Design has become very good at telling grand stories about itself. We talk about design as if it is a catalytic force – a driver of social change, a tool for radical transformation, the answer to wicked problems (Buchanan 1992), and a fundamental engine of innovation. These stories are compelling, they resonate, and they help design claim a seat at strategic tables. But they also risk oversimplification of scope and meaning, and a drift from grounded practice into metaphors that cannot carry the weight we ask of them.
This tension between narrative and practice shows up in design education, in methods discourse and in how we represent design’s agency. It can lead to design becoming a stereotype of itself.
Indeed, a pervasive storyline in design today is that everyone can design and that design can design everything. There is a seductive logic here. Democratising design, involving stakeholders, and sharing creative agency all feel progressive. Yet as previously noted in discussions about design by committee and stakeholder participation, this narrative can dilute the very skills and critical capacities that distinguish designerly practice from mere facilitation or group consensus.
That post questioned when it was that designers began welcoming stakeholder participation and what that meant for design’s identity and critical function. And this resonates with a broader worry: when design becomes a collective pastime rather than a professional practice, we risk losing the deeper judgement that comes from experience, context, material engagement and critical reflection. Design is then in danger of becoming a process as proxy for actual design understanding.
Another narrative thread in design culture is a kind of procedural optimism: that diagrams, flows, templates and stages are the essence of design. The Double Diamond, for example, is widely taught in design thinking units and treated as if it were a complete map of what designers actually do. Yet educators and researchers alike, for example Hills & Bird (2018), as well as practitioners (Jen 2018), have long critiqued such models as simplifications that omit the mess, criticality, contradiction and tacit knowledge at the heart of actual design work.
Design methods are tools, not absolutes – and uncritical reliance on them as linear journey maps are reductive and can obscure as much as reveal. Indeed, previous posts have explored how methods like defamiliarisation can empower designers‘ tacit skill-sets in order to reveal hidden complexity, precisely because design resists tidy prescription.
When process diagrams become dogma, the practice they purport to represent gets flatter, less nuanced, less responsive to context, and less generative of new meaning. In essence, they become anti-design.
Since around the beginning of the 20th century, there has also been a persistent tendency to treat design as a major actor in social and political change. We hear talk of design being able to resolve systemic inequities, reframe civic life, shape policy and reorganise institutions. Design’s relationship with broader socio-technical concerns – such as AI’s influence on education and the limitations that introduces – highlights how context and complexity routinely outstrip the capacity of any one discipline to solve structural problems.
Perhaps more acutely, design does not operate independently of political economy, culture, law and power. It works within those conditions, and its influence is contextual, partial and situated.
In historical terms, design disciplines such as graphic design have long struggled for recognition and definition, both within academia and in professional fields. Indeed, previous posts have noted that graphic design’s identity has often been overshadowed or simplified, treated as a purely aesthetic design practice rather than a research discipline with its own intellectual and practical commitments (Harland & Meron 2024; Meron 2021).
This matters because when design disguises its own complexity under big-picture narratives, it can lead to misunderstanding. It invites stakeholders, educators and funders to value design for what it claims to do rather than what it actually does. The result is a cycle of inflated expectations that designers are then pressured to fulfil through ever more reductive methods – in essence, moving away from design’s intrinsic values and strengths.
None of this is an argument against ambition, collaboration, or relevance. Instead, it is an argument for clarity. Design is powerful in specific, situated ways, not because it is a universal problem-solver. Its value lies in the capacity to translate between domains, to make meaning visible, to shape experiences and to mediate material and symbolic forms. When we talk about design in these terms, we anchor it where it actually has influence and can create value.
Design’s future is best served when we match our narratives to the realities of practice, when we interrogate our assumptions, and when we retain a disciplined humility about what design can – and cannot – achieve.
Buchanan, R. 1992, Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Design Issues, 8, 5-21.
Harland, R. & Meron, Y. 2024, Design Thinking: Standing on the Shoulders of… Graphic Design!, Design Issues, 40, 49-61.
Hills, A., & Bird, A. (2018). Against creativity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 99(3), 694–713.
Jen, N. (2018, August 21). Graphic designer Natasha Jen poses six questions for design thinkers [Talk]. Design Indaba.
Meron, Y. (2021). Terminology and design capital: Examining the pedagogic status of graphic design through its practitioners’ perceptions of their job titles. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 40(2), 374–388.
Communication & Graphic Design Research 