Why I believe designers need to be licensed.
This post contains spoilers from Mike Monteiro’s Ruined by Design. If you are working in the design industry, you need to read that book. Here is the link, go buy it.
Back when I was working at a healthcare technology company, I had the opportunity to run a design sprint to figure out how best to build a product to help people manage their chronic condition. On the 5th day of the sprint, I tested some concepts with my family and out of curiosity they asked
Don’t you need a medical degree to do this?
To which I thoughtlessly responded,
“No, I’m just working on the app.”
Since then, this conversation lingered at the back of mind, because there was something off. How on earth, was I, someone with just a design degree, able to work on a piece of software that will communicate critical patient information, without medical training?
Couple of months passed since then, but then one day, I came across this tweet:
Simon’s life could have been endangered by this piece of software. Not because of the receptionist’s inability to scroll down, but purely because this software made it seem like she didn’t need to scroll. A receptionist at a clinic sees close to 60 patients a day, and each patient could have completely different conditions. A piece of software that doesn’t account for that amount of information consumption, and delivery via a human being must account for and support accurate information delivery. Anything short of that, risks not only “user error”, but places human lives at risk.
Having recently finished Mike Monteiro’s Ruined by Design, and reflecting on this thought that lingered in my mind over the last 6 months, I absolutely believe that designers need to be licensed appropriately for the industry they work with. With software becoming an integral part of our day to day, we can no longer separate (insert institution of your choice) and software. Software has to be designed appropriately for the job it’s facilitating. Would a hospital ever buy a poorly engineered CT scan machine? No. It makes no sense that they would invest into a poorly designed EMR software. Poorly designed software happens out of negligence, rather than a desire to do evil (Hanlon’s razor). With the maturing role of design as gatekeepers to what is being delivered out of an organization, designers must understand what is at stake — and part of that is gaining the right level of knowledge before they can do their job.
Like doctors who must take a Hippocratic oath before stepping into their roles. I think designers must also follow the same path — at least in proportion to the impact their work could do.
For too long, the design profession has talked about changing the world, but they are also at risk of ruining the world if they continue to casually push pixels without being aware of the impact they are having outside of the screen. This must stop.
When I see tweets like this, I feel a tiny bit hopeful, but at the same time worried.
I disagree.
I say raise the bar. Make it harder (for the right industry employing designers), because we don’t need more self-entitled hipsters circle jerking around their Dribble posts.
We need responsible, gatekeeping designers to hold themselves, and the organizations they work with accountable. Because if we don’t do that, people’s wellbeing, and sometimes lives, are truly at stake.
