Day 1- Navigating the Rapid Shift’s In Tech’s Turbulent Terrain

 

• Theme of day is change, so presentation will introduce us to forces impacting design today

• Through perma-crisis, we have exhausted workforce seeing mass layoffs and enforce RTO politices and new six-figure positions for prompt engineers
• So design going through unprecedented times

 

 

• Absurdity of business and ruins of business as usual
• Layoffs of 2022 and 2023
• Co-worker of AI
• Care Labor metaphor for design
• Where do we go to keep jobs or transform?

 

 

• Ubiquitous promise of HCD has been tainted by contradictions
• Designers who championed empathy tech world fell to pattern of exploring users for short-term gains through design decisions made in things like dark patterns
• Design grew to bigger proportions to point where UX demand was equal to that of developers

• People were pushed to burnout and even out of the profession

 

• Technofeudalism: Where tech corps have unparalleled control to data and impacting internet’s open promise
  • We are digital serfs who work with platforms without sense of agency

• How can we empower users in context of user exploitation?
• What is the role of designops in this digital hellscape?

 

 

• Brought  absurdities to the forefront

• Promise versus actual practices
• Jeffrey Pfeiffer, who studied hiring, said it was instance of social contagion of companies imitating other companies that were doing it
  • Layoffs as imitative behavior and not evidence based

 

 

• Typical individual had 12 years of experience, and tenure of 2.5 years, reflecting pandemic overhiring
• Women and POCs were disproportionately impacted and felt by work combined

 

• No sizable data to figure out designers impacted, but lot of anecdata on LinkedIn

• We don’t really know as some people could move to non-traditional org for transforming practices there
• There needs to be change in perceived value to designops to scale design successfully

 

 

• Excaberating layoff anxiety and restructuring workforce to labor costs
• We require new skillsets or irrelevance

 

 

 

• High efficiency in work leads to more work rather than free-time and can result in burnout than leisure time

 

• Without equating job of paid care workers product and service designers related to care labor in following ways
  • Positive and human-centered relationships, at least in theory

• Care labor is caring for needs of others, whether user bases or communities

• Work is unrecognized as it is relational and emotional as opposed to productive
  • Correlated with colonial mode of living

 

• As a designer at heart, and in DesignOps by necessity, I think in systems
• There is an intricate web of challenges molding professionals

• Recognizing visualizing challenges
• Ensuring collaboration
• Optimizing workflows

• A blind demand for efficiency puts our jobs at risk

• 1) Nothing changes
• 2) Job moved to efficiency and pushing DesignOps generalist roles to side
• 3) Laying off DesignOps practice

 

• Struggle to demonstrate value of design as it is viewed as nice-to-have than essential
  • Hard to progress beyond initial interview stages
• Networking remains crucial, and cold-calling and applying doesn’t work

 

 

• Merging with DevOps and ProductOps leading to dilution of work
• Moving to general operations

 

• Talks become more executional at expense of long-term outcomes

 

• Hope companies will recognize significance of DesignOps

 

• Point to make is that as DesignOps need to change jobs description, otherwise risk of losing profession
• AI and automation might not replace jobs, but turn to more humanistic traits as opposed to efficiency and maximization
  • Focus on strategic work, and outcomes as opposed to outputs
• Adapt by facilitating collaboration and look between human and machine generated work

 

• Re-skilling is a competitive tactic
• Requires massive organizational shift

• AI is struggles with soft skills and LLMs have biases despite claims of neutrality
• Designers can add humanity to work
• So HMW create new standards for bridging that gap?

 

• Setting up facilitated experiences and visualized outcomes

 

• Can consider whole lifecycle and deisgn impacts
• Activate for human approaches
  • Thinking beyond human needs and profits
  • Shift from short-term to long-term planning

• HMW can we create new ethical design playbooks and importance impact of designs?
• Not recipe for changing world, but requires experimentation and learning from each other and helps
• To quote Audre Lorde: “No such things as an single-issue struggle, as we don’t have single-issue lives”

 

• AIs make the problems worse, but embracing it is a necessary compromise and setting up rules of engagement
• Job is changing so we need new ways of working

 

 

 

 

 

1. Comes down to what we can effect in companies we are employed at or seeking new challenges
2. If feel change I can create right now is not happening, there are many environments people who are susceptible to change and mostly in unofficial channels
3. Find people and critical mass of those in agree and those who are coming on?

1. Would say there are clues currently from interviews, that most of time DesignOps be kept in company role, but diluted into broader ops team
2. Know that most DOs are teams of one and likely to keep as person need to shift priorities to cost unit
3. Scope of job changing as well and have all priorities along with new ones added on
4. Might even happen that whole job changed and finding new challenges as this is not what they signed up for

1. AI as necessary evil, and need to work with it or be phased out.
2. Managers will think this.
3. Grasp best practices and seek courses for AI-levels
   1. Using it to cut down time for templates for skills mapping and doing bulk part of work for you
   2. Becoming more practical occurs and automate work better
   3. Later talks will have more to say regarding this

1. Starts with conversation and level of readiness of org to have these talks and how we can create strategies together
2. Be open what you need to succeed and do well at job regardless of org you are in
3. Having meetings with PMs and Engineering to bring data points together and have educated guess on how design can fit into the company