Why Designers Fight With Each Other

Infighting and factionalism are among our worst enemies

Quick notes: the book is Why Design Is Hard is on sale now. And open office hours are tomorrow at 9am PST. Here’s a quick excerpt on how we sometimes hold each other back.

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One reason design is hard is because the small community we have is prone to in-fighting. We have so many specializations that spend time in public focusing on their differences rather than their similarities.

This is a tendency known as the narcissism of small differences: we tend to fight most with the people we have the most in common with, often over trivial details (e.g ”UI vs UX”). It’s a pattern you can find in professional circles but also in ethnic conflicts and civil wars.

Design is a small enough professional minority to begin with, but when graphic designers, UX designers, content designers, information architects, service designers, design researchers, and whatever new sub-classifications of design we come up with next focus on our differences more than our similarities, it fuels the ego trap. We get hung up on trying to win tiny battles and don’t realize we’re losing the war (or that we’re not in the right war at all).

Instead of forming a community around our common need to overcome the toughest situations we all face, we indulge our obsessions with small details instead. Specialization is valuable, but if we want design to become easier, we have to help each other solve shared situations that make design hard, like explaining what we do, growing influence and getting better at persuading powerful people to use our knowledge.

The business of events and books is rewarded for specialization, everyone wants to feel like they’ve found their little tribe, but staying on safe turf works against us if we want to impact the world at large. I want a better world and I think you do too. To get it we have to we sometimes make design harder than it needs to be and if we work together it makes it easier.