Title: Everyone is a designer. Get over it.
Context: Controversial opinions being expressed on the internet?!?! What is this world coming to?
Synopsis: Allow me to begin by nitpicking the very premise of this article, which is—dare I say—poorly designed. While the overall conclusion is sound: “design” encompassing the end-to-end experience of a product or service with responsibility for that being broadly shared; the logical leap to concluding that thereby everyone working on delivering the end-to-end experience is ipso-facto a designer, strains the very definitional bounds of design (to err on the side of understatement). We could explore a hundred metaphors and draw a thousand parallels with other professions where like-minded people work together to deliver on a singular objective without separation of expertise being ignored to simply prove a point (i.e. many individual decisions affect the eventual, singular outcome). Indeed, specialization is a key development in modern organizational production, which enables such complex processes to be coordinated in the first place. Segmenting responsibilities and capabilities then arranging them to produce the best outcomes is how progress, including experiential improvement, happens. Of course, the universal adoption of a customer-centric vision is the right thing for any business to have, but how this makes everyone intent on delivering such a thing specifically a “designer” is beyond me. That said, a little polemicism never hurt anyone. After all, everyone is nothing more than a bomb-throwing, demagogue anyway, so we should all probably just get over it.
Best Bit: “Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not, people outside of your design team are making significant design choices that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your product. They are designers.”
via gv.com
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