When can I call myself a designer?

Years ago, if you had told my teenage self that I would be in UX Design, I would have asked you firstly what is UX, and secondly will I still get to blow things up in the lab.

Naturally I pursued engineering in my later studies to achieve my dream of setting things on fire in the name of science, but alas I discovered that my passions lay with more environmentally friendly causes. With the analytical part of my brain used to being frequently exercised, I had thought that the creative nodes in my brain had been shelved away in the deeper recesses of my mind. But, years later, here I am, making a career out of listening to people complaining about things not working properly and trying to find fresh ways to solve their problems.

There’s a designer in all of us.

We each have our own unique taste in what we like, and don’t like so much. “I like this colour”, “this sweater is so me”, “this couch totally fits in the living room”. In a way, everyone has the latent ability to put on their designer hat when the situation calls. Clients and colleagues often ask me how I got to my current role in UX design, and the short answer is pure happenstance, some altruistic colleagues and a sprinkling of good fortune.

Beginning my career in consulting, I had a multitude of pathways and a plethora of learning opportunities available to me as a wide-eyed graduate. Unsure of what to pursue, the only thing I did know was that I wanted to do two things in my career: I wanted to help people and I wanted to solve problems. This coincidentally worked out quite well, as I was able to work as a business analyst in a succession of business process improvement projects. And even more fortuitous was the fact that each project had a heavy design capability where I was able to work with some brilliant designers. These designers challenged the status quo and brought about positive change to some pretty conservative, risk-averse clients, all whilst doing so armed only with a pack of post it notes and a pair of Nike Air Maxes. I was in awe.

As I worked closer with these colleagues, I got an insight into their inquisitive nature and their unique ways of working. The major quality that stood out to me was their empathy. These people were able to seamlessly switch between their customer, client and consultant ‘hats’ and imagine what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes. But of course, these colleagues that I put on a pedestal were just normal people at the end of the day, working on a team trying to achieve a shared goal. And they encouraged others to consider alternative perspectives and to try on different hats during the problem solving process.

Post its and blu tack weren’t enough to make things stick.

Moving from improvement project to improvement project I was working with stakeholders who were quite often throwing solutions at the wall and hoping that they would stick. I started to find myself asking the same questions over and over again:

• What’s in it for the customer? Why should they care?
• Who is actually going to use this solution, and how would they be affected?
• And eventually, why don’t we just speak to the people who will be affected before shaking up their current ways of working?

As the great Sir William Osler once said, “The good physician treats the disease, the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” You could create the most incredible solution for the client, but if there is little adoption, or it’s not quite aimed at the right audience, then it detracts from the utility it could provide as a result.

Unicorns are real. Or maybe just at work.

I was initially under the impression that in order to be a designer, you needed to major in interior design, have incredible artistic abilities and tour in a band in your free time. While yes, creative skills and expression can take all forms, these tropes were something I realised quite quickly were stereotypes. It wasn’t about the person’s hobbies or fashion sense, it was more about their mindset, trained skills and a sprinkling of emotional intelligence that was what maketh the designer.

In the earlier stages of my journey to upskill myself, I found that there were a handful opportunities to don my designer hat and take on responsibilities in project teams that had design capability gaps at the time. I was able to work with project leads that were willing to shake up the status quo, and senior peers magnanimous enough to take the time to coach me on how to upskill on design. Client meetings started turning into working sessions and eventually workshops, and conventional presentations in Powerpoint became screens and mockups in Figma. In a stroke of luck, the process flow diagrams that I created in my studies to map out industrial plant components in sequence, turned out to easily translate to business process flows and user flows. These flows were used to bring to life customer journeys, pain points and improvement opportunities. And what was initially a communications tool for stakeholders, became an important deliverable that was used to coach clients about the importance of design in business process improvement.

Step aside de Bono, I’ve got hats too.

Even now I experience a bit of cognitive dissonance calling myself a designer. But, at the end of the day, it’s really a label that probably doesn’t do enough justice to the different hats I’ve accumulated in my journey and continue to use each day. You can take me out of engineering, but you can’t take the engineer out of me, and it’s much the same with the other roles that I’ve been fortunate to have worked in previously. I’m but a humble student on my continuous learning journey and I’m thankfully surrounded by people that encourage me to always improve. People will have their doubts and maybe you’ll second guess yourself at each impasse (because what’s the full working experience without a bit of imposter syndrome?). But it’s all the more satisfying when you step back from time to time and take stock of what you know and have achieved to celebrate each win, small or big. And coming full circle with the learnings we accumulate, we can pay it forward to others to ensure that people have the tools to continuously adapt in a changing world to become the best versions of themselves.

So, which hats are you going to put on today?