I shared a very personal journey with a group of creative practitioners and academics at The Future of Creative Work conference. And this is it:
It’s ironic to talk about my professional path, as a misfit… feeling like a misfit among my fellow speakers today. But here I am. And feeling like a misfit is what has kept me finding my way through my professional journey as a creative.
I’m Sara, I design products and services that are made possible by emerging technology. I’m a hybrid designer. Which means I combine and apply deep people-centred research, like in-depth interviews and testing with experts and users, with diverse design processes, like prototyping, interface design and service mapping, to help my teams gain confidence when discovering new products and services or improving existing ones.
So today I will give you a quick overview of where I’ve been, where I’m at and the direction I’m moving into. And reflect on past, present, future, both my journey and what I’ve observed in the industry.
This is my official timeline. Those are the official roles I’ve held over the last 20 years. I studied design, I worked as a designer. And I’ve iterated on that a few times. This doesn’t tell you much, I know. But the story is that I’ve had the privilege to feel like a misfit in a diverse range of settings and organisations, of different shapes and sizes, both as an integrated full-time member of the team and as an independent contributor through my freelance work.
At certain moments, the way I think and work as a designer, what I draw inspiration from, changes to adapt to the nature of what I’m designing.
So I’ll show you the other side of this timeline. The side that shows the drivers to my learning journey as a professional and the lens through which I saw the work I was doing. What sometimes made me feel like a misfit.
Let’s start from those early days. I studied communication design. How to translate and shape information into a form that helps people understand a message. The focus was on drawing striking magazine or poster layouts. And though that’s what I studied I was more interested in web technologies, learning how to code to build websites and exploring different ways for people to not only consume content, but also interact with it online.
So I worked in advertising for a few years, designing and building websites, apps and online adverts, and the focus was on outputting creativity fast. It was about novelty and being the first among agencies to use the latest web technologies to capture our user’s attention for as long as possible. That’s how success was measured. But, if I captured people’s attention for that long… why? What was it useful for? I was interested in learning about human factors, cognitive psychology, and how people think, behave and make decisions.
So I studied interaction design, human-computer interactions and people-centered design. I learned how to draw from methods inspired by ethnography and other social sciences, to learn about people’s needs and goals, and design products and services that meet those needs and goals.
And in my work, alongside building and designing interfaces and interactions, I design the whole journey of users, oftentimes considering how services will be delivered and the workflows of the internal teams. I prototype those products and services and test them by going out and speaking to users and simulating those experiences in the real world.
And whereas before I was working as a solo creative, my work now is more and more collaborative and integrated into a multi-skilled team, driven by ways to collectively make decisions, make sense of research insights and gain confidence in the direction of what we are building.
But a few projects in particular, working to design healthier digital services for children and young people, made me feel like a misfit again. I was increasingly interested in the hidden factors that have an impact on how an individual might use or perceive products and services. Factors like mental health, trauma, approaches to parenting, laws and regulation, human rights and social inequalities.
That brings me to now. The nature and potential for impact of what we design today, has changed immensely. I’ve had the opportunity to design tools that use personal data to help children make healthy choices about their use of devices, tools that help reduce bias in recruitment processes, interactions that increase trust in an AI, and digital interaction patterns that protect children’s digital privacy by default. To undertake projects of this nature, I’ve had to dive into academic research, behavioural science and data protection regulation. I wasn’t trained for that.
So I’ve been studying sociology and human rights. Because what we are designing today, is more than meeting people’s needs. We are translating into technology our society, our culture, our collective norms and decision-making. For example, predictive risk modelling systems are being used to help authorities, educators and social services to identify and deploy help, to people at risk of abuse, suicide and exploitation.
To design those systems, we need to be able to creatively understand and utilise a different set of resources. Like policy, regulation, human rights and in-depth research, as well as having hands-on understanding of the technology itself.
So… I’ll leave you with 3 challenges, challenges I’m finding my way through, as a misfit hybrid designer in all of this…
Firstly, who are we becoming as creatives? The title of this session. How are we making space for this evolution, the changing roles within our teams and listening to its direction and needs?
Then, how can we bring in-depth resources into the creative process? How dowe embed, for example policy, regulation, human rights and in-depth academic research into our practices and utilise them as a creative tool? And what methods are we going to use to test and make sure technologies and services are having the intentional individual and societal impact we want them to have?
And finally, if we are being intentional about that impact, what kind of tech society do we want to become? What collective values are we going to design into the technologies that enable the products and services we use?
Well… I’m glad that we’re all here today to figure this out together.