Why we need Junior and Senior Designers to work together
An overview of the skills of expert and junior designers and how they can work together to bring creative solutions to complex problems
What is the difference between junior and senior design?
As a junior designer myself, I know how hard it can be to make your mark in a field full of seniors and experts. At the moment, it seems like there are a lot of job openings for seniors, but not enough for juniors. What is really the difference between being an expert and being a junior. Can both levels be useful? Can they work together to bring their strength and skills into a project? I think that both levels of expertise is useful and needed in the field to help solve complex problems, because the more perspective we bring to the table, the more creative and relevant the solution will be.
I am interested in knowing the skills and strength of both levels of designers and to know how they can use their differences and perspective to work together in powerful ways. Based on research I did during my master’s degree in design, we will see how designers evolve during their journey from being a junior to becoming an expert and how they can bring their talent and perspective to create innovative solutions to complex problems.
The Junior (a.ka. the “newbie”) Designer
When designers are juniors, they start by learning the design process, following a strict structure, without paying much attention to the context in which the solution will occur. It’s like designing a chair at the most basic level, without adapting it to the user’s needs (for instance their height and weight) or without knowing why the chair will be used.
Although junior designers will take more time to learn the methods and apply the right process, they can bring fresh ideas and new perspective to a project. We might think that because they take more time to design and apply processes that they are not as useful as seniors, but this is far from the truth. Contrary to experts, juniors are less biased by old solutions and old ways of working. Since almost everything is new for them, they will search for new ways of solving problems, which can be so helpful to break old habits and ways of thinking. Innovation is what creates meaning and what makes products relevant to the users, so it is important to bring new value to differentiate our solutions from the competition.
The Intermediate Designer
Intermediate designers will start to have their own ways of working. They will begin to integrate more context into the solution and better understand the nuance of the problem. They will be able to select important factors in the context that will help them build a solution. At this stage, the chair will look a little more complex, it will be designed for a specific context and purpose, for example working in a home office for 8 hours.
The Expert Designer
Senior designers will have learned the design process along the way and will have integrated many ways to solve specific problems. This means that they are quicker to identify problems and already have some means of solving them based on experience.
Experts define a problem in a unique way, based on the user’s context, needs, and goals in order to suggest new ways to solve it. Experts are able to use their intuition, through experience and they bring their own tastes, preferences, ways of seeing the world, and prejudices to see the problem. For example, they will create a chair with their unique signature touch. This “signature touch” as well as their principles and values are what differentiates them from other designers. In addition, experts tend to be less trapped and less biased through confirmation or fixation, i.e. the tendency to have a preconceived solution without really adapting it to the unique context in question.
Although seniors often have a lot of preconceived solutions and ideas in mind, they use research, such as contextual research and user research, to help them understand the context and needs in order to adapt the solution to the specific situation at hand.
Seniors will have learned the design process and have learned methods and tools that works well for them. They can almost design on “autopilot” because a lot of problems will be similar to the ones they have seen. Therefore, they tend to improve less than juniors or intermediates. Some expert designers can be stuck by their processes, methods and tools and will not try new ones, even if they are better ones available. Most professionals will stay at this level the rest of their lives.
Understanding How Designers Come Up With Creative Solutions
Creativity is very mysterious and it was thought that solutions often come out from a magical “aha” moment. From this perspective, designing is often seen as something intuitive, mysterious and pretty. However, research has shown that the more a designer takes the time to define a problem, the more creative and innovative a solution will be. We are far from the “magical” spark. Albert Einstein highlighted the importance of identifying a problem before designing a solution.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein
It seems, to be creative and relevant, it is not so much about designing a solution, but about finding the right problem to solve, that is the hardest part of designing. Framing a problem is not about taking the initial brief as is, it is about going into the context of the problem, to understand user needs and objectives of the client, in order to create a new way of seeing, so you can see from the user’s perspective and create a relevant solution from that point of view.
So how do designers frame problems?
One of the main ways to frame a problem is to learn about the context, the users and the objectives of the project. Having access to new data helps you interpret a situation in a new way. Another way to frame problems is to try things, play with your prototype, make new connections with ideas, and do workshops. Sometimes, you can frame a problem by not even trying to “solve” it, just by being elsewhere or by talking to someone different from you, can be enough to shift your perspective on a problem.
You know you are reframing a problem when you go completely in another direction. For example, at first, you might look at the problem of low visitor numbers on your website due to an outdated visual design, but as you dig deeper, you’ll notice when you do a search on Google analytics that the problem is more likely due to the fact that people can’t find your pages on Google searches due to poor SEO.
As you can see, framing is a way of looking at a problem that gives you a new direction and ways to solve it. In other words, framing is attributing new meaning to something.
Junior and Expert Should Talk More Openly to Share Different Perspectives
As we have seen, framing a problem is crucial to come up with creative solutions. Now, can junior and experts come together to help frame the problems to come up with even better ideas than if they were alone? I believe that if juniors and seniors create a safe space where they can talk and listen to each others, they could learn so much. Since juniors have fresh ideas and are open to learn new things, they should be feel free to share their crazy ideas openly. The expert can listen without judgment, and can bring their wisdom and experience to help create feasible solutions.
The point I want to make to finish is this : It is important to have a combination of junior and senior designers in a team, because the more perspectives and divergent ideas we have, the better we can come up with creative solutions.
Credits and references
Photo Credits : https://www.freepik.com/vectors/. Light vector created by upklyak — www.freepik.com
Book references : How Do Designers think? The Design Process Demystified (Fourth Edition) by Bryan Lawson.
