In a collapsing world, what makes a good designer?

Design is, like many others in this capitalist age of hyper-branding and corporate mediocrity, a competency that has utterly lost its meaning.

I do not derive any joy from stating this.

I have been in too many conversations where

• “design” merely refers to visual design
• a project brief meeting is referred to as “co-design”
• a feedback round is referred to as “an iteration”
• the only supplies an ideation session requires are post-its and markers
• a 2x2 matrix is the foundational basis of the entire strategy
• only product outputs are seen as “valuable”

Folks, this is not design.

The design graveyard is landscaped with no budget for creativity, lack of involvement of those with lived experience, zero respect for those most harmed within the context, and outputs that are already set in stone (i.e. with executive pre-approval and earmarked funding).

This is top-down autocratic implementation where the “designer” is merely expected to sing and dance according to choreography that they must entirely guess, in order to produce precisely what they were hired to manufacture, usually without ever being told what it is.