The Designer’s Tension
Being a designer these days sure ain’t easy. Of course, there’s the ever-changing screen resolutions of new devices, compatibility among browsers and platforms and—inevitably—the seemingly schizophrenic demands of antsy clients! All of this is without a doubt frustrating, even demoralizing to varying degrees. But what’s really at the heart of a designer’s difficulty is the tension between ego and empathy.
By ego, I’m not referring to becoming some self-absorbed jerk with abrupt mood swings, fragile emotions, and pompous self-righteous attitudes. That’s frankly an extreme caricature held as the villainous symbol of a “bad designer”—regrettably, some of us may have worked with such a person! I know I have. Instead, by ego I refer to the sense of self that drives you as a designer to pursue your passion, express your talent, and achieve an optimistic vision of bold, beautiful solution—a product, an interface, a service. It’s a powerful, even necessary, sense of personal identity, conviction, and confidence enabling you to be a leader guiding a design’s ambitious manifestation in support of collective aims (i.e., team, company, society).
Yet, if you think about it, this comes in direct conflict with empathy, the ability (and desire) to step outside of your self, to observe, understand,and absorb another person’s experience. To be wholly responsive to others’ concerns that are not your own. Maybe it’s literally walking in someone else’s shoes to directly connect with their goals, pains, hopes, or issues. What’s truly best for them, given their circumstances and constraints? How will you help them achieve an improved, satisfying life or delightfully finish mundane tasks?
Indeed, to empathize is to connect with others emotionally, cognitively, and contextually to discover profound (or simply obvious) insights. It requires humanistic values of care, trust, respect. Yet to successfully lead a new design—while contending with clients, stakeholders, or design peers—requires a pretty good dose of ego for making strong arguments, leaning with your personality (whether overtly or subtly) and leveraging team relationships.
And, let’s just admit it, there’s often a personal stake in seeing a well-considered design come to fruition, like the pride of a parent (or a teacher or mentor) seeing their child rise to an occasion and prove their ability for all others to admire as an exemplar. There’s a degree of professional honor, and the risk of putting your name behind a risky venture (aren’t all designs which subvert convention inherently so?). No denying it, ego plays a role in making design happen. But that’s ok!
It’s the healthy, vital, necessary dialectical tension between ego and empathy that keeps a designer in line, on task, and moving forward, preventing the fall into hardened self-absorption and also the drift into trying to satisfy everything for everyone, like a willow in the breeze.
As a successful designer you ought to have a personally meaningful point of view, grounded in authentic human experiences you’ve connected with. Sustaining this productive tension is an important factor that takes a level of professional maturity shaped through many humbling moments — and it’s definitely not easy.
