Over the past few years, design inside tech firms has become the easiest role to cut, and with every round of layoffs it is designers who are first on the list. We were once told we had a seat at the table, yet today that seat looks temporary at best.
If we are honest with ourselves, we helped create this problem. We, the product and digital designers inside tech, became more performative than productive. Nobody ever gave us a seat because we could make things beautiful, and while we shouted about users, we were rarely given the budget to test early and often, and access to data was nowhere near what we would have liked. Instead, we performed. We borrowed the language of research and process, even when in reality we were working with little more than instinct and guesswork.
The value of design was supposed to come from solving problems, delivering design thinking, and shaping processes that produced outcomes business leaders could measure. It is no surprise, then, that the academic designers who spoke the language of process, efficiency, ROI and users were the ones who seemed to matter, yet if we are honest, very few of those efforts really moved the needle.
Take Jony Ive as an example. He does not design products by running endless workshops or following ritualised research stages. He and his teams build by feel, then adapt based on feedback. Of course strategy matters, I have always planned my approach before moving a single pixel, but I never felt the need to perform that planning as theatre.
Disappearing into a void after a brief and reappearing at review stages may have left people anxious, but more often than not what was delivered was higher in quality because the focus stayed on the doing rather than the performing. Feedback still mattered, it was simply balanced with collective knowledge, taste, and trial and error to create digital experiences and visuals people actually loved.
That approach may feel outdated today, yet given how many designers are cut in every round of tech layoffs it is clear the way design is being done now is not valued either. Too much of it looks like theatrics, too little of it feels critical.
What makes this sting more is that, at the same time, branding has picked up again. In brand and marketing work, people are not dissecting every step in the process, they are celebrating the outcomes. Campaigns, identities and storytelling are back in the spotlight, effort is visible, impact is celebrated. I would go so far as to say that if you are a digital creative and you get the chance to return to brand and marketing roots, take it, because for now at least that work is still valued, visible and championed. In tech, meanwhile, design has been reduced to a cost to be cut, and for those of us who stay, the challenge is to reposition what we do, together.
Neither the old way nor the current way is enough, and we need to redesign design itself. Design has to become so valuable it cannot be ignored, it has to earn the time and space to create effective solutions away from the microscope of constant justification, and it has to produce outcomes so strong that companies are reluctant to lose the people behind them.
We could certainly improve all the templatised and systemised work with more brand and personality, because surely the point of making ourselves more efficient is to free up the time to put craft back into our work, to do the things that tight schedules and budgets would not normally afford us. We should be taking a page from the branding companies, crafting experiences that carry the brand voice in every interaction and every element of the interface, because that is where design shows its value and earns trust.
We gave away too much power when we packaged design into a process that could be taught in a two-day corporate workshop, and executives began to believe that was all design was. No one makes the same mistake with engineering, because none of them believe they can code. The dev mystery remains, and design needs to keep some of it’s own too. The only voices worth listening to are those who talk about design in ways that inspire, not those who rinse and repeat the latest buzzwords in a slide deck. We should be showing, not telling.
I won’t pretend to have the answers, but I know design cannot keep fading into irrelevance. The layoffs, the reduced teams, the constant devaluing of our craft all signal an industry in decline, unless we act.
This is our new brief, and our collective challenge, to solve the problem of design itself. Not with another layer of theatre, not with borrowed language, but by proving through what we make that design is indispensable.
It is time to treat design as the problem to solve, and it is up to us, together, to design the solution.