A designer’s journey of ignorance, resentment, and wisdom

How politics and power influence our perspectives.

Michael F. Buckley
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readMay 13, 2022
Illustration of man walking on Penrose triangle, surreal concept
Getty Images | francescoch

Design and politics have a lot in common. Many of us go into these professions with preconceived notions about how our fresh perspectives and vigor will be a catalyst for improving humanity. Unfortunately, this spirit for positive change is matched only by our ignorance of reality.

The truth is many professions, including the design industry, play the game of workplace politics. This complex social structure involves people using their authority, power, and delegation to advance their personal agenda.

Some designers accuse specific social systems, ideologies, and even business models as the root cause of these supposed unethical tactics.

The Nature of Power

People aligning actions with self-interest is not a new idea or a consequence of our current system. Part of the human condition is the pursuit of power and influence.

Throughout history, various people and cultures have risen and fallen in their attempt to gain power and control for one reason or another.

The common thread among these egos and ideologies is not some antiquated system or corrupt hierarchy. The human lust for power is as ancient as our need to communicate with each other. And many professionals, including designers, witness and experience this innate human behavior at some point in their careers.

As Robert Greene writes in his book The 48 Laws of Power, “No one want’s less power; everyone wants more.” And to quote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “The world itself is the will to power — and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power — and nothing else!”

The Three Stages of Perspectives

There are three distinct stages to a designer’s perception and self-awareness as we move through our careers. These phases can get summarized as ignorance, resentment, and wisdom.

These views of how the world works (or how we believe it should work) get defined by the experience and knowledge we gain over time.

Stage 1: Ignorance

Before beginning our journey as design professionals, we are primed and spoon fed false promises by educational institutions, overhyped certificate programs, and pretentious design gurus.

We get taught that design is about solving human problems. And implementing processes such as design thinking, product discovery, and many other user experience methodologies will achieve these moral objectives. However, this romantic perception starts to crumble when we enter the real world.

Novice designers rarely get to see how businesses make decisions behind the scenes. You are kept in the dark most of the time while mindless design requests trickle down to your department.

With little power and influence, you do as you are told, hoping for that seat at the table one day where you can share all the knowledge and processes you’ve learned from your professors and boot camps.

However, you notice a pattern once you start moving up the ladder — it seems the higher up the rungs you go, the fewer discussions of effective processes for producing meaningful designs occur.

Conversations or exercises aimed at empathizing with the people who use your products or services are almost non-existent. And instead, decisions revolve around profitability, growth, and arbitrary revenue projections. You begin to see how the sausage gets made — and it is not pretty.

The utopian bubble, which believed that design was about solving problems for people, eventually gets popped. The harsh reality is that you are just a pawn in a complex system to serve the needs of a business and those who run it.

Stage 2: Resentment

Once reality settles in, our ignorance becomes bitterness and resentment. We start to accuse people and systems of being blind to understanding the value of good design. We even start believing these people and systems are corrupt and malevolent.

It becomes apparent that people who use designers, such as stakeholders, clients, entrepreneurs, etc., have minimal interest in producing good designs and only concern themselves with what aligns with their self-interests.

In stage two, we also observe people’s need to feed their power and ego and how this demand influences their preferences and objectives. You realize the system you thought rewarded solutions oriented towards making good products or services is a lie. And it seems people are more interested in control and recognition for the things produced instead of how usable or meaningful it is.

A designer’s anger and resentment towards a system that rewards incompetence and selfishness are justifiable. However, these feelings are also foolish.

Besides blaming the people, many designers end up condemning the system as the problem. This misplaced outrage is a common theme among political dreamers as well. They would preferably burn the system down then face the reality that all humans are capable of such selfish behavior regardless of the system in place.

Many designers will blame greed, capitalism, and even privilege as the driving force behind these antiquated processes of creating solutions that mainly serve the needs of the business or institutions. The truth is the system is not the problem — human nature is the root cause.

Stage 3: Wisdom

The final stage in a designer’s career gets influenced by the accumulation of knowledge from solving unique design problems and the interactions we have with various people and systems.

A seasoned designer understands that no system or process is perfect. And becoming angry or upset about unpredictable circumstances and the actions and egos of others we can not manage is irrational. The truth is the only ego we can control is our own.

Our strategy evolves into doing the best we can with what we have while maintaining authenticity and empathy.

At this final stage, we also begin to understand how people think and what fuels their motivations, particularly those in charge — whose actions do not always align with our values as designers.

Over time, the experience and knowledge we gain help us discover strategies and mental models to navigate these complex human behaviors of others — while still allowing us the ability to produce good designs that align with our values.

Conclusion

Some people may consider the perception of such a harsh view of the design industry as cynical or jaded. Many will also see this attitude as counter-productive to their vision of a design utopia driven by rigorous design processes and virtuous objectives.

The irony is that these critics forcing others to align with their values, regardless of presupposed moral justifications, is also a form of seeking power over others.

The fact is what makes design good or bad from an ethical perspective can get deconstructed to align with any new or preexisting system of beliefs.

Navigating the design industry within any system requires accepting what can and can not get altered. And when it comes to transforming human nature, you are not just fighting a system. You are battling deep biological and psychological behaviors associated with our fundamental human desire for power.

The essential thought worth remembering is that we can only change ourselves and our perceptions. And that any meaningful and progressive changes we want to occur regarding the design industry, or even society and politics for that matter, must occur incrementally through wisdom and persistence, not rebellious resentment and anger.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

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