Meditations on Power in Design

I've recently come to the realization that the process of building stuff (interfaces, experiences, software, etc.) following the principles of design in a client-supplier relationship is most often a story about resolving the conflict between hierarchical and more egalitarian/communal work structures. Which unfortunately means that allowing the design process to flourish is primarily a question of producing an appropriate system of mitigating power - like a kind of workplace judo.

The root of the conflict, (like all power struggles) is money. The person paying for a product is trying to solve a problem. And for that they provide money to people whose business it is to figure out how to solve problems. The client therefore brings two positive things to the table: the ability for people to provide for their families and accumulate desirable possessions and experiences (represented by money), and a thorny problem that requires a number of those people to solve.

Unfortunately, they also quite often bring a third thing to the table, which is ceded to them because of what is perceived to be their "ownership" of the problem: They bring an excessive amount of power over the final solution. They have the power to pull the plug, to remove the ability for the people working on the problem to provide for themselves, their families and their loved ones.

So with the imbalance of power that comes from a typical client relationship, excessive hierarchy is often immediately brought in as a way of resolving the potential risk that money or time will be wasted. Results must be provided by a certain date, so the project now has to be managed, therefore Project Management is born. And the client now needs to be managed to provide a line of defense for the team that is building the thing, therefore Account Management is born.

And you need those lines of defense if you're trying to build something within a framework of an antagonistic client superpower. You need people to get up in the morning and get beaten up over timelines and client whims because they provide a necessary buffer between the client and the team building the project. Because the process the team needs to follow has nothing to do with hierarchy. It has to do with collaboration and communalism, with careful listening, observation and iteration. It's about involving the lots of people in the design conversation and translating what they are saying, thinking and feeling into a thing that other people will find both desirable and useful.

There are actually many paths that can get you to the answer of developing a system in which design can flourish. None of them are necessarily easy, but neither is the waste that excessive hierarchy produces.

I don't have the answer, but I think there are some different approaches to the problem - different paths which, if taken wisely, could lead to good answers.

Meditation Number One

Since money is a primary issue in the power imbalance, how could you remove money from the equation? In other words, how could you create a system in which people can spend the time required to design an answer to a problem, while still being able to provide for themselves? I'm thinking open source here, but not many people make a sustainable income from open source ventures. Without winning the lottery, are there new ways of making a living without requiring money?

Meditation Number Two

Or... what if you framed the relationship differently? How could you reframe the client relationship so that the client had an active role in the solution? Allowing them to be an equal partner rather than an antagonistic force? This is called collaboration - by involving clients in the process, you ensure they have a stake in the solution. The main challenge with this would seem to be that the nature of the problem (i.e., money=veto) doesn't really go away. Unless your client is the head honcho, you'll still run the risk of the plug being pulled by someone not involved in the process.

Meditation Number Three

Or... think how you could remove the client from the relationship, but retain a source of income Maybe this is really just called entrepreneurism, because the traditional answer is to get income by selling your services to thousands of people. (Yet technology is opening up the possibilities for new developments in this arena).

For some reason, this feels like the most harmonious and simple of all the meditations, because although the "client" doesn't go away, the success of the thing you're building is based on satisfying all of your clients, i.e., your customers. You're still subject to the whims of your clients, but in a much more distributed and possibly sane way. The problem with this is getting off the ground has traditionally been expensive and often a long-term game, which often requires you to give up part of your company in return for cash. Are the low barriers of entry that we are seeing today helping to mitigate that?

Thoughts? It seems that many smart people are trending toward trying to solve the issue of power in one of these ways rather than living in the traditional subservient client model.