The Institute of Design released the Lead with Purpose report to highlight design’s central role in realizing executive vision. The research team identified seven trends that are currently shaping and challenging the field of design—and are likely to continue to be influential over the next five years.
We’ve further explored how these trends—all of which reflect the considerable impact of customer expectations in the world today—surfaced in our interviews over the course of the study.
Consider these trends as calls to action.
Trend 1:
Sustainable systems are becoming nonnegotiable.
Not only has society at large come to expect that companies be accountable for sustainability, their employees are also requiring a demonstrable commitment to green business practices. Internal processes are shifting, as this new priority forces organizations to challenge traditional business flows and processes. Instead of designing social responsibility departments to compensate for unsustainable solutions, corporations are working to embed smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth into their production systems.
Trend 1 and the Lead with Purpose Report
The need for more sustainable system solutions was one of the most frequently expressed messages of the ID Pathways Study. Specifically, respondents voiced this trend as the need for organizations and their designers to, as they put it, “turn the mirror inward” with an eye on ensuring that operations, systems, and internal workings of the organization can scale, create efficiencies, and maintain seamlessness.
Trend 2:
Diversity enables growth.
The design process amplifies diversity in organizational decision-making by bringing cross-functional teams together to collaboratively realize an executive vision, or intent. Design strengths, such as facilitation and collaboration, are key to fostering more cross-functional, diverse decision-making.
Trend 2 and the Lead with Purpose Report
The design process amplifies diversity in organizational decision-making by bringing cross-functional teams together to collaboratively realize an executive vision, or intent. Design strengths, such as facilitation and collaboration, are key to fostering more cross-functional, diverse decision-making.
Trend 3:
Educational models are shifting.
People from all career fields are more frequently choosing flexible or modular educational programs that can provide them with the diverse skill sets necessary to solve problems that span across traditional disciplinary silos. This desire for flexibility—combined with the rising costs of US universities, the blurring of educational modalities, the rapid evolution of technological capabilities, and tech-driven learn-at-your-own-pace personalized education models—is challenging the efficacy of the traditional in-person, four-year college degree.
Trend 3 and the Lead with Purpose Report
Because the design field is growing and changing at such a rapid pace, many of our respondents are looking to supplement their formal design degrees with certificates, online programs, or continuing education in design, business, and /or emerging technologies. Several respondents are also beginning to develop internal, supplemental educational programs within their organizations, which is helping to democratize design and teach it to non-designers. Each of these actions seeks to support individuals in becoming “π-shaped” in their skill sets.
Trend 4:
Automation is challenging the status quo.
Cognitive technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have topped the list of emerging technologies for planned CIO investment. AI, specifically, is seen as a technology that can increase productivity, strengthen regulatory compliance, and help organizations derive meaning from ever-growing datasets. It’s also a technology that stirs up fear and anxiety, as in an automated world humans will not fully occupy the driver’s seat (so to speak). AI will encroach upon our agency—just one of the many unintended consequences organizations need to consider.
Trend 4 and the Lead with Purpose Report
Respondents in the ID Pathways Study believe that designers and the cross-functional teams that they facilitate will have to “humanize” the applications of these automated technologies into the business and future-proof them (as much as possible) for long-term unintended consequences. This work will ensure that automation is supporting companies in the creation of truly meaningful, valued, safe experiences for their customers.
Trend 5:
When it comes to digital data, ethics have become a priority.
As consumers are becoming more aware of their lasting digital footprint, there is a movement toward a more transparent digital culture, one that emphasizes ethics and accountability, particularly as it pertains to information sharing. Corporations are championing initiatives for ethical practices in the use of data and technology. They have also become more sensitive to the impact of their products on both society as a whole, and the individual. Governments around the world are working on policies to protect consumer data.
Trend 5 and the Lead with Purpose Report
Accountability in design was a big concern for many of our respondents, especially those who work in data-sensitive industries such as financial services, healthcare, and technology. Many interviewees expressed a need for better foresight planning and technology understanding in order to anticipate potential impacts and prevent unintended consequences. Design is instrumental to both advancing vision and reflecting values. In building a reputation for enforcing and defending values through ongoing customer-centric work, design can bring an ethical “checks and balances” mindset to corporate ethics conversations.
Trend 6:
The digital distinction is dissolving.
The day is coming when new generations will ask, “What’s the internet?” A new phase of technological evolution is dissolving the border between our physical and digital worlds and making the internet disappear into virtually everything we do, day by day—how we learn, work, play, move, eat, shop, and relax. This era of the everywhere, all-the-time digital universe will require that we continue to develop our understanding of what it means to serve an audience.
Trend 6 and the Lead with Purpose Report
A willingness to challenge legacy structures will enable organizations to build and produce responsive ecosystems of information, products, and services that support the curated and customized continuous experiences all audiences will increasingly expect.
Trend 7:
In the age of customer-centrism, core values matter more than ever.
Whether we are talking about personalized technology, humanizing our “users,” empowering internal teams, or treating people more like partners through more transparent and ethical use of their data, the conversation about what it means to serve the individual is evolving, as are considerations of responsibility and agency. Customers have more and more ways of voicing their concerns and expect to have opportunities to participate. Plus, they often want their experiences to be uninterrupted, fluid, and varied. Taken together, these high standards for serving users are pushing organizations to jettison their internal siloes in favor of seamlessness.
Trend 7 and the Lead with Purpose Report
In our research, design professionals talked about the opportunity to embed and steward ethical decision-making within the Intent-to-Effect Pathway. According to our respondents, designers can help to ensure that the entire organization is operating with integrity—defined as keeping social responsibility in the forefront of the development process.