Manuel Lima thinks it’s time to redesign design

His new book, The New Designer, is a noticeable departure from his previous titles. Conceived in the midst of a mid-life crisis after turning 40, Lima started to question his role as a designer, asking big questions about the profession. “A midlife crisis can be a positive thing,” Lima told me. “I had these great experiences but I kept seeing places where design was blind to the true impact it was having on the world.” What began as a series of letters to his younger self that mixed practical career advice and philosophical questions about design’s roles in the world grew into a proposal for a new mandate for the designer: someone who values collaboration, embraces unpredictability, is rooted in ethics, and concerned with the future.

The New Designer looks at nine myths that are popular in today’s design industry—from the benign “design is perfection” to the potentially controversial “design is for humans”—and seeks to reframe them, making space for a new type of designer, one who is prepped to deal with the most pressing issues facing us, as a profession, as a society, and as a planet. I spoke with Lima about the big ideas in the book; our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Fast Company: What is the “new designer” and how does it different from the “old designer”?

Manuel Lima: In the book, I try to debunk nine myths that I think are holding designers back from reaching their true potential, both as individuals but also of what design can be as a practice. We have these processes—design thinking methodologies like the double diamond or the Stanford model—and we’ve gotten so used to them that we don’t even see them anymore. We have to abandon a lot of these processes because they often end with a deliverable. Designers are evaluated by the number of launches, the number of products they ship, the number of clicks, and not so much the quality of the design, the impact on the environment, and the ethical concerns around what we make.

The new designer is less concerned with a deliverable—something tangible—and more concerned with the impact of their design on the world as much as the design itself. They are thinking about ethics; they are thinking about the systems and cultures that embody the design; they are thinking about its long-term future and the impact after they are gone.

FC: You write in the book that the designer of the future is a mix of psychologist and anthropologist, sociologists and ecologist, systems theorist and futurist, activist and reformer. What does that mean?

ML: Designers of the future will be creating things that are not always tangible and not always visible. They’ll be creating systems that make this society and the world better. That will require a huge change. In digital design, when we talk about a design system, we usually mean buttons and pattern components and making sure there is a visual consistency. But that, to me, is incredibly small. It lacks ambition.

Designers need to be thinking about even larger scale systems, because the planet that we inhabit is the most complex system we have. We need to be much more ambitious when it comes to systems and design. That means that designers must always be good collaborators. And that’s why you need to be a little bit of a systems theorist. You need to be able to understand psychology. You need to be able to fight for the long-term impact of a design solution and not just the immediate needs of the business or client.

FC: Speaking of the Earth, one of the myths you tackle in the book is that design is for humans. You offer a pointed critique of human-centered design, arguing we should be thinking about earth-centered or future-centered design instead. Why is human-centered design limiting?

ML: Human-centered, or user-centered, design as a concept is a great idea. It opened the door for design to be more attentive to the needs of our fellow humans. It has helped make good products, and we shouldn’t shy away from that.

But on the other hand, it reminds me of this medieval concept of the scala naturae, the natural skill of being, which is this medieval hierarchical notion that God is at the top, then you have humans, then the top animals (which is usually just our favorite animals) and then you go all the way down to lower species. It puts this imposed hierarchy on the world around us where humans are at the very top of the chain and it’s a very outdated, anthropocentric view of the world.

Similarly, design is embracing a hierarchical and rigid view of the world where we are once again centering the human experience above all others. Humans are not the ultimate target of any design solution—a mobile phone to a chair to a website to a plastic bottle—because most of the things we make will perhaps outlive us by centuries. If you ignore that post-human usage, it’s completely irresponsible and it’s why we got into this environmental crisis.

The plastic bottle is by far the worst offender in the sense that it’ll be used for maybe five minutes, yet it will stay in the environment for centuries and centuries. The designer’s responsibility and role should not be to maximize the duration of usage but to minimize the impact post-usage and impact on the environment. So, even if I’m doing this for humans, there’s a myriad of things that we have to consider beyond the user. In this way, Earth is the ultimate stakeholder, not your customer.

FC:I’ve joked that maybe human-centered design is really just “corporation centered” design. Sure, we’re making things easier for the user but what we’re making easier is for them to spend more money for corporations to make a bigger profit. How do designers advocate for an Earth-centered approach inside a company—inside a system—that encourages short-term thinking over long-term impact?
ML: At the end of each chapter in the book, I include actionable advice for the individual designer because it’s easy to get pessimistic about the problems the world faces today. I believe individual designers can personally have an impact. They can actually make a change. Every social movement in history starts, mostly, with one person.