The Dribbblisation of Design
Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead...<p>I don&#x27;t think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first.<p>I&#x27;ve spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing.<p>At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business.<p>Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren&#x27;t the shiny bit of design, I think we&#x27;re seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally.<p>Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.<p>Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there&#x27;s overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.<p>I think the problem is that it&#x27;s just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There&#x27;s overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn&#x27;t mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised.<p>There&#x27;s an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don&#x27;t think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There&#x27;s value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.