Designers are translators

Last year, Chris had the great pleasure of presenting on behalf of Paper Giant at the very first Service Design Now conference here in Melbourne.

Our presentation was titled Designers are Translators and it was a great excuse for us to work through some things that have been on our mind for a while.

We could probably get most designers to agree that three major modes of design are making, research and facilitation. But it would be very hard to get them to agree on exactly what those modes entail. Or, more usefully, we can think about designers as people that move between modes.

Translation gives us a good way of thinking about what we do when we move between modes.

Thinking of designers as translators is useful for a few reasons:

It helps us focus on the ways we move between design modes (it’s about the arrows!).
It helps us think about the choices we make in those translations.
It helps us think about the ethics of our day to day work by making our power clearer.