The myth of the T-shaped designer

My peers and employers are often stunned when I say that I don’t have or have plans of keeping a traditional “portfolio” of my past design work. The reason I don’t want to is because it won’t be a good representation of my skillset. Design portfolios tend to emphasize the visual design work and devalue the design thinking and ideation work. If you’re looking for a purely visual designer, then great. Go ahead and ask for a portfolio. I’ll flat out reply and tell you that I’m not the right person for that job. I can do visual design to a respectable degree (and enjoy doing it), but I can recommend at least ten people off the top of my head who are much better at visual design than I am and will do it better than I can.

I could write lengthy case studies and blog posts about my problem-solving process instead, and I’ve done some version of that in the past. But it’s not sexy. It’s not appealing to a startup that wants to hire a designer because it’s the cool thing to do. No-one reads those posts. The only people that find it valuable are large research organizations that are looking for how other people solve problems similar to the challenges that they’re facing.

The thing about visual design work is that it evokes a very immediate visceral reaction. It can either be positive or negative, but it gets the viewer’s senses aroused in a way that a flowchart or a series of paragraphs could only dream of. “Oh look at the beautiful gradient you used!” or “I love the visual contrast between the icons and the subtle background” is extremely quick (and shallow) feedback you can provide about the work. It’s much harder to look at a whiteboard sketch and pinpoint a flaw in one of the core assumptions made about the users of the product.

There’s many aspects of design I could specialize in, and I intentionally didn’t choose visual design. While it’s an extremely valuable skill (as well as the way I got my start in design), I don’t see it being a core skillset of the designer twenty years from now. With automation and AI taking over consumer products, the designer is being asked to do things that have traditionally been reserved for other disciplines or flat out didn’t exist. There are now voice designers for Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and Cortana. There are designers who focus solely on the tone and emotional language of these virtual assistants and chatbots. As we move into a future without physical interfaces and one that includes technology embedded into everyday objects, the designer’s role shifts from making interfaces usable to just letting users accomplish tasks without forcing a new interaction model onto them. Talking and listening are such natural human instincts that we’ve been doing for thousands for years, which is why it feels so good to command your phone to do something and have it do it for you.

All my mentors and managers in the past have pushed me (rightfully) to pick an aspect of design to specialize in, whether it be visual design, UI design, user experience design, motion design, prototyping, usability research, user testing, design consulting, or design thinking. Pick one and specialize in it. Elongate the T while keeping your other skills alive. What’s missing from these options is the evolution of design in the future. Design has historically had a trend of catching up with technology as it gets better, cheaper, and more affordable for consumers. Once something is able to be produced on a massive scale, that’s when designers start coming into the niches of the industry and start offering better designed solutions to various problems.

But technology is evolving faster than ever before. The iPhone hadn’t even come out ten years ago from when I’m writing this. In ten years from now, we could be requiring natural language processing designers, automation systems designers, ethical robotics designers, and even designers in the space tourism industry. All these roles are currently being done to some degree by the ones spearheading the invention and primary implementation of them, but once they become widespread, specialized roles for designers will become available very quickly as the market opens up to the flood of consumerism.

Regardless of what roles come in the future and how design evolves, there’s one thing that will always be at the core of the discipline, and that’s problem solving. Take any product, no matter how futuristic it is, and it will have consumer needs that it needs to meet. It needs to accomplish tasks in a focused, user-centric manner. Going from a blank slate to a user experience that makes sense to human beings is a skill that will always and forever be required of designers. It doesn’t matter if smartphones are dead in 2030. It doesn’t matter if we’re terraforming and colonizing Mars by 2050. Visual design and interface design might die out, but a tried-and-true problem solving process is always going to be staple.

And this is precisely why I focus all my efforts into problem solving. Every time I’m working on something, I ask myself questions like “Where did this requirement come from?”, “What could have gone better in user testing so that we don’t run into this problem next time?”, “I wonder how this person’s personality is biasing their every interaction with me…” or “How do we anticipate the needs of the next ten thousand users based on what we know about our current six hundred?”.

It’s so easy to get tunnel-visioned into making a SVG look pretty so that you’re handing off one clean compound path to the developers as an asset and feel proud and accomplished of yourself for having “done your job” as a designer that day. But that’s just a surface-level perception of what design is. To truly become a master problem solver, you’ll need tons of experience not only solving different types of problems in different industries and markets around the world, but also working with many people (and soon AI) whose personalities, ambition, drive, meticulousness, and interpersonal relationships with you play a huge role in the outcome of the solution.

Instead of becoming a T-shaped designer where you’re picking a random discipline and focusing your skills in it, I’d suggest trying to become an O-shaped designer, where you’re getting a broad understanding of design, economics, business, culture, technology, and society as you form the outer ring of the O and then start filling in the middle by learning more and more about how to solve problems. The boundlessness of the T allows you to expand horizontally and vertically pretty much infinitely in various skillsets, but to create a well-rounded product that is aware of the context it lives in, you need to know how to solve problems relevant to that product. By rounding yourself out in your early career by creating the outlines, it gets easier to fill it in as you progress further and further and as design keeps pace with technology.

It’s hard to talk about being a designer when you can’t show people what they expect to see — a portfolio of visual design work. So far, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with people who value problem solving and design thinking skills. It helps that I have the skillset to produce work in currently relevant disciplines like usability/accessibility testing and rapid prototyping, which I enjoy a lot as well.

Everyone I ask today about where my career should go gives me feedback about what I should do based on the current state of things. “Yeah, mobile is huge right now” or “Definitely learn VR design, it opens a whole new world of possibilities”, which is great, but in my mind, I’m always going “What will this teach me that will still be relevant twenty years from now?”. No-one has the answer to this. It’s a very tough question to answer, but there’s some core components, like problem solving, that will always be required.

So yeah. Pick a vertical and focus on the T if you like. It’s safe. It’s tested. It’ll keep you going for a while. But I’d rather be O. Gather a variety of skills not just within design, but within other disciplines to see how they affect design and how design affects them in turn. Then as you start building an understanding of how everything is connected, work to grow your skills in lockstep with the evolution of technology and its impact on the world. Start filling in the O once you’ve gone over the outline enough times to feel comfortable with it. That’s exactly what I plan on doing, because I personally don’t believe that a T-shaped designer will be prepared to face the challenges of the coming few decades.