The greatness test: what is your best design work?

How do you assess your life's work so far

What is the greatest work you have ever done? Think about it. I will ask you again later in this essay.

One reason greatness is rare is that making great things is expensive. It takes better skills, more resources, higher ambition and wiser leadership to achieve. Everyone loves to talk about greatness, but most of the time it’s impractical and the risks outweigh the rewards. When a tired parent picks up their child after school on a rainy Thursday night, does it have to be a great drive home? Or when you grab a quick lunch before a stressful work meeting, would you even notice a great meal? Greatness is overstated and to paraphrase Voltaire, greatness can be the enemy of the good. Chasing it for the wrong reason or at the wrong time can make things worse, not better.

When it comes to organizations and workplaces, greatness is more about culture than what one person can do alone. A brilliant architect like Zaha Hadid or Rem Koolhaas still needed hundreds of engineers and builders who cared as much about making a great building as she or he did (or at minimum, they needed one wealthy client who paid all the workers well enough to approximate that care). Greatness on large projects requires someone to successfully lead a team in working hard toward the same goal, which is difficult to achieve no matter how great the ideas are.

One good definition of the word culture is that it is a shared set of values people voluntarily make sacrifices for. This means many workplaces have weak culture: people are out for themselves and resist sacrificing anything, except in rare instances to help a favored coworker or two. Whereas better workplaces make you feel like part of a tribe where everyone cares about good work, and agree on what good work means. This is unusual. It’s rare. If you’re lucky you experience it a handful of times in a career.

Leaders often talk about good culture but few make the sacrifices required to achieve it. Good culture requires committing to long term investments in people. It demands the slow cultivation and protection of good, trusting relationships. Perhaps hardest of all, it demands setting an example of good behavior by leaders themselves. Leaders can’t just talk about good culture, they have to live it.

This means even for those who truly want greatness, it’s still hard to achieve. To pull it off you often must persuade other powerful people, who have their own ambitions, to align for a higher cause. This means even when everyone wants greatness, if they can’t agree on what great means, the results will not be great. Possibly not even good! Passionate but divided people compete for resources and make everyone’s job harder. Sometimes an organization is better off with simpler, humbler ambitions since those can be easier to share.

Who are great designs really for?

A profound realization for creatives is that most ordinary people, most of the time, do not want or need great things. This is a shock to hear, but if you can step away from your design career to think about human nature it’s almost certainly true. Mostly people want and need simple, decent, reliable things that they can afford. That’s it.

Skepticism is justified in the world of designed things. Few products work as advertised. Low quality is everywhere. Products break easily and are hard to repair. Most people don’t want or can’t afford the things that wins design awards. Why? They won’t solve their real problems. Consumerism has warped design sensibilities so far, and for so long (paging Victor Papanek) that we easily lose touch with what people on this planet care about and need the most.

Here’s one kind of simple proof:

When you go to the store for groceries or clothes, the staples of your life, do you only buy the best and greatest things? I bet you primarily focus on reasonable choices, based on what you can afford and what you really need.

If this is true for most people, most of the time, then why as designers are we so obsessed with some other idea of greatness? Who is it we really think needs all these great things? Why are our standards so high when the world’s standard is so low? I suspect we’re often designing more for our egos that for what will really benefit others in the world.

This line of thinking suggests three truths we need to acknowledge:

1. Affordability often matters most. You can’t improve someone’s life if you make something great but that they can not afford. It’s obvious that making something decent, reliable, affordable and safe is better for the world than an amazing breakthrough design concept most people will never own or use.

2. Convenience comes next. As a species we are efficient and lazy. No one wants more time “using designs.” That isn’t how people think about life. They almost certainly just want to go home and play with their kids. More time using whatever it is you are designing is almost certainly not their life’s goal. This means convenience is the penultimate design attribute. Great design gets out of the way. If people believe something saves them time, they will prefer it even if it’s uglier or harder to use. Much of successful marketing centers on convincing people something is more convenient than the competition.

3. Ease of use and beauty come in third. This is heresy to design dogma, but the factors designers are trained to care most about often come in third. They become important only when a product or service is affordable and convenient enough that there is competition based on ease of use and style.

When you put all of this together it suggests that the greatest designs are most likely the ones designers talk the least about. It’s things that quietly serve their purpose and stay out of the way.

This includes redesigning the food bank website for a struggling neighborhood. It’s improving the bus line that takes people to and from work when it’s raining and so they can save money on parking. It’s refurbishing the park bench where people can sit in the shade as they wait for the bus or talk with a friend. It’s simplifying a government form that makes it easier for people to get a small business loan or food stamps while they are between jobs. What we might call low-brow, basic design work often has more impact on people’s lives that the kinds of high-brow, high-tech work that gets most of the attention.

The greatness test

I’ll now ask you again: what is the greatest work you have ever done?

Many designers instinctively think about their portfolios, but that reflects their ideas, rather than what actually made it out into the world, much less the real positive impact it had. For years I though because I worked on products used by millions of people that those efforts were my greatest contributions. Now I think otherwise.

So much energy is spent to make the world more convenient for people who already have tremendous convenience. The addictive hype cycles we relentlessly follow at what we call the “leading edge” of technology allows us to pretend we’ve made progress, but it’s still hard to point to which of our toughest problems we’ve improved. If we’ve been making great things that would be far easier to do. When I step back and think about the good design as a profession is supposed to do for the world, seeing what I or anyone has done that is great is much harder to do.

I have one final, and superior, question for you. Instead of looking backward at the work you’ve done, consider this instead: What is the greatest use of your abilities to help solve important problems in the world? If there’s meaning to be found in design work, the way to find it will be in your answer.

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For your inspiration: I captured many of the greatest design projects I know of in this short video: The World Needs Designers.