is everyone THE designer?

Welcome to another video if it's your first time here. Thank you for joining. I want to talk about something that was tweeted last week by Mr. Jared Spool. Sparked controversy in the design world over this tweet. Anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer. This includes developers, PMs, even corporate, legal. All are the designers. I'm gonna have to disagree. Before I go into why I disagree, let's read some of the comments. Andre says going to disagree with you. This is going to be freaking boring if I just read all this. All right, so I'm going to comment and I'm going to pull up another tweet. One of the things that Jared talks about is his definition of design. He defines design as the rendering of intent. Design is the rendering of intent, but I don't think that's encapsulates the full definition. So if we pull up our Mac dictionary just because it's the quickest thing to do. Design a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building garment. Blah, blah, blah, blah. A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function. So something that is planned and something that is produced is a design. So therefore anyone who plans and produces is designing. But I don't believe that makes them a designer. I honestly don't care. Like, I think of myself as a designer and I don't even know I'm doing finger quotes, but I think of myself as a designer. Like, I just, I get a bad feeling when someone just decides to call themselves like, I bought a camera, now I'm a photographer. I bought Photoshop, now I'm a designer. I influenced the design in a small way, now I'm a designer. I think if you are a lawyer and you influence the design in a great way, that doesn't make you a designer. It makes you a lawyer who influenced the design. I believe that I can write code for a project and not be the developer. You know, maybe it is a matter of semantics, but words do matter and titles do matter, regardless of whether you try to strip them away. You know, I think everyone should learn how to code. I think everyone should learn how to design. Everyone should learn how to research. But the fact of the matter is you're not going to have 10 people doing all different things. It would just be chaos. So in a way, you. I mean, someone has to own the design, whether it's the lawyer or the developer. You know, maybe they are depending on the company. You know, they are the designer. If there is not a designer Someone is designing it and it might be a developer and they may be throwing together components that are straight out of Bootstrap. So maybe your app is half designed by the Twitter bootstrap theme and half designed by the HTML components and it was just an assembly. And if you want to call that person the designer, then that's fine with me. Just because someone influences the design doesn't mean that they are the designer. I think now I'm sure that I'm completely leaving my argument wide open for holes. And I'm sure that if Jared came and sat down at this table that he would talk circles around me. He's much older, much wiser, much more experienced, and I have a lot of respect for him. But I do disagree with the fact that he's calling everyone the designer because they influence the design. It just feels wrong. And I don't have a very clear thought out, succinct reason to say that other than making this kind of rambly video, but that's what I'm going to do. What would you call the person who takes all of the influential material from the pm, from the legal team, from the developer? Who is the person that takes all of that influential material and plans and executes the design? Someone is still going to put it together and that is the designer. The person who is executing the design. If you had input in that, that is great, and I'm all for that. But someone has to own it. Someone has to be responsible for that task. And the person responsible, more often than not, should be the designer. Anyway, I'm going on a tangent here. One more tweet. Four days later, on Sunday, after like a tweet storm from the design community, Jared says, I learned something interesting. While apparently upsetting people with what I thought was a simple, non controversial tweet, people asserted that I was insulting an entire class of designers by devaluing their work. I completely disagree with that. I do not feel insulted. I don't feel like you're insulting the class of designers. Designers and non designers are considered a single class of people. But why is there a problem with having designers and non designers? Is that a problem? I don't see that as a problem. I see it as a problem if the designer is unwilling to work, has to own all of that stuff. Someone needs to own the structure of the code, someone needs to own the legal terms of the software, someone needs to own the financial statements. And just because I am concerned about conversion rates doesn't necessarily make me the accountant. Someone has to own it. So I don't know. I guess in my mind it's a matter of who owns it, who is responsible for it, who is accountable. If you don't put someone on the hook, then you're not accountable. And I think that's maybe what it boils down to is who is accountable for the design, who is accountable for the research, who's accountable for the money. And in some ways, we're all accountable for all of those parts. But if you shift someone's title or if you shift someone's responsibility, then the accountability gets lost. Go design something or not, you know, or just tell someone to design something and say that you designed it. I don't know. Whatever you want to do. That's going to be all for this little mini rant. I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on this. You know, I know this is opening up a can of worms, but if you're. If you have an opinion about if you're a designer or not a designer, or if you think everyone who influences the design is the designer, let me know in the comments below. If you enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up. And if you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button. I just recently hit 1,000 subscribers. Very grateful for all of you that are watching. And I've got a special video coming up on that note. So. All right, that's it. And until next time, peace out.