I always believed designers are visionaries. Few days ago I had a talk with Philippe Cailloux in the Bay Area who made me have a different vision on that. Let me share it with you.

I have just spent a month in the Bay Area meeting a lot of awesome companies from small startups like Bolt Peters, mid-size ones such as Dropbox and bigger ones like Google. I learned that some of them hire designers who have a real capacity to execute great visuals to be directly sent to clients (mostly consultancies) and others are interested in designers who are able to think, be problem solvers and envision the future. I think these are actually the two elements which make designers who we are. We are able to envision the future and shape our ideas into products.

Philippe made me realize that the one skill that we have and which gets empowered by the different tools we use is visualization. It can be using diagrams to visualize systems, sketching to visualize scenarios or 3D modeling to visualize a product. We know how to visualize things and ideas. But why is this so important?

Visualization is the one language that anyone can understand, no matter your culture, background and geographical origin. In an organization, this is the one way that works across disciplines and makes sure everyone is talking about the same thing. I have actually confirmed that lately when I was consulting for Gemalto. Engineers and business people had been working for a year on a product trying to make it technically and financially viable. I came in to think about how people would use that product by drawing scenarios to illustrate use cases. The whole team was around the table. After a few hour each member of the team saw for the first time challenges regarding technical and business aspects thanks to visualizing how people would be using their products. It completely uncovered things which now seem obvious! And these were not details but basic and hence huge challenges they would have to solve. Visualization is one (if not the one) best way of communicating!

As I love entrepreneurship I might have wanted every designer to be a visionary, but that might not be the case. Some are, but not all. Philippe says the entrepreneur has the vision, the idea, but he doesn’t always have the skills to share it with other people so that they can actually build the product or service which makes the idea become true. Philippe believes the designer is the platform that facilitates communication across different parties in the company by deeply understanding ideas and being able to visually translate them so that the company can produce a product or service which is both meaningful in itself and also reflects the entrepreneur’s vision.

So visualization is just a mean we use to create conversation. As Philippe says we could then be qualified as “business conversationalists”. By creating a certain common conversation we help people understanding each other and facilitate the creation of new product and services.

This is I think a pretty interesting way to think of what design is. Yes we can generate ideas and yes we can shape nice products but we are much more than that. Anyone can come up with ideas but we are the one discipline which is able to create a bridge between disciplines and unlock the road leading to innovation.

Having an idea and being able to communicate it is gold!