A new model of understanding design’s function within the body of an organization
How would you describe the way your design department functions within your organization? Are you deeply connected to all of the other departments? Do people on your team have strong relationships with the strategy and engineering teams, a strong understanding of business objectives, constraints, and results? Is your team as invested in the needs of different functions within the company as in the needs of your customers and users?
Or is your team more like a walled garden, a protected enclave of creativity and customer insight? Does the design department feel removed or differentiated from the rest of the company? Do you have a fairly specific and possibly rigorous process for receiving and clarifying new work requests?
I began thinking about the difference in these models recently when I learned about the interstitium. An organ that was only identified in 2018, the interstitium is a structure that wraps around and connects nearly all of our organs, arteries and veins. It is made up of fractal collagen tissue framework that move fluid throughout our entire bodies - 4 times more fluid by volume than blood in our circulatory system (!).
I learned of all of this through the excellent article in Orion by Jennifer Brandel. She tells a little bit of the story of its discovery, and how it was overlooked for hundreds of years.* She argues that rationalistic and individualistic Western thinking led to an organ-centric understanding of the body, which made it hard for scientists to recognize this complex, whole-body system. “In the early modern period, Western scientists conceived of the world in terms of parts, of individuals. Everything was seen as a unit. A molecule, a cell, an organ, a person, a … noun.”
There are organizations that treat design teams like a discrete UI organ. Requests and requirements flow into the team, the designers inside work their magic, and UIs come out the other end. Often teams that work in this model will develop rigid intake processes which are set up as protective barriers against toxic or overwhelming inputs, and establish clear boundaries around the team that strive to create a safe space for designers to discover, create, and test. (I remember one company I worked for had a clearly designated “Design Studio,” that could literally be sealed off with doors that locked!)
While these protective mechanisms may help teams feel more safe temporarily, I have never seen it lead to the real flourishing that can result when teams move beyond this individual unit model. Sometimes designers love the creative enclave–the teams inside can become very tightly knit and produce interesting and beautiful work. This is basically the creative agency model, and it does have a place sometimes. However, as can be the case with agency work, sometimes this work gets degraded, or even disappears, before it is fully developed and becomes a live product or service. And occasionally, when the boundaries around the team are not quite right (too tight, too porous, too rigid), designers can be pretty unhappy inside these teams, feeling like they have very little autonomy or room to do their best work.
In addition to fostering the happiest teams and best outcomes, it will also make us much harder to replace with AI.
(These models are related but distinct from what is usually thought of as “design maturity.” A team can operate as a separate unit all the way up to the Structured level, and companies can highly value customer insights and design but still have design departments that operate as individual units. Sometimes the company might even want to be more integrated, but the design teams themselves keep the separation.)
In her article, Brandel also goes a step further. Inspired by the connective nature of the interstitium and how it escaped notice for so long, she draws a parallel to the people who work in this kind of capacity in society.
“It turns out, we’re interstitionaries. That is, our work is on all things in between — connecting insights, people and resources between sectors, industries, companies, projects and individuals…I see these people everywhere who are bridging, connecting and serving as conduits, keeping systems in communication, operable, healthy.”
I immediately recognized myself and what I want for my teams in this description. Design is uniquely positioned to act as an interstitium within organizations, connecting the customer to the business realities to the technology and to the product. In my experience the healthiest teams and companies foster this connection in a fluid and non-hierarchical way, because the organization cannot thrive if any of these are subverted or ignored for too long.
I would add that it seems to be in the design community’s best interest to move this direction as quickly as possible. In addition to fostering the happiest teams and best outcomes, it will also make us much harder to replace with AI. Already we have AI tools like Galileo that function like a dream design agency: they take an input and then output a UI, but they do it instantly. We may soon have AIs that even function as insight generators–if they are trained on large data sets of user research, perhaps they will be able to take a product as an input and produce customer-centric insights. Design teams that function as organs can be replaced–we can make artificial hearts, after all. But we are a very long way from an artificial interstitium.
I think we are living in an exciting time where the world is moving beyond focus on individual units (nouns), toward understanding and designing complex systems, interconnected webs of action and reaction.
“Other fields are revealing this same truth, seemingly all simultaneously. Ecologists now perceive the trees in forests as connected to one another, trading information and nutrients across long distances, calibrating an ecosystem’s health. Mycelial networks are now part of conversations of people who, until recently, knew nothing about mushrooms. Cooperative businesses and mutual aid are experiencing a resurgence as more people recognize their own interdependence and trade value with one another.”
I am genuinely excited both to do this work and to work in this way, and optimistic about design’s role in this new future. As Brandel says, “We need more navigators skipping between these constructed categories to subvert and replace a perspective of separation that has reached its limits and logical conclusion.” As designers I encourage us all to continue to embrace the spaces in between.
*The story of the interstitium’s discovery is astonishing, and I highly recommend listening to the Radiolab episode about it.
** For more resources and a list of interesting and important reads on the topic of interconnectivity and interdependence, check out the website Brandel created to collect interstitionaries and insights.
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