The Expanding Radius of Design

Designers can produce functioning applications and move across forms of creative production that previously required several specialists. Product managers can materialise interfaces rather than describe them. Researchers can turn evidence into propositions, while engineers can explore experience without waiting for a finished design. Capabilities that once helped define the boundaries between disciplines are becoming accessible through many of the same tools.

It is easy to interpret this as evidence that the disciplines themselves are disappearing. I have made versions of that argument before, writing several months ago about the possibility of design consuming product, or product consuming design. If the distance between intention and execution continues to shrink, some of the organisational boundaries built around that distance should eventually move with it.

I still think that direction of travel is plausible. What I am less convinced by is the assumption that it produces a single destination. Watching these capabilities develop within teams has made the distinction between what people can do and what organisations expect them to be responsible for increasingly important. Capability can change quickly; responsibility is shaped by economics, risk and the structures through which companies operate.

The immediate change may therefore be less about which discipline absorbs another, and more about how far each can participate in the same product problem. That opens a different question: what remains distinctive when the ability to make becomes increasingly shared?

The cost of going beyond your discipline

For some time, we have tried to describe designers through increasingly broad definitions. T-shaped, star-shaped, generalist, specialist, product creator. The terminology changes, but the ambition is relatively consistent: retain depth in a discipline while developing enough breadth to contribute across more of the product problem.

Across teams I have observed, the most interesting changes have generally come from people using technology to follow interests they already had. Designers drawn to visual craft are exploring illustration, motion and 3D. The tools have removed enough of the technical barrier for them to express ideas previously beyond their practical reach, without conferring the judgement of someone who has spent a decade specialising in those disciplines.

In new product development, a storyboard can become a short film and a prototype can become functioning software. The person who conceived an idea can carry it further before needing others to help realise it. What changes first is the cost of operating beyond a given expertise, not the expertise itself.

That expansion works in both directions. Someone with little formal design training can produce an application that, at first glance, appears accomplished. For designers, this can be uncomfortable. But it is difficult to argue for our own freedom to move beyond the boundaries of design while expecting everybody else to remain outside them.

Access is not expertise

There is an important distinction between being able to produce something and understanding why it should take a particular form. Visual polish is the most immediately apparent example, but the distinction extends to whether an interaction makes sense, whether a proposition addresses the right problem and whether the experience holds together beyond its most convincing screen.

I have seen relatively little evidence that access to an agent alone turns someone without developed design judgement into an exceptional designer. An accomplished-looking output can conceal unresolved questions about behaviour, accessibility or customer need. When ten credible directions can be produced in the time it once took to explore one, understanding which deserves further development becomes more consequential.

Design cannot, however, claim permanent ownership of that judgement because designers historically controlled the tools required to express it. Some people have always had strong visual or product instincts without the technical capability to articulate them. These technologies can expose creative capability that was previously difficult to express, while also providing a credible approximation of expertise someone does not possess.

The distinction becomes clearer when the work is challenged. Can its author explain the choices, recognise where the proposition fails and adapt it in response to evidence? A convincing first output provides relatively little assurance on those questions. A job title provides no complete assurance either.

From description to expression

The immediate opportunity becomes more interesting when we consider what this means for collaboration. Product development has always contained a translation problem: people think differently, while our processes require them to transfer intent between disciplines. Written requirements become designs, designs become software, and research must influence decisions across those transitions.

These arrangements developed for understandable reasons. Specialist work required different tools and experience; briefs and hand-offs helped coordinate it. But each transition also created an opportunity for context to be simplified or lost. Making an idea tangible earlier can reduce some of that distance.

Consider a product manager exploring a new dashboard. An early generated version might reveal that the proposed experience gives equal prominence to every metric. A designer can question which decision the customer is actually trying to make. A researcher can challenge whether the information answers that need, while an engineer can identify where the proposed behaviour assumes data the system cannot reliably supply.

The dashboard may change substantially or prove unnecessary. Either outcome can be useful if the team reaches it before committing significant delivery effort. The initial artefact gives different forms of expertise something concrete to question, and the product manager can participate in developing the answer rather than waiting for an interpretation of the brief.

This depends on the output remaining open to challenge. A polished prototype can also make a weak assumption look settled, particularly when its creator has become attached to it. The benefit comes from bringing expertise into the conversation earlier and allowing it to change the proposition. Faster production alone cannot guarantee that.

Technology expands the possible organisation

Capability does not rewrite an organisation overnight. Roles sit within career frameworks, governance structures and accumulated operating practice. Specialist expertise still needs to be developed, and someone must remain responsible when an outcome fails. Producing a working prototype and accepting responsibility for a live service are different commitments.

A small company may have considerable freedom to redistribute those commitments. A bank, insurer or telecommunications company must also account for existing customers, interconnected systems and regulatory obligations. Even within one business, an experimental proposition and a critical service may justify different arrangements.

The economics will influence which model emerges. Where one person can carry work further with adequate quality and fewer dependencies, consolidation may be commercially attractive. Elsewhere, specialist review, rework or the consequences of failure may outweigh the apparent savings in production. The relevant comparison is the cost of reaching and sustaining a sound outcome, including the expertise needed along the way.

Greater overlap can create its own coordination burden. If every discipline brings a competing solution, the team may spend the time saved on production reconciling proposals. Broader participation becomes useful when people understand which decisions they can make, which require another perspective and who is accountable for resolving disagreement. Shared contribution still needs a way to reach decisions.

I would expect consolidation to progress further where work can be tested cheaply, dependencies are limited and mistakes are reversible. Where those conditions are absent, broader individual capability may initially change how specialists work together more than how many specialists are required. Technology expands the possible operating models. It does not prescribe one.

Wider, not necessarily flatter

A useful model for this stage of the transition is a centre of expertise surrounded by a wider radius of contribution. Those radii have always overlapped. Engineers make experience decisions, researchers influence strategy and designers contribute to product direction. What constrained that overlap was partly expertise, but also the cost of expression and execution.

As those costs fall, people can contribute further from their established centre. Viewed only through breadth, this looks like convergence. Yet participation in a problem and the ability to lead a particular dimension of it exceptionally well remain different capabilities. Expertise may develop across several disciplines, but it still takes sustained practice and exposure to the consequences of decisions.

There is a limit here that the optimistic account can overlook. Lower production costs do not create unlimited attention. Time spent learning an adjacent capability is time unavailable for something else, and deeper expertise does not automatically accompany a longer list of outputs. A designer who produces mediocre code, generic illustrations and superficial research has not necessarily become more valuable.

Expansion is useful when it allows an existing strength to influence more of the outcome. For a designer with a strong instinct for interaction, making a prototype functional may reveal behaviours that static work leaves unresolved. For someone whose strength lies in narrative, film may help develop and communicate a product vision. Neither needs the same breadth, and neither gains much from treating every newly accessible capability as an obligation.

For leaders, that makes the investment question more specific. Which adjacent capabilities would help this person contribute more effectively, and where would access to a specialist produce a better result?

Time for learning and critique remains part of the investment. Expecting broader output while removing the conditions through which expertise develops would undermine the capability the organisation hopes to gain.

For designers, I find this considerably more interesting than the defensive question of whether AI will replace the role. Creative ambition has often extended beyond what someone had the time or technical means to realise. There is now more room to follow that ambition, provided the freedom to go further is accompanied by judgement about where further is worthwhile.

An unfinished transition

Several months ago, I was asking whether design might consume product, or product might consume design. Both remain credible possibilities in some organisations. What I would add now is a third: the disciplines persist, but become substantially larger than the definitions we use today.

That possibility is worth taking seriously because it changes what leaders should examine before redrawing the organisation. Greater individual capability is a reason to reconsider how work is distributed; it is insufficient evidence on its own that the expertise behind existing roles has become redundant. The stronger basis for change is whether broader contribution improves the decisions, learning and quality through which a product succeeds.

The relationship between designers and non-designers can become more productive as that shared territory grows. More people can express an intention, test it with others and carry it further. The value of a discipline will increasingly depend on what its expertise brings to that process, with less protection from exclusive access to the means of production.

The eventual organisational model remains unresolved, even as the expansion has already begun. The future may eventually be flatter. For now, it is becoming considerably wider.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Ashton Snook and do not necessarily represent the views or position of the organisation.