by Enrique Allen

For the last few years, I was teaching startups to think like designers. But I eventually realized that you need someone to model and inspire design thinking within the company. If you don’t have a designer in your founding group, it’s harder to have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies.

This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.

Although designer-founder genes are rare, more designers have the capacity to step up to the challenge. Inspired by the mathematician Richard Hamming, I believe that being a designer founder of a tech startup is one of the biggest opportunities in the design field today. So I laid out some assertions to begin experimenting, started aligning resources and kickstarted research about designer founders.

What’s Driving the Movement

Here’s why design is important to the tech world today:

1. As the consumer tech market becomes more crowded, brands and experience design–not just technical capabilities–are becoming critical to success.

2. Innovation is about radical collaboration. The critical mass of combined design, technical, and business skills enables product iteration to happen faster and at a higher resolution.

3. Designer founders have unique skills (not just visual) to understand human needs and discover unarticulated opportunities.

With these points in hand, I presented them to as many designers and investors as I could find. Turns out, more than 50 of them believed these assertions, too. So we came together as a community to create the Designer Fund and invest in the next generation of designer founders.

[Image: Seregam/Shutterstock]

The Skills to Ship

Clearly, every designer isn’t meant to be a founder and probably shouldn’t be. To be clear, we don’t mean designer as the prima donna pixel-pusher that you might be picturing. We also don’t mean designer as the “I took one class called UX Fundamentals in business school.” We mean an honest-to-goodness, experienced practitioner who has learned to design by designing. And most importantly, they’re able to ship usable products.

Above all, designer founders should be experts at finding the right problems to solve. That means sometimes building usable products that are ugly, or prototyping with a spreadsheet, and not getting trapped into making something beautifully useless that will not scale. Designer founders need to be able to do a lot, and it’s not easy.

This Is About Impact, Not Hype

The point is not to get caught up in buzzword titles, or challenge the role of design consultants or founders with engineering backgrounds, but to highlight the emerging opportunity for founders with design expertise from trained to self-taught backgrounds. It makes sense that a prerequisite for a tech company is to have a founder with technical skills. The same heuristic should hold true if you want to ship consistently well-designed products like Pinterest, AirBnB, and Path. Why not have a cofounder with design skills who champions the user experience?

Now, more than ever, we face complex problems that designer founders are well-equipped to solve. Everyone in a company should have empathy and practice design regardless of their title. Design can no longer be just be an outsourced add-on, limited to putting “lipstick on a pig.” Tech moves too fast for such short-sighted design thinking; it won’t be a lasting advantage.

Of course, designer founders aren’t some magical unicorn or silver bullet that’s going to solve everything. They’re but one potential key ingredient to teams of innovators, not a guarantee. Many companies will succeed without designer founders and many will fail with them. But I believe they improve the odds of survival.

Studying the Paths of Designer Founders

Designer founders we’ve observed are consistently multidisciplinary and have cross-functional skills necessary to make decisions about products. They are fluent in the full design stack, ranging from user research and interaction design to information architecture and communication design. They may not be experts in all sub-disciplines of design but can get by on their own in the early days of their startup and attract specialists when needed. In addition, they have a thorough enough working understanding of technology and business stacks, including agile programming and data-based marketing methods. Designer founders can move up and down the design stack and across the technology and business stacks to do what it takes to ship and use data to justify their decisions when needed. Thus, they are capable of leading both their product and organization through the design cycles needed to innovate. There’s a difference between a designer who can design a car dashboard and a designer who can design an entire car and how to drive it. Designer founders need to be able to do both.

[A portrait of the ideal designer founder. Image: Nanostock/Shutterstock]

To support these claims, we’re practicing what we preach and interviewing every designer founder we can find who’s created a venture-backed tech startup. The collection of interviews will be published as a nonprofit book that will be free for students, with the goal of synthesizing patterns and lessons to inspire entrepreneurial designers. The first by-product of this research, our Designer Founders info cards, represent a snapshot of data we’ve collected and some patterns we’re starting to explore. What you find is that designers live behind some of the web’s best startups, including Vimeo, YouTube, Hunch, Path, Etsy, and Instagram. That’s no coincidence.

The Future of Designer Founders

More designer founders than previous decades are daring to walk the unbeaten path and sacrifice the security of a paycheck to pursue the freedom of creating meaningful impact through tech startups. Whether they succeed or not, these designers represent a new breed of entrepreneur that will hopefully inspire the next generation of designers to be even better at making positive social change. There are also schools who are responding to the call to train entrepreneurial designers, such as the Stanford d.school, School of Visual Arts, among others. As we enter a user-interface revolution, there are even more possibilities for designers to create experiences with touch, sound, and movement interaction.

In the wake of Steve Jobs’s example, it’s obvious that designer founders should be champions of the user experience. They’re the ones who stand with one foot in the world of technology and the other in the world of people, bringing the two together.

A version of this article also appears on FastCoDesign.

One could argue that Steve Jobs’ prominence in the collective imagination of what a truly innovative business leader should think, say, and do has only strengthened exponentially after his recent demise. As it often happens in the case of similarly influential, seminal figures, the hard recollection of facts and of “what really happened” gets quickly out-shined by references to memorable, albeit often anecdotal, events in that person’s life. These are the stories that tend to be told again and again until they take on the aura of myths, and as even the modern Greeks can easily attest most human beings tend to embrace myths, especially when they come wrapped in compelling narratives involving a hero.

Along these lines one could also argue that Jobs’ near-ubiquitous biography has been instrumental in this still ongoing “mythification” process: If you happen to work as a professional in the creative industry, countless conversations these days start with a client, a colleague, or even a friend quoting a passage from the book, and one can can come to see this state of things either as a precious conversation starter or as an unavoidable reference to someone whom you’re expected to either praise or criticize.

There’s no denying that the role Jobs has come to play in the field of innovation-at-large is usually associated with the term “genius”—and I largely agree with this value statement—but what I’m interested in is how Jobs’ role in the high-tech industry fits with the forces currently shaping the perception of where innovation comes from in a contemporary business environment, both in large corporations and in small start-ups.

Are innovation and creativity the material of über-talented individuals working in splendid isolation, or are they the result of a team effort, even when well-orchestrated by a conductor?

The motivation for the reflections that follow relates to the slowly-building backlash against the current widespread industry notion that today’s innovative businesses need to be structured around a shared vision, cross-disciplinary group collaboration, and a deep understanding of the intended end-users of their products or services.

Distributed evidence for this apparent innovation “pendulum swing” can be found in recent articles, including “Groupthink” by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker and “The Rise of the New Groupthink”, by Susan Cain in the New York Times. Lehrer takes the position that brainstorming is useless, while Cain posits that the current obsession with collaboration and “groupthink” needs to be rebalanced in light of evidence highlighting the key role that lone and often introverted thinkers and inventors have played in major recent and not-so-recent breakthrough innovations.

I cannot but associate these considerations with those that have fueled recursive debates around the role user research plays in driving truly disruptive rather than incremental innovation. For example, after the publication of his book Design-Driven Innovation, economist Roberto Verganti posted various reflections on the Harvard Business Review website, questioning the role and sustainability of so-called user-driven innovation.  

In a recent-past-that-feels-like-ages-ago, these opposing visions of the world used to pitch Sony against Nokia, with Sony usually representing the “creating desire and demand” camp, and Nokia typically getting associated with the user-centered approach. Most recently, Apple has replaced Sony in flying the flag of “people don’t really know what they will love until we show it to them” (this quote being my own anecdotal contribution to the Myth of Jobs), and Nokia’s slot has arguably been filled by companies like Google with its data driven decision-making process, or Facebook and Twitter, both of which constantly evolve their services around customer feedback or manifest behavior.

So, what gives?

Is innovation the result of the prophetic reflections of lone, introverted, self-centered, creative geniuses, or instead the fruit of the collaboration of a group of talented contributors working together to shape a collective shared vision?

Are radically innovative (and successful) products and services the result of disruptive technologies and effective marketing acumen aimed at generating desire, or should markets and technological innovation eminently follow what people want, need, dream of, or aspire to, whether those desires are consciously expressed or need to be uncovered using insight-generating research techniques?

 As a designer I think the answer is yes.

That’s because I don’t think there is an archetypal, simplistic image of what type of personality or process best fosters innovative thinking, or even what type of physical working environment can best support a creative culture. That view of the world is too polarized. In my experience there is no single specific behavioral trait, methodological approach, or carefully-selected set of contextual factors that guarantees success in the ability to think differently and translate that thinking into success in the market.

That said, there is indeed a common trait in the typical way creative thinkers approach challenges: they can comfortably hold opposing thoughts in their heads and get to work. At times, this trait can be misconstrued as “the magic of creativity” and especially in the design field I frown when I hear that label because it reveals a preconception that designers are industrial artists that purely rely on their intuition to give shape to their solutions. Not so. The truth is that designers often confidently leap off an unstable conceptual platform with the apparent confidence that the resulting oxymoronic cognitive springboard will not just overlook an empty pool and a hard landing.

Informed intuition. Controlled chaos. Abductive analysis. This is often the mindset of successful creative, innovative thinkers: seeing opposites and apparently contradicting goals not just as a potential for dissonance, but as an opportunity for dynamic harmony.

To paraphrase one of Walt Whitman’s most famous verses “creative thinkers are vast, they contain multitudes”: creativity is inherently inclusive.

I will quickly also add that this ability applies to all creative thinkers, whether they are indeed designers, artists, technologists, engineers or economists, and however they might be labeled as, CEO, CMO, CTO, CCO or ABCDO.

Ok, so what now? The truth does not lie in the extremes, and definitely also not in the middle. The truth lies in harnessing the positive tension between the extremes, and fine-tuning it until it resonates with what current technologies can enable and with what intended consumers and end-users are ready to adopt in a given socio-cultural economic context.

Think of all the vectors that typically influence bringing a truly innovative product or service to market, and imagine them individually stretched amidst the opposing constraints that often define their conceptual and practical boundaries (time to market, development cycles, user experience, technical feasibility, branding, business models, just to name a few). Now imagine all these vectors as taut guitar strings, one alongside the other. Imagine fine-tuning each string so that it’s in harmony with all the other ones when they are strummed together. Imagine this being not a one-off task, but a near-continuous activity that a talented musician needs to constantly perform as he or she is playing, not before.

Seeing an opportunity, a challenge, human beings, or the world as a whole, as multi-faceted systems that can only be approached in their full complexity: this syncretic way of thinking applies not just to the input, but also to the social and environmental context, and to the tools, process, and output of the work of creative individuals and groups.

From this conceptual standpoint, seeing brainstorming in opposition to solitary thinking, or user research as antithetical to disruptive innovation feels simply off the mark. These apparently opposing approaches are actually complementary, and effective innovators already use them as such, picking the right mind-frame and the accompanying tools and methodologies according to the specificities of the challenge at hand.

This holistic way of thinking and working is the trademark of places like the one I happen to be lucky enough to work in.

These are places where the physical working context combines an open-plan with project rooms of various sizes to support small group collaboration or individual focus, with plenty of highly transparent, portable cubicles most of my colleagues tend to refer to as “headphones”. They are environments where people can also comfortably work from home or from whatever concentration-inducing environment they prefer when they’d rather work alone uninterrupted. They supply a context in which an office is often not defined by walls surrounding an enclosed space, but happens to be the place where people live, work, and use the products and services we give shape to.

 Also, these are places that are characterized by a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and multicultural environment that encourages and often simply requires group collaboration because of the multifaceted complexity of the problems that need to be tackled. A context that at the same time expects every single team member to bring a strong individual point of view to an opportunity, a point of view fueled and sustained by personal passions and deep vertical knowledge.

 These are places where a highly flexible process associates moments of deep immersion in the complex world of the people we shape solutions for, combined and interspersed with periods where rich stimuli are processed and interpreted to generate insights that inform the creative process without analytically prescribing mechanistic solutions.

Finally, these are places where effective ideation methodologies combine high-intensity collaborative workshops and workgroups, interspersed with slower moments of synthesis and evaluation, in groups or alone, integrating internal and external expertise, welcoming end-users as active participants to the creative process while still expecting team leaders to be the advocates and owners of a clear and well-communicated holistic vision.

Positing that the intuition of a visionary genius or the introduction of a disruptive technology are best poised to lead to radical innovation is simply a misleading construct, if postulated in absolute terms.

Maybe Jobs or Wozniak were such visionary geniuses working in uninterrupted solitary isolation … when they weren’t busy working crazy-long hours with the rest of their über-talented crews, in a part of the world that’s still today considered the cultural cradle of high-tech innovation.

The answer lies in harnessing the positive tensions that naturally build when any existing social or cultural paradigm can be challenged by the introduction of innovative ideas, products, or services. Without a profound understanding of what people will be ready and willing to introduce into their lives, even brilliant products have regularly failed on markets not mature enough to digest their full potential. Harnessing these tensions is in itself an art that only a group of talented individuals have proven to be capable of mastering.

A new ad campaign for the College for Creative Studies in Detroit lightheartedly gives its academic programs the D.A.R.E. treatment. Stay off the art, kids.

I’m not sure if/where these ads are running, but I’ve seen them kicking around online for a few days and I think they’re terrific. (Update: Copywriter Joel Wescott tells me they’re running in the local metro paper and stills at the local movie theater. There’s also a radio spot.) I’m not even sure I want to critique this, since it’s a hell of a lot better than anything I’ve done lately.

Overall, this is a pitch-perfect satire of anti-drug PSAs, down to the over-dramatic, obviously posed photos of gravely serious family situations. It’s also done in a way that elevates and glorifies art school. By laughing at anyone who considers art education unwise, impractical or even reckless, the ads remind us of what a reasonable choice it really is. Of the seven ads in the series, the only one that falls flat to me is “Your mother and I raised you to do better than this.” It doesn’t fit because the dad isn’t expressing displeasure that his kid is doing art—he seems to be mad that the art isn’t good enough. This doesn’t match the rest of the ads, and could have been fixed by applying the same copy to an image where the son has actually created something impressive. Other than off note, this is really nice work. Go to art school and make ads like this.

* * * *

Who created this campaign?

Advertising Agency: Team Detroit, Dearborn, Mich.
Chief Creative Officer: Toby Barlow
Creative Director: Gary Pascoe
Art Director: Vic Quattrin
Junior Art Directors: Michael Eugene Burdick, Brandi Keeler
Copywriter: Joel Wescott
Account executives: Tim Galvin and Ashley Budchuck

Who signed off on it?

I’m guessing CCS president Richard L. Rogers. Update, via comment below: And closer to the campaign, probably Marcus Popiolek, the college’s director of marketing and communication. Update 2, via Wescott: Also, Kate Lees and Megan Mesack at CCS.

Credits and images via Scaryideas.com and Tek1Now.