Trauma and the design profession
What self-limiting beliefs are hard for us to avoid?
One goal for Why Design Is Hard was to confront the self-limiting parts of design culture. In my career it’s been unusual to see it addressed directly in the hundreds of books, podcasts and design events I’ve experienced. Yet it’s something I’ve discussed with other design leaders, but often in hallways at events or in backchannels on Slack.
By self-limiting, I mean a person who limits their own growth by their expectations and actions. These expectations may be formed by bad past experiences, including childhood trauma, and have understandable causes, but their negative impact is the same. The defense against one wound creates another. At its extreme, self-limitation becomes self-destruction.
After a chat on LinkedIn with Jen McGinn about why designers find it hard to sell their ideas I was motivated to do some research and found this Reddit post:
[Many] go into design with the dream and expectation they'll be designing cool stuff, designing what they want, how they want it…
The reality is, you're under appreciated, under valued, everyone has an opinion, you're not designing for yourself you're designing for someone else and if they don't like it tough…
I've seen it crush a lot of people's passion and drive and motivation and their mental health.
This story is familiar, right? Not all designers feel this way but clearly many do.
But what is the source of this young designer’s surprise? Why wouldn’t employers have strong opinions and preferences? Somehow for designers this reduced agency is a greater personal disappointment than for engineers, managers or almost any other profession.
Who becomes a designer anyway?
The deeper questions from the “disappointed designer” story are:
What kind of person chooses creative professions like design?
Where does the expectation of getting to design whatever you want come from?
The stereotype, for whatever it is worth, is that people enter creative fields because when they were young they were drawn to solitary activities of self-expression. Maybe art was a way to avoid an abusive family, or nasty schoolmates, and feel safe (e.g. the unfairly labeled “weird art kid”). The point is that there was an element of escape fueling their creative interests.
There’s some research supporting the link between trauma and creativity, especially for children, but it certainly doesn’t apply to everyone. Do designers come from backgrounds with more family trauma than other professions? Does the stereotype I offer above resonate with you? It definitely fits many designers I know, but that’s really not reliable data to work from. If you know of someone who has studied this please leave a comment.
If we buy the stereotype, the self-limiting trap is that their relationship to their work is personal: it’s not just a job, it’s their identity. And it’s an identity formed as a defense against, or an escape from, other people. And when someone feels their identity is being criticized, it’s easy to feel (re)victimized by behavior that is normal for most people in project work at their job.
The Reddit post continues:
[Many designers] take criticism on their work as a personal attack and it really gets to them, they can't separate work from themselves and the constant amends and feedback we get as designers can really really get to some people
Put another way, the same sensitivity that gives designers exceptional taste and useful obsessiveness over details, can also surface in insecurities that makes common work situations (re)traumatizing for the designer and frustrating for everyone else.
What causes self-limiting behavior?
I want to frame this generously for anyone who feels victimized by their workplace. Many workplaces are terrible. The average boss isn’t great and half of all of them are worse than the average. If I were in your workplace I might be just as frustrated as you are. But I can’t magically fix most workplaces. You can’t either. What I can do is reframe this situation to make it easier to accept or improve, and invite you to do the same.
Criticism and the avoidance of it is perhaps the primary cause of self-limiting behavior in design culture. By avoiding situations that invite criticism, or to behave in unproductively defensive ways in those situations, designers also avoid opportunities to grow, teach and earn trust. It’s only in difficult conversations with peers and leaders that new understanding in both directions is possible. To gain influence, demonstrate expertise, and build trust depends on situations where criticism or disagreement is possible or even likely.
A primary message of Why Design Is Hard is that the design of products or services is a social process, not a solitary one. Hundreds of decision by different experts go into making any product and they make those decisions together. This means the more solitary you are the less involved you will be in important decisions. The exception is if you are fortunate enough to work for someone powerful who effectively represents you in decisions or in a mature culture that understands the role designers want to play.
Regardless of our preferences, the social nature of design in organizations is immutable. Organizations are made of powerful people with opinions. Which means any designer who is in denial of this, resents it, or chooses not to invest in growing relational skills, is limiting themselves. They are holding out for a mythical workplace that has never existed. The fact that design culture still somehow yearns for it, even if just in our mythology, perpetuates not only disappointment for future generations but a world that is not as well designed as it could be.
So what now?
In the simplest terms, redefine your relationship to your own creativity. If we can’t change the nature of workplaces, or the general ignorance in the world about good design, the only option is to work on ourselves. This isn’t easy of course. You may need the help of a therapist to do it. But this is preferable to being angry about things that we do not have the power to change and that possibly never will on their own.
Towards the end of Why Design Is Hard, I share a story about the tyrannical Frank Lloyd Wright and how difficult he was to work with. For many designers Wright and people like him represent a fantasy they aspire to of being able to create whatever they want and not having to answer to anyone.
We’ve refrained from stories about artists in this book until now for good reason. Art can be about the artist, but design is for the people. Wright and narcissists like him (he wore capes, you know) are only good examples of how to make design harder.
A famous artist, whose clients hire him because of his fame, can get away with behaving poorly. The rest of us don’t have that luxury, and even if we did, behaving this way doesn’t lead to better work.
Just ask Wright’s clients, who must sit in their beautiful living rooms in uncomfortable, angular wooden chairs that they can never move or replace.
For us, it’s a reminder that sometimes the ego trap is a childish wish for artistic entitlement, stuck in a grown-up’s power trip, masquerading as a career. It would be wiser to make design the profession and art the hobby, where the art and the artist can be free.
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