Design is Not That Important

John Maeda in his Design in Tech Report:

Years later now, I’m in a phase where I realize that [advocacy] was really important, but in reality, design is not that important… I find that any company that wishes to be design-led is going to index high on experience quality. If [the company’s] audience is designers, and people with high standards of quality, then fantastic. But if they do that, maybe they won’t worry about the tech stack, that actually it’s a brittle tech stack and maybe it works 99 times out of 100. If they’re so focused on experience, maybe they’re not going to be asking product questions about is this going to help us break even.