While exchanging messages, or talking with someone, you probably don't realize how surprising is the fact that people can understand you. That is natural, after all, analyzing each everyday activity would consume a lot of mental bandwidth. Even so, sometimes we can choose to look at words as sound or symbol patterns that simplify complexity. In one of these recent reflections, I asked myself: how do I interpret the word design?

Until the beginning of last year, I wouldn't consider the response worthy of an essay. What changed? I read Ruined by Design, by Mike Monteiro, where he presents a distinction that changed how I interpret the word. Since then, the uses of the word design I've seen in narratives have slightly differed from the meaning that I now attribute to the term. I find nuance where there once wasn't, and are these that I consider worth sharing.

To design is to influence?

“We need to care much more about the effects of our work than the cleverness of our pixel positioning […] To design is to influence people. To design is to build new connections in people’s minds. To design is to build relationships where there previously weren’t any.”

— Mike Monteiro

Let's consider that the verb to design means the same as to influence, as Mike proposes. In this case, what does it mean to influence? In the book, he brings various examples, ranging from hiring people that don't look like you to taking a stand against unethical decisions. But, at a higher abstraction level, to influence is to generate the effect that this book had on me and that I hope this essay has on you: to create new connections in someone's memory.

It may seem insufficient to define the verb design as to influence. Probably, when you see the verb influence, you quickly think of digital influencers and not product designers. But the end result of someone's work designing the Instagram app is the same as that of those designing stories to post on the platform. On some scale, we are always designing and influencing. Asking ourselves questions and answering them.

It's important to highlight that design is a political act. Our influence must be thought of in such a way that it doesn't hurt anyone, since we are responsible for what we put out into the world. I could have written this essay focusing on a niche, with a super technical and convoluted language, but I considered the exclusion in which this approach could result and chose to go a different path.

How to influence?

“If I could change one thing about how everyone doing “creative problem solving” worked, it would be to stop brainstorming ideas and start brainstorming questions. Brainstorming and ranking ideas is the worst and it puts team members in competition with each other to look smart.”

— Erika Hall

Most times we unconsciously influence. We trust our first thoughts, our intuition, and go on autopilot. It's a human tendency to neglect ambiguity and suppress doubt to satiate our desire for comfort and clarity, as I could discover reading Thinking Fast and Slow. It's easy to judge true what looks coherent.

Fortunately, as Daniel Kahneman mentions in the book, there is a way out: if you have trained yourself to be cautious about questions of this type, or if the situation is new and surprising, you will make yourself think consciously. In this way, a specialist is someone that trained themselves to be cautious about questions in their domain, allowing them to verify and eventually correct their intuition before giving answers. Even so, we are all subject to a lot of biases and it's costly to think consciously when not in a flow state.

Besides verifying the intuitive response, thinking consciously also allows us to reconsider the question. What are the motivations of whoever asked the question? This person may be biased or have a different view of the context. Often times it's necessary to reformulate the question adding or removing constraints since answers (solution hypotheses) should come from well-grounded questions (problem hypotheses).

Are we all designers?

“We have this idea that everything can be taught, everything can be taught in school. And it’s not true that everything can be taught. […] Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. […] Very often specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s just being figured out or is really hard to figure out.”

— Naval Ravikant

I got a degree, read a few books and countless articles, designed posters and apps… and, in the end, all I learned was a sharper common sense? I don't know about you, but this existential crisis hits harder and harder for me. Until now I've found two aspects that should differentiate the way said product designers think: knowledge about people and about means of interaction. The second is a lot more specific than the first.

An engineer implementing a proof of concept may end up using a checkbox component when the most appropriate would be a radio. The founder of a company asking for opinions in a meeting may not know why or how to prevent groupthink. When it comes to human behavior and interaction patterns, it's the person in the design role that should be the reference and act to prevent bad decisions.

Decisions such as the color of a text or the size of a button are usually left to the people only in charge of design but in practice every human influences. Product managers when defining priorities, for example, are making decisions that shape a product, which in turn will influence a lot of people. In this case, designers by profession can contribute with knowledge, but this person should be the most qualified to make this kind of decision.

Do you believe that to design is to influence, that we influence by answering questions, and that every human does this? At least this is my current understanding of the word design. I believe that I'm at the beginning of a long journey to understand the ramifications of these associations in my daily life as a designer by profession.

If to design is to influence, maybe usability decisions aren't the ones that impose the most risk. If to influence well is to think carefully about the consequences that an idea can have, maybe the current design methods are not sufficing. And, finally, if everyone designs, there may be a lot to be learned with the processes that other knowledge areas employ.

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