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https://www.fastcodesign.com/3063318/5-design-jobs-that-wont-exist-in-the-future

09.01.2016

5 Design Jobs That Won't Exist In The Future

And seven jobs that will grow, according to design leaders at Frog, Ideo, Artefact,
Teague, and more.

John Brownlee

Organ designers, chief drone experience designers, cybernetic director. Those are some of the
fanciful new roles that could be created by the global design industry in the next few years

But what about current design roles? How will they favor over the next 15 years? Will every
company by 2030 have a chief design officer, or will they all go extinct? Should a generation
of creatives who grew up worshipping Apple's Jonathan Ive put all their eggs in the industrial
design basket?

We talked to a dozen design leaders and thinkers from companies such as Frog, Artefact, and
Ideo to find out which design jobs could die out in the next 15 years, and which could grow.
There's no empirical evidence behind these picks, so they shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Still, they represent the informed opinions of people who get paid to think about the future.

UX Designers

User experience designers are among the most in-demand designers working today. So how
could their jobs disappear? According to Teague designers Clint Rule, Eric Lawrence, Matt
McElvogue, "UX design" has become too broad and muddled. "The design community has
played fast and loose with the title 'UX designer,'" they write in an email. "From job posting
to job posting and year to year, it jumps between disparate responsibilities, tools, and
disciplines. Presently it seems to have settled on the title representing democratized design
skills that produce friendly GUIs." In the future, they predict that UX design will divide into
more specialized fields. "The expanding domain of user experience and its myriad disciplines
will push the title 'UX designer' to a breaking point, unbundling its responsibilities to the
appropriate specialists," they say.

Visual Designers
Visual designers are the ones responsible for the way an app looks. UX designers,
meanwhile, are the ones who concentrate on how it feels. A lot of times, designers do both,
but going forward, jobs that require just visual design skills are going to die out. That's
according to Charles Fulford, Executive Creative Director of Elephant, the San Francisco-
based, Apple-centric stealth arm of the digital agency Huge. "Gone are the days of UX
dumping a ton of wireframes on visual designers," he says, as well as "the days of visual
designers being clueless about usability." What are needed instead are designers who can not
only come up with the look of an idea, but make it real, with actual programming and
prototyping skills.

Rob Girling, cofounder of the design consultancy Artefact, agrees. "In the next 10 years, all
visual design jobs will start to be augmented by algorithmic visual approaches," he says.
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After all, design companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to create
previously impossible algorithmic designs, as well as crunch UX data on millions of users.
"An AI-powered tool can automatically provide a designer with 100 variations of a layout,
based on some high-level template, or style definition . . . We see early versions of these
algorithmic procedurally generated tools already in use by game designers." For example, the
17 billion planet universe in the recent blockbuster video game No Man's Sky was largely
generated algorithmically.

The short version? If you're a visual designer, it's time to diversify.

Design Researchers
"When ethnographic research was new in design, there were designers who specialized in
research," explains Harry West, CEO of Frog. "The role of design researcher is now evolving
to become a fundamental skill and practice for all types of designers. Today, for any design
challenge, it is assumed that you first learn what the customer wants; every designer must
know how to set up customer research and learn from the source." Consequently, no one
needs a dedicated design researcher anymore. "The role is so fundamental that every designer
should know how to do it," says West.

John Rousseau, executive director at Artefact, puts a finer point on it: New technologies like
machine learning and virtual reality are killing design research. "Design research as we know
it may cease to exist—at least in terms of the types of ethnographic field work we do today,"
he says. "Research—-and researchers—-will likely be marginalized by new forms of
automated data and insight generation, compiled via remote sensing and delivered through
technologies like virtual reality."

Traditional Industrial Designers

Most designers we asked predictably thought their own fields had rosy prospects. Not Markus
Wierzoch, industrial design director at Artefact. He says that classically trained industrial
designers who remain too attached to the "industrial" parts of their profession—in other
words, overly focused on the sculptural look of a product—will become, in his words,
"designosaurs."

"More than ever before, industrial design cannot exist in a vacuum," he writes. The issuer is
that form no longer follows function and function only—software is also involved. That
means industrial designers in the future will need to evolve to think about the total end-to-end
user experience, a role Wierzoch calls the "post-industrial designer." (More on that below.)

Doreen Lorenzo, director of integrated design at UT Austin, also sees the role of the
classically trained industrial designer dying off soon. "In the future, all designers will be
hybrids," she says.

Chief Design Officers

"This is a trend as of late: to have an executive-level design figurehead," says Sheryl Cababa,
associate design director, Artefact. But that role might—and should—die, because it's
redundant. "Good design is, fundamentally, interdisciplinary, which means that in a company
that is design-oriented, all executives will be design practitioners, and the chief design officer
position will vanish as quickly as it came."
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CEO Tim Brown echoes the idea that design will be embedded at the executive level,
although he doesn't necessarily think CDOs themselves are going to die out. "Business is
moving from a long period where analytical skills were of extreme value in the search for
efficiency, to one where creative and design skills will be essential to deal with complexity,
volatility, and the requirements for constant innovation... CEOs will need to be designers in
order to be successful."

Design Jobs That Will Grow

Virtual Interaction Designers

Virtual and augmented reality is set to become a $150 billion industry by 2020, disrupting
everything from health care to architecture. UT Austin's Doreen Lorenzo thinks that more
user interface designers will start strapping themselves into Oculus Rifts and becoming VI
designers. "As more and more products become completely virtual—from chatbots to 3D
projections to immersive environments—we’ll look to a new generation of virtual interaction
designers to create experiences driven by conversation, gesture, and light," she writes.

Specialist Material Designers

Yvonne Lin of 4B Collective believes that in the near future, there will be a growing need for
designers who can work in and across different types of materials. For example, she sees
bamboo architects as being an up-and-coming design field, as the Western world embraces
"the possibilities of a weight-bearing material that can grow three feet in 24 hours and can be
bent, laminated, joined, and stripped," as Asia has.

She also says that designers who can sew will soon be in hot demand to create structural soft
goods. What's a structural soft good? Think of the kind of things MIT's Neri Oxman designs,
or wearables that are as much tech as textile: a blend of circuit boards and fabrics, like
Google's Project Jacquard.

"Today, there is a skill and knowledge gap between the soft- and hard-good world. Very few
people know how to work in both," she says. "The intelligent mixing of fabrics (for comfort)
and plastics and metals (for structure and function) would have significant benefits for health
care and sports products. As people live longer and as sports participation increases the
demand for these more comfortable and higher performance products will increase." Maybe
even tomorrow's Air McFlys.

Algorithmic/AI Design Specialists

Fifteen years down the road, few of the designers we spoke to were afraid that a robot or
algorithm would take their jobs. Though "applied creativity is fundamentally hard to codify,"
as Artefact's Rob Girling says, artificial intelligence will create new design opportunities—so
much so that Girling and other designers we spoke to think that AI and algorithms represent
growing field.

"Human-centered design has expanded from the design of objects (industrial design) to the
design of experiences (adding interaction design, visual design, and the design of spaces) and
the next step will be the design of system behavior: the design of the algorithms that
determine the behavior of automated or intelligent systems," argues Harry West at Frog.
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For example, designing the algorithm that determines how an autonomous vehicle makes the
right human-centered decisions in an unavoidable collision. "The challenge for the designers
is to tie the coding of algorithms with the experiences they enable."

Post-Industrial Designers
"As every object becomes connected—from your couch to your fitness bracelet, the hospital
room to your wallet—we need to think about connected experiences," says Artefact's Markus
Wierzoch. "[These] offer much broader value propositions, which means we need to change
the [design] processes used to define these objects beyond their immediate form and
function."

Enter the postindustrial designer. Postindustrial designers will need to think of the total end-
to-end user experience to build "tangible experiences that connect the physical and digital
worlds," Wierzoch says.

For example, the designer of the future, charged with designing an electrical toothbrush, will
need to make sure their toothbrush can connect to an app, give users brushing stats, as well as
plug into the future smart home. It's just not enough to design something that cleans your
teeth well anymore. "Someone has to be responsible to stitch complex experiences together,"
Argodesign's Mark Rolston says.