📚 (Don’t?) Read This: Bring Out Your Design Dead

Here’s a page I ran across in a post on LinkedIn by design educator Ryan Rumsey: it’s a collection of articles, posts, and essays—dating from 2005 to last week—declaring, in various ways, that (for various definitions) the practice of design is dead.

I haven’t read all of the pieces collected here, and I don’t necessarily recommend trying. What I find interesting here is the sheer number of pieces collected so far, and what it might mean about the discourse of design as a job in general.

The internet’s a big place. Statistically, a lot of people are probably going to be saying something like “design is dead” at any given time. But these posts demonstrate a few qualities that I think illustrate something about how we feel about our jobs:

1. They often rely on a specific name for a specific type of design, which—at the time of writing—appears to be on shaky ground, outmoded, or otherwise endangered.
2. Many involve questions or uncertainty around how changing technological landscapes will impact the kind of work we, as “designers” of any type, can/will/should/should not do.
3. Often, the death of design is invoked as a precursor to a perspective on the practice that isn’t actually suggestive of its death—it may just be adding nuance, systemic understanding, or broader views on the practice of intentional making.
4. Design is experiencing a crisis of meaning! All the previous factors and more are continually coming to bear on our industry and, absent a wider perspective, we’re really unsure what to do. In this frame, the concept of “UX” is itself highly questionable.

Similar to the piece I recently shared about “Fictional Computers and Their Themes,” I think this assemblage offers—beyond the face value of the posts within—some clarifying news that, no matter what’s happening, the design community cyclically experiences its own emotional, intellectual, or technological “death,” only to continue on in our pursuit of making things well for other people.

Check out the Notion collection.