Apparently I am waxing careericidal once again, because I just posted this on my company’s slack:

A meditation on the classic “Microsoft Re-designs the iPod Packaging” video.

This video pretty uncannily represents how most design used to be, back in the days before design research, when everybody in the room wanted to be the one who “knows The User” and “knows what The User wants”.

And that smarted, most insightful person, by total coincidence, always turned out to be the most powerful person in the room. Huh.

Then design research came along, and it changed team politics and collaborative dynamics completely. Design practice liberalizes business.

This same thing, by the way, is exactly what happened at the inception of the Enlightenment with the Scientific Revolution. This is how liberalism always happens. (and no, of course not — it did not happen perfectly, out of the gate, but nothing happens perfectly right away, except in the minds of naive fantasists, or the rhetoric of cynics.)

Here’s how I explain my job to myself so my work feels important enough to take seriously: We designers are in effect bringing a social scientific revolution to the notoriously illiberal, authoritarian world of business. This is why design research is the greatest thing ever.

Sometimes it is useful to have the opportunity to remember what it was like back in the bad old days of intuition wars and might-makes-right design.