Many people start out in design, any form, by reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. In a bid to get back to a beginner's mind, I've been re-reading this book recently and it's got me thinking about the current state of design.

Did you know that the original title for the book was actually The Psychology of Everyday Things?

Similarly, I was watching a documentary the other day, The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. In it, he traces the roots of marketing and brand design back to Freud, Jung, and especially Freud's nephew, Psychologist/Propagandist turned inventor of modern marketing, Edward Bernays.

📖 Read more about it here

📺 Watch the documentary here.

The main takeaway for me, besides that Bernays might have been actually evil, is that Marketing is just Consumer Psychology. Marketing was invented by Psychologists who understood how to manipulate and tug on people's emotions to get them to buy things or to vote for certain political parties. They used the medium of design, especially brand design, to do it. This knowledge of people can be used for good or for evil of course...depending on your personal beliefs and who's paying for it. But that's a different rabbit-hole for another time.

What's the takeaway for those working in design now? Marketing and Design are both Psychology, yet so many go into these fields without a background or understanding of what motivates and inspires humans emotions and behaviour. We seem to have forgotten the origins of our field, and the importance of understanding people, especially when hiring designers.

I've wondered why it felt so natural and understandable for me to switch into Design from working in the non-profit world. I see now, the reason is that I had just completed a degree in Psychology. If you understand people, their emotions, and their cognitive biases, you can be a good designer quite quickly. Without an understanding of people, creating designs and products is going to feel like a confusing uphill slog of throwing things at the wall and hoping they stick. This is what I see a lot of designers (and Product Managers) doing now. Or they're asking to test everything because they can't make the abstract leap of logic from understanding people to applying these principles to their design work. It's exhausting and slow.

If a company wants to up-level their design, marketing or research teams, you must hire people who understand people. Obviously, not everyone with a degree in psychology understands people, but it's certainly a good place to start the search. At the very least, let's bring back understanding human psychology as a pre-req to working in design or marketing. It's the foundations for everything else that we build on top of it.