A Professional Certification for Design?
I enjoyed reading the article "I'm With Stupid"" which solicits a self critique of designers and our profession. It will be interesting to see wha kind of comments show up here when this article has had been passed around. Another article on Speak Up is also worth reading as it covers at length the argument that I'm making. I'd suggest reading this one as well.
In spite of all the intellectual "design" rhetoric that we continually spew, we've let the profession fall prey to the non-professional. Our anti-establishment attitudes have left the design profession (mostly graphic design) unregulated, unsupported, and remarkably tolerant towards the unprofessional. Because of this we are often left to fend for ourselves combatting our self-inflicted stereotype. We want people to take us seriously, but we haven't organized ourselves sufficiently to benefit like we could. We should take a serious look at other professional services and compare. In most U.S states you can't be an architect, you can't cut hair, you can't be an electrical engineer, you can't do about anything without some kind of official license.
But to be a designer and practice design, all you have to do is put the word "designer" on your business card, and off you go "designing" and wasting clients' money. It's no wonder that new clients are always a little gun-shy. They've all been burned at least once by some unprofessional design services.
We could do a better job organizing ourselves and contributing to more collaborative efforts that will help educate businesses about the value of design. We should also find new and creative ways to combat the sudo-designers that plague our profession.The effect is very damaging and we run into evidence of it constantly when working with our clients. A recent client who left our agency came back after an in-house "designer" launched a new website for them and their online sales crawled to a stop. The designer didn't think about things like usability, did not design the site to communicate with the audience, and nearly brought the company to their knees with poor design alone.
I'd like to see some kind of professional certification in place, as well as a blacklist of sorts that could weed out designers who don't comply or have been known to provide sub-par services. I think that ultimately it would raise the status of our profession and provide more opportunity for designers who are serious about their work and the benefits that they can provide to businesses.
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