I haven't yet come across fears that seem more likely to occur in designers. We're subject to all the same insecurities as other humans: being wrong, looking bad or stupid, our work being inadequate/disregarded/doubted/criticized, etc. Perhaps we're more sensitive to situations involving our creativity or craft than others, but that seems to parallel the sensitivity that anyone might have when their specialized expertise is viewed negatively. Some of us might be a little more fearful than most about creating design that is underinformed or underexamined. But I don't think that applies to most designers.
Confrontation. A bad review. Being passed over for promotion. Getting managed out or fired.
Today's news seems to point to a need inside some parts of Amazon for design heroes.
"the FTC accuses Amazon of “knowingly” deceiving millions of customers into subscribing to Amazon Prime through the use of “dark patterns.” Specifically, the FTC describes how Amazon’s checkout process would allegedly present customers several options to subscribe to Prime, making it difficult to locate the option to simply finish a purchase. The commission also alleges that Amazon required customers to go through multiple unnecessary steps before successfully unsubscribing from the program."
Thanks Phillip. Those feel like things most people would be afraid of (a bad review, getting fired). Can you think of things that designers are more likely to be afraid of than other people?
I have feared being derivative. It's been paralyzing at times. Having to learn to lean into inspiration from others by infusing my work with myself. I will always have been influenced and inspired by others, but the quality work has come when I've been able to overcome the fear, and the voice in my head by being vulnerable, and putting some of myself into my work.
Thanks for sharing Kendall. This is a common fear for folks who go to design or art school. I think part of the challenge is as a designer you are well versed in the work of other designers, and it's easy to forget that your users know far less and are very unlikely to see your work as derivative, even if you feel it is. The question then is whose problem are we trying to solve?
If you were teaching designers today, would you teach them differently than you were taught about this issue?
100% - I would focus learning opportunities on how to actually take inspiration from others and incorporate into your work. I think that's an essential skill. Learning to harness it instead of being afraid of being derivative can really be a way to take big strides in your work.
And I totally agree that shifting the conversation toward what will work best for the users and how can we best solve the issues they're having, understanding that aligning with design patterns that others have used, and have become second nature, will enhance your user's experience.
Dark triad behavior. Overt and institutionalized, or in managers. There is no way to navigating them with integrity and honesty, yet multiple layered and abutting cultural systems urge people to stay put, work it out...or worse, act the same, "it's just business." Damned if you stay, damned if you don't.
Love this. Well, not the dark triad itself, but this is big observation and I wouldn't have guessed dark triad would be the first comment :)
Bryan has been thinking about blindspot detection and your comment makes me think: how can a person see the *real* cultural landscape they are on? It's often now what we're told it is. And we usually learn the hard way.
Yeah, guess what I recently ran into again. 😂 Top of mind because top of experience. Deeper read is Snakes in Suits (https://a.co/d/22MhKQV), or anything by Robert Hare. Hare's answer is avoidance, and that they are all charmers. Think about that: we don't get jobs outside of networking unless we can be charming, but dark triad are charmers.
I've also been thinking about it since my first dark triad manager. From a company point of view, I'm currently looking at public cognitive load use/abuse, where the profits go, treatment of employees, consumer support, sense of primary purpose (e.g., profit, fix [what]), hegemony tactics used, profit from trauma, information integrity, ESG reports, whether their actions are where their mouth is (e.g., if they are talking data privacy, what does their https://themarkup.org/blacklight say?). But companies can feel solid and still hire dark triad. And it's reading tea leaves: there's no way to tell if some of these factors are a learning gap, purposeful, or somewhere in between.
Want to really blow your mind? Look at dark triad behavior, and then deceptive design and our -isms. Correlation is not causation...but it is interesting and might be worth study.
Still on my mind. ;) Ran across the below article recently, and it makes me wonder: in a field where empathy is key, where we are always trying to see another's point of view, are we fish in a barrel? It's part culture (every business is set up to reward getting others to work cheap, where they draw the line is cultural) and part individual.
I've had some pretty public run-ins with dark triad folks (http://bit.ly/trafomh-the-brand) and the tales of deep dark triad exploitations I come across continue to to send shivers down my spine.
One question Scott and I often talk about is where does healthy self confidence end and narcissism begin? e.g. Without a confidence that approaches narcissism, we have little traction in putting our thoughts and creations out into the world - But when does that tip over into the dark side of narcissism?
That's about as hard and public an experience with the dark triad as you can get. My sympathies.
It's hard to tell when and how and what shifts a personality into the dark triad. The psychology field has been able to define personality patterns -- through qualitative conversations and quantitative patterns in diagnostics tests -- but that's when it's *there*.
My first reaction is cautionary. We, people, are after simple answers, simple markers of good/bad, yes/no, etc., and it's so we can feel more confidence in placing trust in our decisions, so we can build towards a future. We want to say that a person is good if they have characteristic x, y, and z. But here's the kicker: it doesn't work. The arbitrary markers we've devised (race, religion, gender, success, age, what flag(s) they have on the lawn, if they have a lawn) aren't effective signals. The signals mark as "bad" people who are perfectly fine, and they give cloaks of "good" to people who can't comprehend other people as something in the same category as they are. The dark triad, especially, are fantastic at convincing people that the signals seen are the best -- they fit the narrative to their expression.
The key behaviors of the dark triad are, at their root, extracting from people for personal benefit. Get someone's attention, energy, work, stuff, etc., to be able to use towards their goals, without any care for if there's any damage done, and anything goes as long as it works.
Think about that characteristic, and then look at our environment, biodiversity, climate, and more. These are patterns in our species. It's a key pattern to how we managed to build all our tools. It's just pushed too far. It's not the simple existence -- a toggle of on/off -- that signals the damaging personality, but the balance of it against the whole.
It gets complicated, because it's predicated on interaction and people aren't cookie cutters -- what's a step too far with one person could be ten steps shy of too far for another, and again: we like simple. It's ok if we do this here, why not there? Do we ding people for picking their simplicity point to help them make decisions? If we do that, how do we not include every cognitive bias? Worse, doesn't this play into goalpost moving and other-perfection demands of the dark triad?
It's not simple. It's not one characteristic. It's a combination, over time. I wish I could encapsulate my personal human cognitive model succinctly, but to be truthy it got really complex. :)
I mainly come across two kinds of designers, and each has a different type of fear.
1) Designers who are driven by artifacts that they hope carry the magic of persuasion (because that is what we've trained them to expect) - And when that magic dust fails to do it's work, a fear with a twist often develops around approaching peers, especially across disciplines with a "they just don't understand" attitude - Which seems cavalier to a degree, but I think it is cavalier that is rooted in the originating fear of not getting taken seriously.
2) Designers who have been trained to understand and learn from the "feedback gauntlet". There is a kind of success there, but many are afraid of pushing past that into the kind of design leadership that addresses the systemic issues that keep many orgs from deep impactful results.
I haven't yet come across fears that seem more likely to occur in designers. We're subject to all the same insecurities as other humans: being wrong, looking bad or stupid, our work being inadequate/disregarded/doubted/criticized, etc. Perhaps we're more sensitive to situations involving our creativity or craft than others, but that seems to parallel the sensitivity that anyone might have when their specialized expertise is viewed negatively. Some of us might be a little more fearful than most about creating design that is underinformed or underexamined. But I don't think that applies to most designers.
Confrontation. A bad review. Being passed over for promotion. Getting managed out or fired.
Today's news seems to point to a need inside some parts of Amazon for design heroes.
"the FTC accuses Amazon of “knowingly” deceiving millions of customers into subscribing to Amazon Prime through the use of “dark patterns.” Specifically, the FTC describes how Amazon’s checkout process would allegedly present customers several options to subscribe to Prime, making it difficult to locate the option to simply finish a purchase. The commission also alleges that Amazon required customers to go through multiple unnecessary steps before successfully unsubscribing from the program."
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/21/23768372/ftc-amazon-lawsuit-prime-dark-patterns-subscriptions
Thanks Phillip. Those feel like things most people would be afraid of (a bad review, getting fired). Can you think of things that designers are more likely to be afraid of than other people?
I have feared being derivative. It's been paralyzing at times. Having to learn to lean into inspiration from others by infusing my work with myself. I will always have been influenced and inspired by others, but the quality work has come when I've been able to overcome the fear, and the voice in my head by being vulnerable, and putting some of myself into my work.
Thanks for sharing Kendall. This is a common fear for folks who go to design or art school. I think part of the challenge is as a designer you are well versed in the work of other designers, and it's easy to forget that your users know far less and are very unlikely to see your work as derivative, even if you feel it is. The question then is whose problem are we trying to solve?
If you were teaching designers today, would you teach them differently than you were taught about this issue?
100% - I would focus learning opportunities on how to actually take inspiration from others and incorporate into your work. I think that's an essential skill. Learning to harness it instead of being afraid of being derivative can really be a way to take big strides in your work.
And I totally agree that shifting the conversation toward what will work best for the users and how can we best solve the issues they're having, understanding that aligning with design patterns that others have used, and have become second nature, will enhance your user's experience.
Dark triad behavior. Overt and institutionalized, or in managers. There is no way to navigating them with integrity and honesty, yet multiple layered and abutting cultural systems urge people to stay put, work it out...or worse, act the same, "it's just business." Damned if you stay, damned if you don't.
Love this. Well, not the dark triad itself, but this is big observation and I wouldn't have guessed dark triad would be the first comment :)
Bryan has been thinking about blindspot detection and your comment makes me think: how can a person see the *real* cultural landscape they are on? It's often now what we're told it is. And we usually learn the hard way.
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
Yeah, guess what I recently ran into again. 😂 Top of mind because top of experience. Deeper read is Snakes in Suits (https://a.co/d/22MhKQV), or anything by Robert Hare. Hare's answer is avoidance, and that they are all charmers. Think about that: we don't get jobs outside of networking unless we can be charming, but dark triad are charmers.
I've also been thinking about it since my first dark triad manager. From a company point of view, I'm currently looking at public cognitive load use/abuse, where the profits go, treatment of employees, consumer support, sense of primary purpose (e.g., profit, fix [what]), hegemony tactics used, profit from trauma, information integrity, ESG reports, whether their actions are where their mouth is (e.g., if they are talking data privacy, what does their https://themarkup.org/blacklight say?). But companies can feel solid and still hire dark triad. And it's reading tea leaves: there's no way to tell if some of these factors are a learning gap, purposeful, or somewhere in between.
Want to really blow your mind? Look at dark triad behavior, and then deceptive design and our -isms. Correlation is not causation...but it is interesting and might be worth study.
Still on my mind. ;) Ran across the below article recently, and it makes me wonder: in a field where empathy is key, where we are always trying to see another's point of view, are we fish in a barrel? It's part culture (every business is set up to reward getting others to work cheap, where they draw the line is cultural) and part individual.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2023/09/06/narcissist-magnets-narcissistic-partners-dating-red-flags/70774088007/
I've had some pretty public run-ins with dark triad folks (http://bit.ly/trafomh-the-brand) and the tales of deep dark triad exploitations I come across continue to to send shivers down my spine.
One question Scott and I often talk about is where does healthy self confidence end and narcissism begin? e.g. Without a confidence that approaches narcissism, we have little traction in putting our thoughts and creations out into the world - But when does that tip over into the dark side of narcissism?
That's about as hard and public an experience with the dark triad as you can get. My sympathies.
It's hard to tell when and how and what shifts a personality into the dark triad. The psychology field has been able to define personality patterns -- through qualitative conversations and quantitative patterns in diagnostics tests -- but that's when it's *there*.
My first reaction is cautionary. We, people, are after simple answers, simple markers of good/bad, yes/no, etc., and it's so we can feel more confidence in placing trust in our decisions, so we can build towards a future. We want to say that a person is good if they have characteristic x, y, and z. But here's the kicker: it doesn't work. The arbitrary markers we've devised (race, religion, gender, success, age, what flag(s) they have on the lawn, if they have a lawn) aren't effective signals. The signals mark as "bad" people who are perfectly fine, and they give cloaks of "good" to people who can't comprehend other people as something in the same category as they are. The dark triad, especially, are fantastic at convincing people that the signals seen are the best -- they fit the narrative to their expression.
The key behaviors of the dark triad are, at their root, extracting from people for personal benefit. Get someone's attention, energy, work, stuff, etc., to be able to use towards their goals, without any care for if there's any damage done, and anything goes as long as it works.
Think about that characteristic, and then look at our environment, biodiversity, climate, and more. These are patterns in our species. It's a key pattern to how we managed to build all our tools. It's just pushed too far. It's not the simple existence -- a toggle of on/off -- that signals the damaging personality, but the balance of it against the whole.
It gets complicated, because it's predicated on interaction and people aren't cookie cutters -- what's a step too far with one person could be ten steps shy of too far for another, and again: we like simple. It's ok if we do this here, why not there? Do we ding people for picking their simplicity point to help them make decisions? If we do that, how do we not include every cognitive bias? Worse, doesn't this play into goalpost moving and other-perfection demands of the dark triad?
It's not simple. It's not one characteristic. It's a combination, over time. I wish I could encapsulate my personal human cognitive model succinctly, but to be truthy it got really complex. :)
I mainly come across two kinds of designers, and each has a different type of fear.
1) Designers who are driven by artifacts that they hope carry the magic of persuasion (because that is what we've trained them to expect) - And when that magic dust fails to do it's work, a fear with a twist often develops around approaching peers, especially across disciplines with a "they just don't understand" attitude - Which seems cavalier to a degree, but I think it is cavalier that is rooted in the originating fear of not getting taken seriously.
2) Designers who have been trained to understand and learn from the "feedback gauntlet". There is a kind of success there, but many are afraid of pushing past that into the kind of design leadership that addresses the systemic issues that keep many orgs from deep impactful results.