Design Is Fundamentally Progressive

This take is incredibly hot. Please don't burn yourself. I have a theory and you might not like it.

The theory is this; design as a discipline is fundamentally incompatable with conservative thinking. Moreover, conservative thinking is inherent, which puts design at odds with human nature. My logic is as follows.

Conservatism is predisposed to maintaining existing views, conditions, and institutions. That's a literal definition of the word. To conserve what exists means to prevent changing what exists.

The discipline of design is all about change. As designers, we believe that we can and should improve views, conditions, and institutions by changing them. We can design better ways of living. We can design better ways of thinking. We can design better. Conservative worldviews are detrimental to a person's ability to succeed at that.

Now for a hard truth. Everyone is sometimes unreceptive to change. Like it or not, we all harbor conservative views sometimes. It's easier to think conservatively than progressively. Progress requires change, and change is hard and scary. It can temporarily slow us down, or force us to think critically about something, and we usually don't want that. So, we naturally tend toward conservatism.

Those of us who become designers are comfortable with navigating change. But we each have our own limits. Maybe we'll react viscerally to an idea that challenges our preconceptions. Maybe we'll panic when we get laid off. Change is not always, in the moment, good. In fact it's often not good over the long term either.

As designers, we must be dilligent about producing positive change, while being willing to fail and try again. We can really only do that for things that we believe in changing; things that cause progress. That's why it's critical to find meaningful work. It's also why corporate designers burn out so often. Corporations are built for the production of profit, not meaning.

People think of design as a fun and creative job, and it is. But designers also have to persist through doubt and change. Designers must overcome the natural tendency toward conservatism and embrace progress in order to do the job effectively.