You’re designing for change? Great, here’s 14¢!

Designers are a masturbatory bunch. We like to sit in white rooms with just enough colour from all the ridiculous post its that we post on our walls and discuss our ability to change the world.

“Design is different from art in that it provides solutions.”

“Designers are natural problem solvers.”

Both reiterated to death. Both competing for a gold medal in ridiculous. I’m not sure at what point this happened, but somewhere along the way, we went away from solving problems to looking for problems to solve — as if this world doesn’t have enough blisteringly obvious issues.

I was at an event today where a jolly bunch of kiddos went up on stage to talk to us about a chatbot they built to help people find the perfect restaurant to go to. They said the problem with Yelp or Foursquare was that you can’t trust someone online that says “this sushi is shit” if you don’t know that person’s taste in sushi to begin with.

The solution?

Design a bot to tell you if the sushi is good or not. Because you know, bots are famous for having legendary taste buds.

Look, obviously I understand that the bot uses data and your preferences to make better decisions. Decisions that drive you into another recommendation black hole, suggesting you eat your one millionth ramen this year because you made the stupid mistake of hitting the heart on a ramen dish in Instagram.

Of course I also identify that bots are important and an inevitable technology. I can’t wait for them to make millions of call center employees jobless and to then watch the media make a big deal out of “OH THE HUMANITY OF FIRING A THOUSAND PEOPLE” for a total of 4 days before we move on to the next story about a Snapchat competitor making $20bn because “Oh well, it deserves that because think of the potential!” FOR WHAT?! More shitty content? Bill Gates once said it will take $2bn to solve world hunger. Why then did Snapchat itself ever get valued at 9.5 times that amount? Really what the hell is going on?!

That paragraph wasn’t even about design! It was a freebie rant.

I love being a designer. I meet so many extremely interesting people who are designers and we have some great conversations at times. The problem I’m currently having is how much fuss we make over making everything we do look shiny, even where it doesn’t make sense. We fool ourselves into thinking that building yet another bot to recommend some garbage is good design. We have painfully non-scientifically verifiable research methods but because we can add a layer of yummy After Effects on top and slap on a meandering acoustic guitar beat, people buy into this insanity as “human-entered” design.

Again, not to be one-sided about it all. I genuinely believe that some of it good — great even! I’m all for co-creating solutions with people to solve their problems, but sometimes that problem is “how might we make this toilet brush more ergonomic” and a video will have some well-groomed dude come in and tell us about how they worked with people to make it the perfect fit. It’s a goddamn toilet brush man! Most apps are toilet brushes too — as are a ton of modern services. In fact, out of the one billion apps on the iOS App Store, I’d say 999.9 million of them are toilet brushes. As are the plethora of “Uber for X” services we developed in the past few years. Toilet brushes.

Design is a great tool. It’s interesting, and it can be powerful. That’s all dandy! But I think we’ve taken our ability to “design for change” FAR too seriously. The statement has lost meaning. There are many, many things worth changing with design, but too few of us young designers are really dedicating time towards that. I actually don’t quite have a problem with the fact that we aren’t necessarily all working towards fixing the world's problems, but then don’t call it designing for change with so much grandeur. Unless of course, this meant that you’re designing for pennies, in which case, here’s 14¢ for your efforts.