At design school, we talk about design all day, everyday. The ideology of a graduate program in design is, at minimal, that design is important. I want to believe it, and I do believe it. Or else why go to design school in the first place?

So one of the humbling experiences of working for an engineering-centric startup is that design is not part of the core value proposition. Fundamentally, customers don’t buy our products for its design, and in a sense, they shouldn’t. 

This might be the root of some of my friends’ surprise that I chose work at this startup. Don’t we (designers) want to work at places where design is the competitive advantage? Where design is the company’s core competency?

Not necessarily.

Design is a vessel. There’s the whole Buddhist thing about the essence of a bowl being its emptiness—that’s why it’s useful. Its emptiness allows it to hold something. I guess that means that design must talk about something else. If you make design about design, you’re just stacking bowls, and that’s not what bowls are for.

—Frank Chimero, in The Great Discontent #99

I love Frank’s point here. To phrase it another way, design must serve something other than itself. Good design is a means to an end. What is your design for?

This is where working at an engineering centric startup has been fun, and I’d argue more challenging than working in a design-centric environment. My design, as it stands now, is for getting the amazing engineering work my team is doing out to the people who need it. The team has built a technical marvel in that machine learning system, and it’ll be damn shame if people don’t get to use it. 

So I am learning what it means to fulfill a design function as part of a bigger venture. Strategies so far:

• Internalizing the company’s goals, values and strategies to understand how design furthers the company.
• Figuring out what is good enough in context of the company priorities.
• Distributing the limited number of my hours among various projects that pushes the company forward, knowing that each project has a diminishing margin of return.

All of these require my checking any designer egotism at the door.

So tonight I will keep thinking about how design is conducted when good design isn’t the top level goal.