In the last few weeks, I have conducted an experiment. During the peak weeks of the summer holidays, when many of you were away, I took the opportunity to alter the routine of this blog slightly. I usually publish an episode of Design Voices Elevated every other Tuesday and a blog post every Thursday. In the first half of August, I opted not to publish a blog post in the weeks when a podcast episode was released, to avoid emailing you twice with different types of content during the same week. Did you notice this change at all? I’d be curious to know.
Personally, I didn’t like it much; it disrupted the routine I worked so hard to build. Therefore, I have decided to try something different. During the weeks when I publish an episode of Design Voices Elevated, I will now send you a brief blog post on Thursday with a reflection on one aspect of the interview that really resonated with me and made me think. This will be a delayed reflection, giving you time to watch the episode and form your own opinion. I’m going to try this for the first time this week. Any feedback is welcome!
A Discussion About Design Founders with Niharika Hariharan
Last Tuesday, I aired an episode of Design Voices Elevated featuring Niharika Hariharan, a design leader based in London and co-founder of Design3. One of the aspects of our conversation that I enjoyed most was our discussion on why there are so few design founders.
Niharika is both a designer and an entrepreneur. She is a strong advocate for encouraging more designers to start their own ventures. Her analysis suggests that designers often lack a network of peers who are also starting businesses, as well as the tools to quantify their ideas. I agree with both of her points. Historically, designers have not been seen as venture-starters, making it difficult to create a supportive network of design founders. Additionally, designers tend to be more comfortable with the qualitative side of things rather than the quantitative, which makes it challenging to engage with business models and growth strategies.
There is another aspect that I believe has played a key role in the lack of design founders we see today. In the last decade or two, the design practice—especially the part that deals with wicked problems and strategic matters—has undergone a process of being made tangible and understandable for business people to buy into. This shift has led to an overemphasis on the process, on the steps designers take to develop brilliant ideas. The complex layering of creative experience and output has been simplified into a few steps that anyone can understand and follow, reducing the practice to a mere shadow of what it truly is. The "Discover-Define-Develop-Deliver" model is an oversimplification, almost akin to a waterfall approach, which has left behind creativity, taste, and imagination. We have made design fit for a factory and have been teaching new design students this factory-like version of design.
This overemphasis on the process works well when it serves someone else’s idea, such as in consulting or corporate environments. However, it does not serve well when it comes to creating a brand-new venture, where the outcome and output are far more important than the process, which is often messy and not linear at all.
What’s your take? I’d love to hear from you, especially if you are a design founder!
I agree, a network of founders would encourage more designers. I also suspect if it could have something to do with personalities. Many designers are also probably risk averse, because we're tuned to consider user and stakeholder feedback. Often there are multiple and long critiques of design which beats it into a lot of us to check before proceeding.