The Pi-Shaped Designer
The “T-shaped” designer concept has long been celebrated in many design fields as the gold standard. This idea suggests that a designer should possess a broad range of skills symbolized by the horizontal bar of the ‘T,’ combined with deep expertise in a specific area represented by the vertical stem. However, with the digital age’s ever-accelerating evolution, the “T-shaped” designer notion has become increasingly outdated. Today’s designers need to be dynamically adaptable and have multiple specialty areas to keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of technology.
The “T-shaped” designer concept emerged as a response to the need for designers to be well-rounded professionals. It encouraged designers to diversify their skill sets, enhancing their creative abilities and complementing their deep expertise in one specific discipline, such as graphic design, industrial design, or user experience design. This model proved beneficial during an era when design disciplines were more compartmentalized.
The Age of Dynamic Multidisciplinarity
The design landscape has evolved beyond recognition over the last few decades. The static, “T-shaped” approach no longer suffices to address the multidimensional challenges designers face. The breakneck speed at which technology advances demands that designers adapt quickly. A designer today must be able to shift their focus and skills to keep up with new tools, platforms, and interfaces that emerge almost daily.
Design is no longer confined to single categories. Today, it is a convergence of multiple disciplines, from AI and data science to psychology and business. Successful design solutions often require a synthesis of knowledge from various areas. As experts in processes and methods, designers are often the ideal leaders for the cross-disciplinary teams required to solve complex problems.
As the emphasis on human-centered design grows, designers need to understand the user’s psychology, behavior, and motivations. This requires an interdisciplinary approach beyond the traditional “T-shaped” model. To do rigorous user research, designer-researchers must master skills and know theories from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This is in addition to any specific subject matter expertise.
Designers today often deal with complex, multifaceted problems that cannot be solved with a single skill set. A multidisciplinary approach enables a more comprehensive understanding of the problem and a more effective solution.
The “Pi-Shaped” Designer
Given these new challenges, it’s time to embrace a new metaphor: the “Pi-shaped” designer. In this model, the horizontal bar of the ‘π’ represents the ability to navigate various disciplines, while the two vertical stems symbolize deep expertise in more than one area. This approach allows designers to remain agile and adapt to the evolving digital landscape. And just as the number Pi can be calculated to infinity, the Pi-shaped designer continuously updates, modifies, and evolves both their broad knowledge and deep expertise.
To excel as a “Pi-shaped” designer, one must commit to lifelong learning. This involves regularly updating skills, staying current with technology, and continuously broadening one’s knowledge base. It also means being open to collaboration drawing on the expertise of colleagues from various disciplines. In many ways, the Pi-shaped designer is less of an expert in a specific design discipline and more of an expert in how to learn new skills, methods, and technologies. It is an ethos based on curiosity and empathy.
Our User Personas, one of the central artifacts of human-centered design methodology, must deepen our knowledge of and empathy for actual humans and cultures and not reduce people to mere customers or commodities. Personas should be windows into not only individuals’ needs and patterns but to the greater needs of communities and our relationship with the biosphere. Social equity, social justice, and environmental sustainability are parts of the same ecosystem.
Our curiosity and empathy do not end with a particular “user” or “customer” but extend to many people, to society, and to the planet. In the contemporary design landscape, designers across all fields must embrace expertise in sustainability design and circular economy principles. As stewards of innovation and creativity, designers wield significant influence over the products, services, and systems that shape our world. Sustainability and circular economy practices have moved to the forefront with the global imperative to address the climate crisis, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. This requires designers to be able to work with large, complex, interconnected systems.
Systems Thinking has emerged as the new Design Thinking paradigm in response to the pressing need to address immense, intricate challenges such as AI, Social Justice, and the Climate Crisis. While Design Thinking emphasizes empathy, ideation, and prototyping to solve complex problems, Systems Thinking takes a more comprehensive and holistic approach. It encourages us to consider the interconnections and interdependencies within intricate systems, recognizing that actions in one area can have far-reaching consequences across the entire system. In tackling issues like artificial intelligence, social justice, and climate change, Systems Thinking enables us to explore the root causes, feedback loops, and unintended consequences, allowing for more effective, sustainable, and ethical solutions that account for the systemic nature of these challenges. As we grapple with these multifaceted issues that impact societies, economies and the environment, Systems Thinking offers a framework to navigate this complexity and create meaningful, lasting change.
Designers who integrate these principles into their work can reduce ecological impact and open new frontiers of creativity and problem-solving. They can rethink production, consumption, and waste, creating a more regenerative and equitable future. Becoming experts in sustainability design and circular economy principles is a responsibility and a path to a more harmonious and resilient world.
The “T-shaped” designer model has served the design community well for years, fostering well-rounded professionals with deep expertise in one area. However, the “Pi-shaped” designer model has emerged as a more fitting paradigm in the dynamic, ever-changing design and technology world. In this age of rapid transformation, designers must embrace multidisciplinarity and adaptability to continue creating meaningful and impactful design solutions that meet the challenges of the hyper-digital climate-crisis age. By doing so, designers can be at the forefront of innovation, tackling complex problems with diverse skills and a deep understanding of human-centered design, systems thinking, sustainability, and emerging technologies.
