Navigating complexity as a designer
Three lessons from three design leaders about working with complexity.
It’s easy to design something when you ignore the context, have no clear “why,” and disregard the constraints.
But when you truly understand the user and the business (context), get clear on the why behind your decisions (intention), and have to work within real-world limits (constraints)—that’s when design gets challenging.
Think about the last time…
You tried to fit something clean and compact above the fold and two even more teams had competing interests.
Or when you had to simplify a flow that needed to work for both first-time users and power users.
Or when every team wanted their feature in the nav, and you had to make it feel effortless and intuitive.
These labors are the real work of design.
You shape and reshape the solution. You frame and reframe the problem.
You sit with the tension, hold multiple perspectives, and make thoughtful trade-offs.
That’s the practice.
That’s where the real impact lives.
You are an agent, navigating complexity. Not avoiding it…
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#1 Live in the borderlands
As a designer, you exist between things. You connect people, needs, business goals, systems, and interfaces. But you don’t fully belong to any one of them.
Although you are a user advocate, a proxy for your users to be heard — you also negotiate between business needs, what is possible, what is feasible and so on.
You mediate between stakeholders: navigating power dynamics, balancing competing needs, and finding a way forward even when everything pulls in different directions.
You balance constraints and creativity.
Sometimes you can marry the tensions into a thoughtful solution.
Other times, you have to make difficult trade-offs.
And sometimes, you have to stand up for what’s right. For the values you believe in. For the users you’re designing for.
Navigating complexity means living in the borderlands — moving between perspectives, holding tension, and shaping clarity along the way.
#2 Adjust altitude
Imagine you’re trying to design a new feature above the fold. The space is limited, so your goal is to design something compact. And then you find out two other teams also have competing interests.
What would you do?
Sitting in your pod, tinkering with the pixels yourself, won’t solve the issue. Well, you could argue that you could, but the alternative might be sitting down with them, understanding their perspective → designing → having some debates, → designing → presenting and influencing them → designing → until the best thing happens.
Getting out of your pod means adjusting your lens, changing your altitude.
If right now you’re too deep into designing in front of your screen, step outside of it. Within your team, engage in conversations beyond what you do day to day.
If you work across multiple teams but spend most of your time within your product team, go out there. Have conversations with other teams. See how they see.
If you’re too focused on your product domain, remember there’s marketing, sales, operations, etc. Different cogs of the company working together.
And if you want to take it even further, look at the broader context. Society, environment, culture.
"Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan" — Eliel Saarinen
Navigating complexity means adjusting (readjusting) your altitude. Sometimes you need to get close to the ground and work on the details. Other times, you need to pull back, see the whole landscape, connect the dots, and make sense of what’s really happening.
#3 Build relationships
You can do good work on your own. But great work rarely comes from your hands alone. It happens when you work with others.
In his book Why Design is Hard,
shared a good example from Dieter Rams.When Rams was working on consumer electronics at Braun, he noticed the engineering team and the design team didn’t work well together, so he made it part of his job to fix that.
“I noticed the engineers liked brandy, so I’d buy a bottle of good Cognac to share. To be a good designer, you have to be half-psychologist.”
— Dieter Rams
Rams is literally telling us that half of his job was building relationships, which is how he achieved the work he became famous for. This explodes the ego trap. For that reason, you won’t hear stories like this in many design books, courses, or documentaries. You won’t find any photos of him with the many engineers, project managers, business analysts, or marketers he collaborated with or took orders from.
The legendary bottle of brandy should be stored behind glass at the MOMA next to Braun’s works, and pictured in every design book, because it represents design as a relational activity, not a solitary one.
— Scott Berkun & Zug, Bryan
Navigating complexity means building relationships — as a foundation. So when you adjust your altitude, zoom in and out, or find yourself living in the borderlands between teams and perspectives, you won’t be alone. You’ll feel more grounded.
Reflective Prompts
Here are 3 simple reflective prompts to help you explore your relationship with complexity:
When things get messy or unclear, what’s my usual reaction?
Who or what helps me make sense of complexity when I feel lost?
How do I want to show up when things feel complex or uncertain?
Until next one,
Thomas
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