Mauricio Mejía

In other words, designers have intuitive or lived experience sensibilities to propose visions (tastemaking). Human-centered design research (empathy) is secondary.

Design tastemaking can better describe how designers consider people. Good designers are tastemakers who rely on intuition and have the ability to get people to desire their proposed artifacts.

Two graphics. Left, design empathy: Designer in a rounded box on the top, and people in a rounded box on the bottom; an arrow connects people with designer with the phrase “insights about people,” and another arrow connects designer with people with the phrase “proposal based on insights.” Right, design tastemaking: Also, a designer in a rounded box on the top and people in a rounded box on the bottom; a dashed arrow connects the people with designer with the word“intuition,” and another arrow connects designer with people with the phrase “proposal based on the designer’s vision.” A label at the bottom, Graphic: Mauricio Mejía.

Design Empathy or Design Tastemaking?

[Alert: controversial take] Design empathy based on gathering insights is rarely how good designers work. While I wish good designers were empathetic and worked to deeply understand people and their needs, it has never been a primary design approach.

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Good designers address undeterminable situations. Other practitioners typically solve determined problems in which evidence may drive decision-making.

When talking about designing, it is better to say proposal-making rather than problem-solving.

Designing suggests desirable futures combining intuition/imagination with evidence/theory. Other practices typically suggest an expected output based mostly on evidence/theory.

Those who consider transdisciplinarity in designing something new probably practiced design as a trade without awareness of the economic, political, technical, and ethical components of design situations.

Text in a solid background that reads: "When designing, practitioners integrate multiple disciplines."

“Transdisciplinary design” is a redundancy. Transdisciplinarity is the nature of design; design practitioners must integrate knowledge to make compelling and effective proposals.

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Paradoxically, sometimes facilitators may give more power to make design decisions (2) if they keep control of defining the design process (1) because participants may not have design skills, access, or interest.

In ideal co-design activities, facilitators give participants the power to (1) define the design process and (2) make design decisions.

Nonetheless, every designer’s responsibility, strategic or not, is to understand the strategic context of their work — business models, social implications, ethical challenges, and more.

Some designers want to enjoy crafting visual communication, products, or spaces…
…they might not want to be strategic designers — not participating in decisions about creating and capturing business and social value.

Professional designing is a longer process, from framing situations to implementing proposals. Idea generation and form-giving are only a small part of working on complex design situations.

I often hear designers say things that suggest designing is done after framing and defining the situation. For example, "We are ready to design the product." This communicates that designers are only good at coming up with ideas and creating pretty stuff.

Real co-design is resource-intensive, and it is still an idealistic process that rarely happens in the real world.

Real co-design would require stakeholder involvement in the whole process. For this, designers would either need to become embedded in the community in the long term, or stakeholders would need to be hired in the long term to become embedded in design teams.

"Co-design sessions" are not real co-design. These are just sessions that are part of a longer and more complex design process where experts and leaders are likely to keep holding power.

Unfortunately, design schools train designers as tradespeople without political and business skills. Also, other schools train practitioners without design skills.

Design is a practice that defines and influences how we live, play, and work. Good designers need solid foundations in critical thinking, ethics, politics, and business.

Design is a series of activities in a process. These activities are conducted iteratively and differently in every process. For this reason, it is not possible to identify *the* design method. The design method is no method.

In this process, they miss opportunities to consider people's goals in everyday life. Designers can reframe their work as helping people and organizations achieve their goals. This elevates design practices and makes them more strategic and relevant.

Even when they practice some human-centered design, they may try to capture insights to rethink these features and characteristics (e.g., I research people to make this tech more appealing and execute the manager's request)

Two graphics compraring designing features and designing strategy. In designing features, a gray circle with the words organizations, strategy, and technology; then, an arrow connecting two other grouped orange circles (a) understand people and (b) design products and services. In designing strategy, three grouped blue circles (a) understand people and organizations, (b) design value proposition, and (c) design products and services.

Designers tend to laser-focus on the features, characteristics, and forms of the products and services they are creating.

Data-driven approaches conflict with systemic approaches. Measuring will narrow the view of the system. In a systemic approach, observing and assessing emergence is more meaningful.

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It is insufficient to tell design students and designers that there is a lot of power in designing.

We also need to tell designers who hold power and what types of design practices and approaches have power.

Designing "end-user" artifacts is the last element in the chain of power.

The most meaningful and impactful Thing we can design for today is public opinion.
The challenge is understanding the ethical and political responsibility that involves designing for public opinion.

The situation space (where problems and solutions co-evolve)

AI gets developed when there is a business incentive. The typical business incentive is to reduce the number of professionals and employees, not to make things easier for them. The client of organizational technology is the CEO suite, not the employees.