Doctor’s Note – Issue 31 – On Mediocrity • Buttondown

I started writing this piece about mediocrity and then Robert Fabricant’s The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future article came out. There is a tight relationship between the two, which extended this essay considerably.
Robert Fabricant’s article provides a good historical summary of how “design” got to where it is, how the big management consultancies acquired design agencies. The tl;dr summary is that a generation of design leaders are grappling with uncertainty about their futures, that many design execs have had their positions and departments eliminated or placed underneath Product in the org, and there is now a crisis of confidence among design leaders. He frames the piece around three key questions:

• Were we unprepared for our success?
• Did we misread the signals?
• Did we struggle to adapt?

Source: Doctor’s Note – Issue 31 – On Mediocrity • Buttondown