Smash The Table!
by Dan
I found myself at a design conference listening to still another demand that clients give us designers that coveted place at that legendary table where all the big decisions are made. Sitting next to me was one of my favorite clients, someone I treasure for her levelheadedness and good humor. “I’ve spent hours at that table,” she whispered to me. “It’s not that great, you know.”
Michael Bierut, You’re So Intelligent
Adaptive Path’s MX Conference is about to kick off. Design managers and executives are descending up San Francisco to learn and talk about how to make their designs more effective, to speak to management better, how to innovate their organizations. Part of these discussions I’m sure will be the perennial talk of How to Get a Place at The Table. I’m here to offer an alternate view: our place as designers isn’t at The Table. It’s to smash The Table.
Perhaps the natural state of design—and thus designers—is to be outside the circle of power, and thus better able to tell the truth to power. At The Table, it is easy to have other concerns instead of just creating the best products possible: political concerns of gaining and retaining power, or financial concerns of running the company, or resource concerns about personnel, or the million other details it takes to run a business–many of which fight against putting out great products. Yes, a seat at the table can guarantee that a product gets made, but it doesn’t guarantee it will be good. Witness: Foleo, which Jeff Hawkins was able to push through but was so roundly criticized, it was pulled before it was even sold.
And of course, yes, we want and deserve respect (we’re changing the world, dontchaknow??), but that respect should flow from the products we create, not the number of meetings we’re in with the CEO.
Designers work better outside, looking in, the wise fools at court. The view outside is clearer, more open to other influences, less susceptible to groupthink and myopic viewpoints. (This outside viewpoint is why so many companies hire consultants.) Being outside allows designers to be advocates: lobbyists for what is the right thing to do for the users, the integrity of product itself, and even in some cases for what is best for the business.
This idea of Designer as Outsider is nothing new. In the 1950s, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss had brown suits made so that he would stand out from his corporate clients in their blue and grey suits.
As Dreyfuss knew, sometimes it benefits us to be more like artists than scientists. Design is, after all, a combination of science and art, and it is often art’s job to shine a light on what is uncomfortable or hard to do: the strange and unusual. The Truth with a capital T (which also means Trouble). We just need to draw on that legacy more often. Telling a CEO her vision of the product is the wrong one is not easy. It requires two things: courage and allies.
Rather than expend energy to get to The Table, it’s better to have allies there. People who know how to read the room, who can seem impartial but also lobby for you and help you make your case. The best clients, Tibor Kalman rightly said, are smarter than you. We need to cultivate these allies through the strength of our work and our ability to explain our work in terms of the value it brings to the users and to business. Only then will our voices be heard and respect given. We don’t need a seat at The Table for that. We just need allies there.
And here’s the most subversive thing: if we do our jobs right, The Table will change. It will get bigger, move, transform, and, yes, even get smashed. The best products change companies, markets, and, yes, possibly even the world. And when that happens, attention will be paid, respect given. You will be thanked for smashing The Table and giving them a new one.
And then you will go and do it again.
April 19th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I’m not even so sure there is a Table, most of the time. I bet a lot of our counterparts on the software development staffs, in project management teams, or in the customer service departments also pine to be allowed to sit at “the Table”, but then go off and make the dozens of small daily decisions that actually get things done.
April 19th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] adaptive path » blog » Dan Saffer » Smash The Table! (tags: business culture design) [...]
April 20th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
yes yes yes.
I was just putting together a page of thoughts around my experience in Art/Design school. I was almost 3 years in and was getting burnt out, fortunately my adviser noticed and asked what was up. I told him that I didn’t want to be a creative if it just meant knowing what every other creative had already done. Art History pissed me off, studio classes all had a lecture that was just more history. History just taught us who was “at the table” or who the people there now think should have been there.
He looked at me and said “art history teaches you the rules, so you can break them.”
I wanted to be at the table making the rules, I was 21 and thought I was a genius, but I realize now that the worst place I ever could have ended up is on the other side, at the table, critiquing a guy like me.
April 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
[...] details it takes to run a business–many of which fight against putting out great products. –Dan Saffer April 20, 2008 Link var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” [...]
April 20th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
[...] at Adaptive Path posted recently about this, here. His take is that the table may get bigger or even better, smashed, if designers do their job [...]
April 21st, 2008 at 9:47 am
I’m wondering about the motivation for being at the table. Is it because the great products and services designers make are not implemented or not implemented well, and designers want to make sure that they are? Or is it that the organizations designers work for are not well designed, and we want to redesign the organization itself?
Both cases seem to point to organizations not being designed well for innovation or design. In the former, if the goal of the consultancy is not to redesign the organization, I’m not sure what being at the table will accomplish, as the organization will have the same systemic problems once the consultancy pulls out regardless of the ephemeral influence. I’m also not sure that making great products and services will inherently change the table or organizations, as we are trusting that the current ineffective systems that are causing designers headaches will be redesigned effectively by the same people who designed them poorly in the first place.
If designers want to be at the table to redesign the organization, making products may not be the road to the table. In that case, I agree, allies are needed, at least until credibility is built. Again, if the goal isn’t to change the system, why sit at the table? But if the goal is to make great products, why would that effectively change the system?
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 am
[...] Saffer quotes a fall 2007 Design Observer article in his blog post about designers and their relationship with management. Although there may be a persistent desire on the part of designers to get a place at the [...]
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] can consume and make their own, or can it stand on its own, and as Dan Saffer recently said, smash the table [...]
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:16 pm
[...] adaptive path » blog » Dan Saffer » Smash The Table! Being outside allows designers to be advocates: lobbyists for what is the right thing to do for the users, the integrity of product itself, and even in some cases for what is best for the business. [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 8:57 pm
[...] at the table” thinking has been questioned by folks like Michael Bierut and, more recently, Dan Saffer. Bierut sees it as symptomatic of an insecurity complex and insists that designers should focus on [...]