Designer of 2015 trends

Six major trends, and the challenges they pose for the profession (which AIGA will take on as its challenges), emerged from our research. These trends define design’s role in a much broader, strategic context than its roots: the making of things and beautiful things. Although that remains an important contribution, they will be a manifestation of a solution that may involve many different forms, including intangibles such as strategy and experiences. Among designers and educators, there has been an enthusiastic response to taking on these trends, although there is also anxiety about whether designers are adequately prepared to take on the broader context of the roles these trends imply for them. They were, in the order of importance as identified by designers:

Wide and deep: meta-disciplinary study and practice

Designers must be able to draw on experience and knowledge from a broad range of disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities, in order to solve problems in a global, competitive market of products and ideas.

As the contexts in which communication occurs become more diverse, designers need to experience meta-disciplinary study as well as training deeply in specific disciplines. They must understand the social sciences and humanities in order to understand the content they are asked to communicate and they must understand how to work collaboratively with other knowledge and practice specialists.

Expanded scope: scale and complexity of design problems

Designers must address scale and complexity at the systems level, even when designing individual components, and meet the growing need for anticipation of problem and solution rather than solving known problems.

Design problems are nested within increasingly complex social, technological and economic systems and address people who vary in their cognitive, physical and cultural behaviors and experiences. The role of the designer is to manage this complexity, to construct clear messages that reveal to people the diverse relationships that make up information contexts and to deliver sustainable communication products and practices to clients.

Targeted messages: a narrow definition of audiences

Messaging will shift from mass communication to more narrow definitions of audiences (special interest design), requiring designers to understand both differences and likenesses in audiences and the growing need for reconciliation of tension between globalization and cultural identity.

The most effective means of communicating has shifted from broad messages for large audiences to narrowly targeted messages for specific audiences. This is the result of both media capabilities (in terms of narrow-casting and mass customization of messages) and also global dynamics. This trend demands a better understanding of a variety of cultures, the value of ethnographic research, a sensitivity toward cultural perspectives, and empathy.

Break through: an attention economy

Attention is the scarce resource in the information age, and the attention economy involves communication design, information design, experience design and service design.

The trend toward an “attention economy” encourages discussion of what is currently driving clients’ conception of form, the attraction of business to design and the problems of designing for a market that values the short term “grab”.

Sharing experiences: a co-creation model

Designers must change their idea of customers/users to co-creators (mass customization) to coincide with the rise in transparency of personal and professional lives (social networking, blogging, etc.).

This trend focuses on user-centered issues through a filter that identifies appropriate methods for understanding people (for example, the current movement toward ethnographic research, rather than focus groups). It brings communication design closer to the work of product designers (who really have the attention of business) and the emerging area of service design. Social advocacy issues both emerge from this phenomenon and are empowered by it.

Responsible outcomes: focusing on sustainability

Designers must recognize that the pursuit of excellence involves focusing clearly on human-centered design in an era of increasingly limited resources, in which appropriateness is defined by careful and necessary use of resources, simplicity, avoidance of the extraneous and sensitivity to human conditions.

Popular, political and business forces are all coming to grips with the challenges of working in a world of limited resources. Designers, as those who use creativity to defeat habit in the solutions they propose, must assume a leadership role in proposing responsible uses of resources.  This involves both the traditional concept of sustainability and also an understanding of appropriate technology and resources for the uses proposed. Responsible outcomes embody ethical issues, social need, global imperatives and the unique contribution of design thinking.

Illustrations by Brian Rea