Does Lean and Agile “Anti-hero” rhetoric normalize anti-intellectualism against design professionals ?
The Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China included a great push against “the bourgeois”, which seemed to include “intellectuals” and “intellectualism”. The result was that doctors, engineers, teachers, professors, writers, and other professionals and artists were forced out of their professions and into peasant farm labour.
I am a huge fan of Chinese cinema so have seen my share of films centered around the cultural revolution. Being a professional designer for over 20 years I could not help but draw a parallel between the anti-intellectual movement and the current state of the design profession.
Institutional Oppression
Now, before you think I am being over-dramatic consider the following quote:
Hero designers are problematic because of their inability to collaborate. Agile is distinctly anti-hero. The smallest unit of labor is the team and not the individual designer or developer.
Having worked physically gruelling manual labor jobs to pay for every credit of my design education I cringed when I read this the first time. It seemed so much like Institutional Oppression.
Institutional oppression is the systematic mistreatment of people within a social identity group, supported and enforced by the society and its institutions, solely based on the person’s membership in the social identity group. Now we often speak of design as a “community”, which sounds an awful lot like a social identity group, so by definition does speaking of members of this group in this way qualify as institutional oppression?
While the statement does not suggest ALL designers are problematic…only those that want to be heroes, what exactly does that mean? Good ones, successful ones? But then I go on to read quotes like the following:
Designers like to be heroes. We think our job is to use our vision to solve the world’s design problems, all by ourselves but those days are over. Jeff Gothelf (Lean UX) points out that in agile environments there is no space for heroes.
No space? Are designers really that bad?
Let’s take a look at the AIGA standards of professional practice to see if there is anything in here that let’s us suspect that designers secretly conspire to be heroes.
The designer’s responsibility to clients
1.1 A professional designer shall acquaint himself or herself with a client’s business and design standards and shall act in the client’s best interestwithin the limits of professional responsibility.
1.2 A professional designer shall not work simultaneously on assignments that create a conflict of interest without agreement of the clients or employers concerned, except in specific cases where it is the convention of a particular trade for a designer to work at the same time for various competitors.
1.3 A professional designer shall treat all work in progress prior to the completion of a project and all knowledge of a client’s intentions, production methods and business organization as confidential and shall not divulge such information in any manner whatsoever without the consent of the client. It is the designer’s responsibility to ensure that all staff members act accordingly.
1.4 A professional designer who accepts instructions from a client or employer that involve violation of the designer’s ethical standards should be corrected by the designer, or the designer should refuse the assignment.
The designer’s responsibility to other designers
2.1 Designers in pursuit of business opportunities should support fair and open competition.
2.2 A professional designer shall not knowingly accept any professional assignment on which another designer has been or is working without notifying the other designer or until he or she is satisfied that any previous appointments have been properly terminated and that all materials relevant to the continuation of the project are the clear property of the client.
2.3 A professional designer must not attempt, directly or indirectly, to supplant or compete with another designer by means of unethical inducements.
2.4 A professional designer shall be objective and balanced in criticizing another designer’s work and shall not denigrate the work or reputation of a fellow designer.
2.5 A professional designer shall not accept instructions from a client that involve infringement of another person’s property rights without permission, or consciously act in any manner involving any such infringement.
2.6 A professional designer working in a country other than his or her own shall observe the relevant Code of Conduct of the national society concerned.
When I became a designer I was proud to be part of a community that held such high ethical standards.
In the digital space, especially in product design, I go to a lot of conferences where the processes like Agile and Lean proudly say they are “anti-hero (anti-designer)” and reminds me of the this poem by Martin Niemöller.
First they came…
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
As institutions adopt Lean, and Agile methodologies that condemn the individual designers as “hero” in a profoundly negative sense, we need to remember that sometimes that “hero” is a person…in my case a kid that started on welfare who literally invested tons of sweat equity to join the noble profession of design, not to be a hero but to be respected. Above all we all want to feel valued for our chosen profession, even if it is design.