If you’re not already a fan, Silicon Valley is a hit TV show by Mike Judge, and it nails tech culture (and now design) big-time.
SPOILERS AHEAD: If you’re not going to watch or already saw the episode, please read on.
Season 3, Episode 4 got me really riled up. The show is satire and it’s all in good fun, but sometimes it really hits home. There are a lot of long-winded people writing blogs about this show already, but very few get the passing reference to the point I’m going to make.
They’ve been building up a plot line with the characters having been forced to work with a CEO that is bent on driving the team in the direction of creating a tangible server box product, in which no one sees any good strategy, but of course, it’s about profit margins to this guy. He continues filling the new office in the background of scenes (especially his office) with hilarious artifacts, from a monster saltwater fish tank, to a remote-controlled sliding glass door, a giant zen garden complete with caretaker, etc… and his entire business rationale revolves around a nonsensical diagram he created, the “Conjoined Triangles of Success”. It’s all almost a little TOO real life. But that’s not what got me.
They next introduce a character, who happens to be a spitting stereotype of a designer, to help design the server box. This is something that’s going to sit in a rack in a basement of a server facility, so who cares what it looks like? But, this is further a stereotype of how outsiders view design. I was dying from laughing when the guy puts on a PowerPoint presentation of random scenic photos while grooving to lame cajong music in his black frame glasses and scarf. ‘Oh no’, I thought. ‘This is how people really see designers.’
Mis-View #1: Design is Irrelevant
Design is your link from the brand to the consumer. And in the digital age, it’s more important now than ever. It’s that simple and that important. When a consumer sees a rotten logo or unusable app and thinks “this is low quality– their business is probably low quality too”, that was lack of design quality reverse-Trojan-horsing at the front gate.
Mis-View #2: Designers are all hipsters
Designers are all aesthetic nerds. They come in many varieties, so it’s unfair to say all are hipsters. Hipsters form a sort of Venn diagram relationship with aesthetic nerds. By wikipedia’s definition, Hipsters are “someone who is pretentious, overly trendy or effete”. So the trendy part is what gets them the job, but the rest is what gives everyone else a bad image.
Mis-View #3: Designers have an unrealistic approach
The designer in the episode playing the cheesy music and showing random nature photos is pretty overboard for his intended purpose of “gaining a shared aesthetic”. It’s an exaggeration, but it’s not far-off from things I’ve seen. Any good or experienced designer has a process of elimination in mind, and hones the final product in a number of rounds of revisions to the work.
Mis-View #4: Anyone can be a Designer
As Richard shows by suddenly changing his mind about the product and making the designer scrap the concept which was created with his instructions of flippancy, clients and bosses may change their mind at the drop of a hat, since design is something “subjective”. Design takes patience and perseverance. And the field is always changing. Constant pressure and criticism require designers to swallow their pride, so anyone with an ego won’t go far with this kind of work. We’re now seeing a great amount of data science to quantitatively validate the previously-subjective mysteries of design, which is both refreshing and challenging.
Another interesting thing is that this server box concept was based on the product of an actual company. See below.
https://www.simplivity.com/blog/2016/05/behind-scenes-simplivity-silicon-valley/
