Design as a Profession
Design has matured from a largely stylistic endeavor to an industry tasked with solving pain points for people, through human centered design. Design as a profession is evolving into a hybrid industry that is considered as much technical as it is creative. Over the years, companies hire designers for their core strengths in design. Nowadays, companies are looking into developing the designer’s core strength and complementing it with skills to enhance their competencies to work in cross functional teams. Design teams have become more vital to business success.
At IBM, it focuses on building competencies, skillsets and learning how to run projects. At KPMG Digital Village, design is for change through innovation, and change is led by design team. At PWC, it depends on the organisation and business direction.
As companies enlist designers with increasing opportunities to explore beyond design, new roles have emerged ranging from Visual Designer, Interaction Designer, User Experience Designer, User Experience Engineer, Frontend Software Engineer to Backend Software Engineer.
Visual Designers weave iconography, typography, color, space and texture together to help users successfully navigate a product.
Interaction Designers envision how users experience a product and bring that vision to life in a way that it feels inspired, refined and even magical.
UX Designers deliver a meaningful product experience to the users.
UX Engineers are the synthesis of design and development, taking an innovative product concepts and bringing them to life.
Over the years, the increase in demand for software engineers allows opportunities for designers with technical skillsets to expand into software engineering. Of course, having a sound foundation of how software engineering function can help the designers to approach design in a modular way. From the structuring of UI components into a shared library to building a MVP to test a proof of concept. As more and more designers are becoming ambidextrous — one hand armed with creative design, and another hand equipped with the technical expertise, design no longer remains rooted at a single discipline.
The fusion of both worlds of design and engineering require the creative sense and technical know-how to come into play. As design is diverging into new paths and specialisations e.g. creative technology, research, and storytelling, new designer professions are specialising in these few niche areas. Specialised jobs such as Motion Designers, UX Researchers and UX Writers can complement Design Team in building a better product for people.
Motion Designers use motion design to help tell a product story, guide users, improve usability, and make the user’s experience responsive and fun.
UX Researchers work to answer the most challenging questions in design and help reveal what users need from a product.
UX Writers craft language to guide users intuitively through end-to-end product journeys and design framework for coherent, elegant presentation of content.
