A New Design Renaissance Will Come
In recent months LinkedIn has been awash with designers and creatives lamenting ‘the end of design’, moaning about the soul-crushing tedium of arranging Figma components at the request of their product owners, or panicking about the arrival of A.I.
I bring good news: a new design renaissance will come – very soon, if it’s not already here – in which creativity, novelty and craft will abound, and those who apply the new technology paradigms to the deepest yearnings and principals of the human spirit will once again be richly rewarded.
What makes me so sure? Let’s start with a diagram.
This diagram probably looks familiar to you. It represents the typical cyclical rise and fall of a civilisation as described by writers and historians such as Thomas Carlyle, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Frederich Nietzsche and many others.
From the birth and death of living beings to the rise and fall of civilisations, cycles are found everywhere. It’s would be no surprise then to find cyclical patterns in business and technology. In fact, this same diagram could also be overlayed over any technology paradigm: radio, television, the personal computer, the internet.
For example, here’s radio:
The first inventions and discoveries that birthed the paradigm of radio began around the turn of the twentieth century. Radio reached a cultural peak in the middle of the century – often referred to as the ‘golden age of radio – before declining into a formulaic bureaucracy and finally dissipating into other technologies. We might listen to radio stations on our Alexa, but it’s not really radio – it is the cultural forms that emerged from radio which have dissipated across into the technology of the internet.
Now let’s look at something more familiar and recent – digital technologies, particularly the paradigm of ‘Web 2.0 technology’.
Let’s unpack this a bit – there are some controversial claims here.
Expansion – The paradigm begins. The technology era (2003- 2010).
The Expansion period kicked off in the early 2000s with the invention of underlying technologies such as AJAX, client side scripting, REST APIs, WiFi, 3G networks, and improvements in rich media embedding. Within months, the industries and cultures that worked with these technologies became a new Wild West. This was literally the term used to describe the chaos, conflict and creativity of those early years. At this stage, value and success were driven by technological advance. The key players were engineers, hackers and entrepreneurs. Those who could build the fastest algorithms, best protocols and get their tech to market first took the initial spoils and many established themselves as the Lords of the era. But not long after, as always happens in any technological cycle, companies started noticing declining marginal returns on their technology investments. The profit from technology spend alone was decreasing over time. A new strategy for driving profits and maintaining competitive advantage was needed.
Renaissance – The Design Era (2010 – 2017)
It soon became clear that those companies who best applied Web 2.0 technology to the needs of humans, who gave them meaning, delight and solved their real day-to-day problems achieved a new level of success and growth. This was something that a technology-only, engineering-focussed strategy was not able to deliver. Furthermore, the newly minted Lords of the realm (especially the FAANGs) now found that they had vast wealth to splash on all sorts of creative activities and so launched an era of creative exploration.
This period marked the high point of web 2.0, the renaissance, the high culture of digital, when genuine creative evolution was happening and appreciable levels of genuine art and new forms of culture were being delivered in the medium of Web 2.0 technologies.
During this ‘renaissance period’, most of the key services and products that we use on a day-to-day basis were created (Instagram, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, Uber, TikTok, dating apps such as Tinder, online learning platforms such as Udemy, food delivery apps such as Deliveroo, Android Material Design, iOS 7), while many others begun earlier in the ‘technology era’ reached their peak, and have evolved very little since this period (Facebook, Gmail, Google maps, Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Linkedin etc). The same could be said for many of the business and enterprise apps and services, including many of the leading SASS products.
However, like all cultures and all technology paradigms, Web 2.0 contained the seeds of its decline – especially in the form of greedy advertising revenues, user-alienating business models and various other crises. It also became clear that the returns on investment into design innovation was steadily declining. Each new redesign of a company’s app or website returned less and less profit margin.
As this began to happen, companies discovered that using approaches such as design systems and components, reusable code and code abstractions, allowed them to reduce costs and achieve more efficiency in their design and build activities. The growing realisation that throwing endless money into unconstrained creative design activities make little business sense contributed to the birth of the third era of the Web 2.0 era – the product era.
Managed decline – The Product Era (2017 – present)
The product era is essentially the managed decline of the Web 2.0 era. It is characterised by cost-saving, efficiency, risk-aversion, bureaucracy and a lack of novelty. Product Owners or Product Managers oversee this era, delivering efficient, unremarkable Web 2.0 offerings to market in as little time and cost as their product roadmaps will allow, ensuring that little identity, creativity, and meaning is included in the cost structure. No new significant Web 2.0-based products or services have arrived since around 2019. Product managers could be likened to the bureaucrats who managed and oversaw the administration of the Roman Empire as the kingdom crumbled and the barbarian armies advanced on the gates of the city.
If business efficiency is why you get up in the morning, then you will probably be loving this era of the current technological paradigm you are living in. If you’re a designer working with Web 2.0 products, you will spend very little time engaged in any kind of creative or human-centred pursuits. You will be simply be arranging predefined components to find the optimal solution to any given feature request from your product owner. But if you came into design because you find within yourself an urge to satisfy the yearnings of the human spirit through profuse acts of creative exploration, you will probably live with a sense that something is wrong – and you will be aching for something new.
A new renaissance will come!
But before you hang your head in despair, let’s take one last look back at that diagram – for there we will see a great seed of hope.
First, you will notice that Web 2.0 technologies will not go on for ever, They will eventually dissipate into other technology paradigms, just as radio, television and desktop PCs did before them. You will be glad to know that you will not be living in the managed decline of the product era for the rest of your life.
And second, you will notice on the right-hand side of the diagram that a new era has begun. We will only truly know in hindsight what that curve will look like but we can make some good guesses that generative A.I., agentic A.I. and robotics will play a central role. It is a Wild West right now. The paradigm is still largely technology focussed, as engineers seek to squeeze out marginal gains from their ever-growing models. But there are signs that human-centricity is beginning to play an increasingly important role in the paradigm. We are perhaps at the beginning of the shift into the second era of this paradigm. I guarantee you, that a new design renaissance will come in which creativity will abound and those who apply the new technology paradigm to the deepest yearnings and principals of the human spirit will once again be richly rewarded.
I will not attempt here a comprehensive prediction of what that renaissance will look like. That can be left for future musings. However, we can state for sure that it will not simply be a repeat of the Web 2.0 design era. Remember; as Mark Twain wrote ‘history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes’. We can state that the period will be marked by massive cultural impact, across many levels of society; by vibrancy, aesthetics and creativity; by uncertainty and exploration; by a deep interaction with human psychology, and by a harmonious balance of creative vitality and ordered structure. This will then be followed by a ‘product era’ of managed decline, bureaucracy, compliance and crisis, before a new paradigm bursts forth. And so the cycle continues…