The design purity trap & how to escape it

Thanks to all 170+ of you who voted last week on our cover design. The clear winner, coming in at over 70%, was this one, which makes me laugh every time.

The book itself is in the layout stage (the manuscript gets converted to actual book pages) and on schedule for a release this September. Stay tuned for more details.

The design purity trap

We’ve already written about why growing up is hard and how to reframe frustrations, but beneath these lessons is a trap in design culture we call the design purity trap.

The design purity trap is the belief that as a designer you should always be evaluated on your creative talents and everything else is secondary. A design purist rejects the need for designers to be good communicators or to learn how to sell their ideas as these things are not “pure design.”

The problem is that most of humanity doesn’t believe in design purity. They barely know what design is or what designers do. Morseo, there is no manager purity or janitor purity or engineer purity. Everyone in every job would love to be evaluated just for their ideas, but there is no workplace that truly provides this. Work is a social process which means communication skills and relationships are critical. This idea of design purity is a trap for designers, since it sets up impossible expectations the real world will never provide.

How to escape the trap

On the first day of design school, and in the first page of every design book, there should be a clarifying lesson about the human nature of design. We suggest: 

Your success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent. The powerful people you need as allies will likely not know anything about design and you will have to charm and teach them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built and shipped by your organization. Your ability to explain your design ideas and persuade people to use them is equally as valuable as your creative talents.

But for design purists this is a betrayal. They became designers to spend time working on their own ideas. They probably loved sketching, drawing and creating with solitary tools and it’s this kind of work that led them to this profession. If they wanted relationships, they’d likely say, they would have become project managers, marketers or entrepreneurs! Regardless of the reasons why, belief in design purity mostly just isolates designers who soon complain that they are constantly ignored. A contradiction that mystifies everyone else in the organization.

Our point is that accepting that design is a social process doesn’t mean that you have to like it. You are not forced to become an extrovert or talk to people more than you want to. All that it means is that your eyes are open to reality and that you see the real causes of your frustrations. Good designers operate in the real world, not the imaginary one they’d prefer. With open eyes it’s possible to accept reality and set healthier expectations, or you can choose to learn new skills to make reality better for yourself. But staying in the design purity trap only keeps you stuck in a fantasy that has never and will never exist, which will make you bitter and sad.

Design culture frequently presents famous artists, like Frank Lloyd Wright or Stefan Sagmeister, as implicit role models, blurring the important distinction between design and art. Design is a service to a company or a customer, whereas art is an expression of the artist. Artists get art purity, the freedom to work alone and focus on expressing their own ideas, but only if their paying clients agree to this. However it’s almost certainly the case that organizations hire designers to contribute to the social process of making product decisions, and not for any kind of purity at all.

Why is it we rarely celebrate design heroes who are shown to excel at collaboration, leadership, persuasion or facilitation, despite how central these skills are to successful design work in the real world? The reason may be that the design purity trap, as misguided as it is, is a tempting fantasy that’s easier to sell than the truth. But if we want a better designed world, the sooner we leave the fantasies behind the better.