Member-only story
Welcome to the Designers’ Club—Keep Out
When you keep design for designers only, you shut out the world and design’s place in it
By Khoi Vinh
Designers like to think design is an amazing, transformative force for the betterment of the human condition. But the rest of the world doesn’t see it this way. Not that there’s vehement opposition to that idea; rather, much of the population is oblivious to design’s relevance altogether. Why is that?
This question is a pivotal one for the profession. Understanding the gap between how designers see our work and how society values it will determine how we practice our craft for the next several decades — at least. It’s the difference between accepting design as a small, insular culture and it living up to its promise as something that can change the human experience.
To that end, it’s useful to examine how the practice of design — specifically, of creating interfaces to technology — compares with the practice of engineering — of constructing the technology. The two are inextricably linked, but the nature of their divergence is striking.
Those who aspire to write code know that there’s a virtually limitless number of ways to study engineering. Even outside of the halls of “‘traditional’” computer science programs…
