The case for a Digital Design Council

People have a better idea of how films get made than how [digital] design gets done

I was listening to Peter Merholz talk to Andy Polaine (thanks Mathew) who, 35 minutes in, talk about the institutionalisation of Design and it got me thinking: do we need a Digital Design Council? I did a stint at the Design Council in 2022-3 so I’m drawing some parallels with their history and impact. Bear with me, forgive me, read on:

1. Digital design education doesn’t match the needs of the market nor the reality of work
   There is real specificity to the ways in which different kinds of organisations commission, build, maintain and continuously improve their website or app. Working as a digital designer in a digital agency isn’t the same as a consultancy nor in house for a company or in public sector organisations. A junior designer working in house in a large corporation will be far less creative than if they work for a startup. A government department will be more political than an agency. A consultancy will require more flexibility and context switching than an in house design department. Yet university programmes under pressure and the wide variety of privately run bootcamps offer such a high level curriculum that the students I have met find it very difficult to find work when they graduate.

   So organisations try to create their own ramps. GDS ran a Design Academy programme for some time before shutting it down last year. My department at TPXimpact launched a Design Academy last year.  But most just don’t hire anyone starting out, preferring to hire people with at least 5 years of experience*.

   A Digital Design Council could work with businesses and educational institutions to develop industry specific curricula. If specialisation is good enough for engineering, it should be good enough for digital design.

2. Digital design needs standards
   40 years into ‘what you see is what you get‘, we should recognise that not everything on a digital design project needs the same level of research and creativity. Some things are just ‘rinse repeat’ jobs. Creating an account, uploading documents, verifying your identity, two factor authentication and others are common digital interactions. I would love for the Digital Design Council to maintain a vanilla version of the GDS service standard and build on it to help organisations stick to some design and accessibility standards and avoid UX dark patterns.

   The Digital Design Council could also explain in plain english how websites are made, what kinds of designers there are, what makes them different and how much they are usually paid in different sectors. There’s no union for digital designers yet but having some standard way to explain those careers, roles and impact would help.

3. Helping explain and direct AI discourse
   When I visited the RCA’s Superfutures degree show last week, most of the students were using generative AI for their final project. I’ve been involved in tech and ethics projects since 2012 and Generative AI is the latest example of what happens when we live with the consequences of the internet-ness of most of the things we have created since we were given smartphones and laptops. But the people who play around with AI in the most interesting ways are probably digital designers in R&D departments or those who run small businesses like Superflux, Projects by If, Acts not Facts, Careful Industries or Special Projects.

   The Digital Design Council could bring together the more traditional digital ethics actors (the Office for Artificial Intelligence, the Alan Turning Institute, Ada Lovelace Institute, the BCS, the IET and the IEEE for eg.) together with those practitioners to help illustrate for the public the real risks and opportunities of automated decision making, using everything we’ve put on the internet as training data, high quality 3D/video computing power. Because the future is probably not better chatbots nor deepfakes but somewhere in the middle. I’d love to think some of this is happening at ARIA but there’s no way to tell from the outside. Showing the near future or explaining the confusing present would make for a nice series of posters at least.

4. Own the digital climate agenda
   There’s a lot that a digital designer or product manager can do to reduce the impact of a website and the Digital Design Council could own and maintain the principles for good/green design in collaboration with the Green Web Foundation and others. They could run high quality training to make sure digital designers have some forms of CPD and keep up with the latest tech standards even if the tech stack they use now is different. Designers move around and the tech stack is constantly changing.

I don’t know is enough to start a charity, but there are so many ways in which digital design affects our lives, it would be nice if we started doing something about it.

As always, I’d love to know what you think about this in the comments.

*I don’t think anyone has looked into this but I’d love to know how many graduates of both university and bootcamp programmes find work in their first year of graduation and stay in that role for at least a year.