The pendulum swings this way. Now companies find themselves competing for customers, employees and partners, and eventually experiences become important for acquiring and retaining them. Design! Eureka! Design is indispensable, desirable, even glamorous. Design poetizes with beguiling jargon about woo-woo abstractions like “humans” with “feelings” and “perspectives” that allegedly drive concrete quantifiable realities. It’s all sorta dumb but cute, mostly worth putting up with. Marketing plunders it for slogans. Design is everyone’s special sauce.
The pendulum swings that way. Now customers are locked-in or lack positive alternatives, because the whole world’s enshittified. Companies need to shed employees and partners. Let’s start with the designers. They’re out of touch and won’t shut up. The woo-woo and whining are wearisome, and we don’t need them. Good enough experiences are good enough, and those can be built by non-designers or AI.
The same wrecking ball has been swinging back and forth through my life for 35+ years. There is no question anymore what’s next and next and next.
Each nasty divorce sours the next honeymoon. You get angst spasms each time you glimpse that unused Tinder app, and one day you just delete it. Instead you open the Uber app and catch a Waymo to the glue factory.
And fuck you — it’s my party and I’ll mix metaphors if I want to.