Changing Role of Designers = Changing Needs of Humans

As Nobel Prize Laureate Economist Herbert Simon said, design is “whenever we are shaping the world to meet our needs.”

The needs and demands of the world are changing, the role of designers rises in response to those needs, and therefore the role of The Designer is changing.

Up through the late 90’s, designers were often concerned with the aesthetic sensibility of singular touch points or products.

Designers in the late ’00s, with the evolution of the web, started combining the focus on aesthetic sensibility of singular touch points with the notion of journeys (often to the shopping cart and check out). And so the designer became a medium of understanding and connecting the dots on a singular journey.

As technology extends and makes more transparent the complex network through which we build / deliver services and products, so do the needs of designers. Designers today and in the near future are called to break out of the silos of singular interfaces and journeys, and instead to make sense of emergent needs and dynamics in complex systems.

It’s a different skillset, identity, culture and paradigm, and it’s a non-negotiable for moving toward the opportunities of the present future.