Five skills a designer needs to thrive in a changing world
In 2022 I was asked to teach the basics of user research. at the Master of Arts in Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). The students I had the pleasure to work with truly inspired me.
To experience the user research process first-hand, I gave my students the following question: "How might we help people better prepare for extreme weather events?". In small groups, they refined the brief and narrowed it down to a specific user group or type of extreme weather event.
Over a few weeks, the students conducted a series of interviews, surveys, and observations. It was impressive to witness the effort and passion they put into their work. They considered vulnerable groups and reached out to policymakers and emergency management experts.
Students generated new ideas based on the insights from their research. The solutions turned out to be very different from what they had initially imagined. They discovered very few people care or actively prepare for extreme weather events.
I sometimes doubted my choice of working on such a sensitive topic. What if one student had experienced an extreme weather event and found it triggering? How can I hold space for their emotions? How can they be mindful of the lived experiences of their research participants?
I tried to design for those scenarios. I offered an alternative brief and transferred a few concepts around trauma-informed research. We discussed how to manage emotions within ourselves and the participants. Maybe this was enough; perhaps it wasn't. My reflections led me to consider how we designers must expand our skill set in an era of growing disruption.
But what are those skills? How do our design process and practice adapt to a changing world?
It's time to review our design practice
A neon sign close to the university campus in Mendrisio by Maurizio Nannucci
In recent years, we have seen more designers learning about system thinking, creating low-impact digital products, or designing for circularity. There are many toolkits and worksheets for making our practice more sustainable. That's not enough.
We need to expand our skillset and design for climate adaptation – how we proactively prepare and adapt for the consequences of the climate crisis.
A recent study showed that climate change and extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods and fires, directly impact 70% of all economic sectors worldwide.
Translate in simpler terms, this would mean that 70% of companies will need to design ways to deal with the consequences of the climate crisis. As a designer, you will likely find yourself solving new challenges. Thus, having the right skills will make you feel more confident, and your work more impactful.
The following is not an extensive list of all the skills needed but a way to open a conversation and offer you at least one practical resource to learn more.
Looking to the future
We need to design for a future that doesn't yet exist. Asking users to imagine what they need could lead to the famous quote by Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Anticipating emerging needs and adapting service offerings to future scenarios requires different tools. Tools for collective imagination, taking inspiration from speculative design, design fiction, and others.
By exploring what is possible in a co-creative process, we cultivate critical thinking about the present. By imagining what lies ahead, we foster our adaptive capacities (Climate ADAPT).
It's the ability humans, organisations, and systems need to adjust to potential damage, take advantage of opportunities, or respond to consequences. Developing adaptive capacities makes us feel more prepared and resourceful during times of drastic change.
We augment our personal agency, well-being, and resilience. All those aspects are crucial to designing nimble responses to accelerating scales and speeds of change. Co-creating future scenarios helps us to develop better responses together.
🧰 To explore possible futures collectively, check out the following new tool: The Futures Bazaar: The Public Imagination Toolkit is a framework that allows participants to engage in a co-creative process in which they transform everyday objects into unique objects from alternative futures to provoke, amuse, and inspire each other. Designed by Stuart Candy and Filippo Cuttica and released by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Situation Lab, this tool is available to download for free from the BBC here.
2. Considering unhappy paths
We design and optimise for happy paths. Therefore, when creating a new experience, we focus mainly on the optimal scenarios. As a secondary task, we identify unhappy paths: potential drop-offs, dead ends in the experience flow, or possible worst-case scenarios.
Because speed and time-to-market are imperatives, organisations have prioritised efficiency over resilience. Building resilience into your processes requires time and money, which you can save when everything goes as planned.
But in a future world where disruption will be more likely and frequent, proactively designing for unhappy paths will set the organisation apart from the rest. To give you one statistic, The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) expects extreme weather events to increase by 40% within the next eight years. That is a lot.
Thus, considering unhappy paths will be vital in guaranteeing users are not left to deal with unavailable services, and businesses can rapidly adapt and recover from disruptions.
🧰 You can run a consequence-scanning workshop during the initial conception phase of a product/service, during roadmap planning and during feature creation. Facilitating a Consequences Scanning Workshop by Doteveryone helps you answer the following three questions:
What are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or feature?
What are the positive consequences we want to focus on?
What are the consequences we want to mitigate?
If you are working at an experience flow and screen level, the following article, explores how to consider drop-offs and edge cases at a UX and UI level when building a digital product.
3. Articulating the business value of our design work
Companies think in numbers and metrics. To be more effective and convincing as designers, we need to communicate and demonstrate the economic impact of our work on the business. This means being able to estimate the financial benefit of our design decisions.
Let's take the example of unhappy paths. Investing extra time designing for unhappy paths might feel unnecessary to the business; their priority is getting to the market quickly. However, designers who can estimate the potential economic impact of increased conversion by designing for unhappy paths will be more persuasive. People will listen to those who demonstrate the possible revenue loss for every day the service is unavailable.
🧰 To get concrete guidance on estimating the ROI of your design work, check out the d.MBA three-step method practical guide.
Here is a concrete example of a workshop in which I have used prototyping with numbers to estimate the viability of a new value proposition.
4. Being mindful of trauma in our practice
About two-thirds of the European population have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. Since the pandemic, we can confidently say this number has risen to 100%. We have shared a collective trauma due to the loss of freedom, certainty and, for some, even loved ones.
Trauma impacts our emotions and behaviours, as well as our body response to certain triggers or situations. As designers, we are crafting experiences for people with trauma. Without understanding trauma and despite our best intentions, we can easily cause more distress.
This is why we need to integrate trauma-informed and trauma-responsive practices into our work. We need to change how we conduct user research, co-design, and deliver solutions that are mindful of traumatic experiences and their impact on our perception and behaviour.
5. Fostering our own emotional resilience
Working with trauma, designing for worst-case scenarios, and envisioning a future with more disruption requires mental and emotional energy. All of this can take a toll on us designers.
I vividly remember the impact of conducting research with vulnerable and marginalised people on myself. The weekend after the interviews, I felt low, drained, and struggled with the emotions that these stories of hardship stirred up in me. Yet, despite my vulnerability, I kept quiet as I thought my reaction would somehow be perceived as incompetence.
Luckily, I had a colleague who openly shared how she was affected by the work. Together we decided to flag this up with our design agency and asked for more support and a review of our research practice when dealing with vulnerable groups or sensitive topics.
Working amid an ecological and climate emergency is taxing, yet doing something about it can give us hope and purpose. But first, we must learn how to deal with our own emotions and climate anxiety.
🧰 A great talk on this topic comes from Renée Lertzman. She sees psychology as the X-Factor unlocking action on climate and the ecological crisis. In her TED talk, she gives valuable insights into how you turn climate anxiety into action: How to turn climate anxiety into action | Renée Lertzman. I also recommend this fantastic podcast episode that highlights examples of how to deal with our climate feels.
The Youth Climate Circle by One Resilient Earth. A free weekly space for youth concerned about climate change from around the world to come together, share, listen, learn from each other, and grow together.
These are my first reflections on the skills required to be able to design for a changing world. Of course, I haven't considered all the technological changes we are witnessing, from the progress of AI to the power of low-code or no-code tools. What I have considered is the common need to make a positive impact.
Observing the next generation of designers, I found this to be the case. They want their work to be meaningful. I am hopeful because, now more than ever, we need people to imagine and design a better world. That’s why I founded IMMA, to help you build your own purpose-driven business.
This article has been transformed into a talk I gave during an event organised by Made For. You can watch the replay here:
