De-commoditizing Design

Cette conférence sera donnée en anglais.

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In this talk, we'll first examine the situation that led to the unprecedented current wave of layoffs, and how company PR departments are using the guise of an economic downturn and the cult of AI to offload bad investment bets through significant downsizing.

We’ll continue by unpacking why (UX) research and design departments are some of the more affected disciplines across the board, and examine the many ways designers have 'designed themselves out' of the production cycle, including:

• focusing on assembling decontextualized, templated front end-components and rapid prototyping at the expense of the required rigour and depth of research and design work
• exclusively using short, time-boxed bursts of work that align with various development methodologies at the expense of well thought out discovery and contextualization efforts
• ignoring building up knowledge and vocabulary that connects the dots between design outcomes and high-profile corporate initiatives
• convincing leadership that it's acceptable for other disciplines to do research work with minimal or no research training
• establishing design education programs that focus primarily on technical skills ignoring that most of the hiring today is done by immature in-house product teams

We'll then examine the attributes of research and design skillsets that have not been nearly as affected by layoffs, and how these skills map onto foundational / generative types of research, and higher orders of design like service and systemic design. We'll also look at the types of problem solving and thinking (futures thinking and systems thinking vs design thinking and visual thinking) that are applicable to them.

In conclusion, we'll end on a high by considering 'layoff-proof’ profiles of researchers and designers, including the kind of narratives they should promote, the skillsets they should possess, as well as the market verticals they should align with that are less likely to be affected by the frequent yo-yoing of the tech cycles of the 21st century.

La conférence est présentée par Cornelius Rachieru.