that as a platform to help others do good work.

So, this is me trying to become accountable. I will try to be louder, to be more outspoken, and to stand for things that I think should be different. I’ll try to share more tools and things that I hope people will find useful for doing better design work.

Let’s help each other be better designers, and do more impactful work.