There is not a designer profession

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot these days since I got inside the IT industry while building my first startup Replit is that inside this industry in general and in society, in particular, there is a strong misconception about what is a “designer”.

I was trying to put myself a title around the designing word in IT because if you say you are an architect people just think about your profile sketching buildings, which is what your learned to do.

But what if you just got the knowledge of a whole new set of skills? Today yet many people need titles in order to frame you in what you do or better, in what they will think of you can do.

It has become so popular that a “designer” is a profile who has the knowledge to create beautiful user interfaces, beautiful illustrations, beautiful graphic design + typography, beautiful apps maybe?

I came from the Spanish architecture world and in this field, there is not a “designer” but during the degree, you spend all day long designing. Designing processes, concepts, ideas, windows, how light goes inside a space, how a person opens a door, how a table is situated in a place, how the structure maintains the building up, what happens when you mix certain kind of yellow with a blue in a space for the people that will live in it, how is the right height of a stair step to now fall down when you use it, how to mix materials to get right isolation of a wall, and I can continue so on.

All of them are design processes, and no of them has almost anything to do with each other. It is more a way of thinking, and a way of approaching a huge problem, which could be to build a building.

There is no “designer” profession.

A “design” is something that has been created, whatever thing. Nature itself designs.

"To design" is the process, is the verb, the action, is the method to approach solving a certain problem using a methodology.

• Take a look at my door design, what do you think about it?
• Could you bring me my designs book?

Those are simple phrases we are used to.

Design syntactically could be applied to anything not just apps or web user interfaces. Everything ever created has passed through a design process.

There is no “designer” profession.

The quality then of a design could be how good it solve the problem it tries to solve if it tries to solve anything.

But in general, introducing the word design adds many levels of abstraction to the concept that could be discussed.

So if you heard “designer” these days the vast majority thinks about a graphic designer or user interface designer, or a guy to ask I have this wonderful idea that will revolutionize this sector x blablabla. I just need a designer and a developer to build my app plz.

So I just wanted to frame this a little bit this stuff again.

There is not a designer profession.

For example:

Designer of buildings = Architect

Designer of aeroplanes = Aeronautical engineer

Designer of films = Film director

Designer of code = Developer, or software engineer

So I think we should at least try, to reeducate the ecosystem about the different roles that take place in the designing process of a tech product.

And if we need to talk about what a designer is, if we are talking about a person.
For me, these people are the ones who solve problems. There are ones who solve them through a more creative process and others that solve them in a more empirical way, people that approach the same problem differently.

Many times when you start designing something then you create new problems, problems that require new ways of solving them and another type of "designers" are needed, or maybe new fields of study and research to solve them.

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