For years, design has been told it needs a seat at the table to matter.

That promise shaped careers, disciplines, and entire organisations. We learned new languages. We produced the right artefacts. We aligned, translated, softened, and proved ourselves useful.

And yet, here we are.

Design is everywhere and increasingly powerless. Present, but rarely decisive. Valued for execution, sidelined when questions get uncomfortable. The seat, it turns out, did not deliver influence. It delivered compliance.

This series argues that the seat at the table was never something good or even neutral. It was a containment strategy: a way to harvest design’s outputs while neutralising its critical capacity. And at the same time design circles became obsessed about, in battle to survive brutal and ever-changing shifts in economics and political climate.

I’m not interested in rescuing the metaphor or proposing better seating arrangements. I’m interested in examining what the bargain actually was, why so many of us accepted it, and why AI now makes the cost impossible to ignore, while still insisting that something valuable remains.

This is not about reclaiming relevance. It’s about reclaiming agency.

Every attempt design made to gain influence reinforced its marginal position. The system didn’t resist us. It absorbed us and redirected our work toward containment.

This anxiety about legitimacy has a familiar shape.

At times, the chair game design plays with the boardroom big leagues reminds me of a joke Finnish people like to tell themselves, self-deprecating about how much they want the rest of the world to notice them.

In a nutshell, it involves a Finn and two others (nationalities differ slightly based on the storyteller’s preference) coming across an elephant. While the other two ponder how much money the elephant could make if you sell it, or how much meat you could get from it for eating, all the Finn is concerned about is: what does the elephant think of me?.

The invitation precedes the influence.

Design has become unusually self-conscious about its own legitimacy, especially in corporate and public-sector environments.

In the past decade, we watched design grow obsessed with service design and human-centred design. Agencies, big techs and even public service organisations proudly advertised strategic thinking, user research, systemic problem-solving. We were driven by the promise that proximity to power would translate into impact. Personally, I can’t even keep count of how often I heard phrases like it’s not just lipstick on a pig and the long-repeated line that good design is good business, as if it naturally provided designers a broader remit. We helped to create and sustain a narrative that never really helped us, quite the contrary.

The disillusionment that followed was not accidental. This will be my reflections on what has transpired.

“But when can we see the screens?”

How we got trapped.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched the same script play out. A client wants to see design: perhaps a prototype, something impressive to show investors, stakeholders, the board. Or our in-house colleagues, be they developers or PMs or whomever, want us to bring them new stuff to build (feed them).

We know it should be at least a shred of research, strategy, alignment, understanding. There should be solid intention behind what we do and why. We know the flashy thing or pointless feature (not based on anything) they’re asking for might be the wrong thing entirely, even if it serves the immediate purpose (landing a client or keeping your job).

But we design and build it anyway. We know better, and we comply anyway. Because that’s what clients are paying for. Or what our colleagues think is the only thing that fuels their work. That’s what they understand. That’s what gets us hired again (or lets us keep our current job). That remains the dominant narrative: design exists to make decisions look good.

Making things tangible is not the problem. Making tangibility the price of admission is.

Critique becomes acceptable once it is formatted.

Yet nearly every client I’ve worked with, especially within the consultancy environment understands design through visual work alone. They want the interface, the prototype, the thing they can see and show. The strategic work, understanding their business, mapping their users’ actual needs, questioning whether the thing should exist, is an afterthought. If it happens at all. Or even worse, it’s done poorly and with false intentions. Based on HIPPOs opinions, which then go untested and undisputed.

Even if they get it, there is rarely any time for it.

We all know what we should be doing. Agencies talk about human-centred, strategic service design. Clients nod. Then they ask: But when can we see the screens?

These aren’t contradictions. They’re the mechanics of the trap.

We are here for the optics, not for influence. Our role is to make decisions look considered, not to shape them.

The bait: Learn to Speak Business

If you ask design professionals swarming LinkedIn, the number one answer for gaining management’s attention and thus leverage for design is usually: learn to speak their language. Generally, this is good advice for anyone working with others. If you want a better working relationship, understanding goes a long way. We have learned to frame human needs in profit terms.

For design, this stopped being advice and became a condition. This is often framed as skill-building. In practice, it functions as gaslighting: speak their language to earn the seat, while fluency still doesn’t buy you permission to question, or sometimes even participate.

You’re not business savvy yet becomes a convenient way to exclude critique while appearing reasonable.

Shifting the burden this way can also have devastating consequences for the individual: you do your all, but no matter how fluent you become, your impact remains small, and you get asked to do more.

We learned their language so well, we forgot we once spoke a different one, one that asked about consequences, not just conversions. About meaning, not just metrics. This often comes at a cost to human beings. Designers’ energy gets poured into creating tangible, management-friendly outputs that move the needle, meaning they can be measured in conversion rates and revenue impact.

You can justify your existence and still be excluded from power.

Once in the room and on that seat, designers are often required to optimise those outputs within rules already set by others. The fundamental questions (Should we build this? Is this the right problem?) are off the table. All energy is poured into optimising. Design becomes really good at proving the ROI of… making decisions look better.

What happens is predictable: we shift the burden (The problem is your communication, not our unwillingness to listen), domesticate the critique (frame human needs in profit terms, neutering the ethical and critical dimension), create compliance (internalise business priorities as the only legitimate lens), and maintain hierarchy (even fluent business language doesn’t change who decides).

This is textbook co-option: the dominated group is told to assimilate to the dominant culture with the promise of acceptance, but the goalposts keep moving.

Conclusion: The table only has room for execution, not questioning

None of this is new.

Design management literature has long operated on the assumption that management lacks knowledge of design, never questioning whether management should learn design’s language, values, and ways of knowing1.

The result, as researchers have noted, is that design gets stripped of its critical capacity to make it comfortable for organisational adoption. In other words, it becomes safe to consume.

I wrote my Master’s thesis on this in 2014, examining how organisations co-opt design while neutralising its transformative potential. The patterns I identified then have only intensified2.

Design management literature often assumes the problem is design’s inability to communicate in business language, rather than asking whether business should learn design’s language too3.

The fastest way to depoliticise and silence design is to give it a seat at the table.

Inclusion without agency is still control.

What happened was strategic silencing.

Inviting design to the table often means requiring it to abide by corporate rules. Design’s unique potential as a mediator between people and organisational goals gets neutralised. Design becomes part of the corporate agenda: financially responsible, bound by quarterly targets, unable to ask uncomfortable questions. Design was allowed to oppose, as long as that opposition remained harmless.

We thought proximity would protect us. It didn’t. We thought proximity to executives would finally give us power, respect, legitimacy. It did not.

Next: the illusions that kept us playing.

References

1 Johansson-Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J., & Çetinkaya, M. (2013). Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures.

2 Keituri, M. (2014) ‘The Discourses on Design as Transformative in Governmental and Social Context: Who’s Transforming Who?’. University of Gothenburg.

3 Kimbell, L. (2011) ‘Rethinking design Thinking: Part 1’. Design and culture 3, (3) 285-306.