By Ben Joos
Image source: Hybrid approach using Unsplash, Recraft AI, and composing it all in Figma.
Key Takeaways
- Complexity breeds growth for a designer
- Become exaptive, able to adapt skills to solve new kinds of problems
- Pittsburgh is a hub for complex design and a world-class growth opportunity
- The AIGA Network is a bridge to wonderfully complex opportunities
Pittsburgh’s ecosystem is a crucible for a new kind of designer. Once defined by the glow of blast furnaces, the city is now a growing hub for complex and high-impact industries, including healthcare and medical devices, manufacturing, robotics, self-driving vehicles, and even space logistics.
Working here means designing within a labyrinth of constraints. These fields are bound by tight compliance mandates, strict cybersecurity needs, and deeply interconnected—dare I say, messy—backends. Designers must navigate the ambiguity of shifting requirements, innovate where no standards exist, and bridge silos between disparate departments. All of this must be done while keeping the user experience flawless, the business outcomes achievable, and without burning out.
It’s a tall order, but this pressure is exactly what forges a designer’s future. It’s here, in the mess, that complexity becomes beautiful.
Why Complexity is a Designer’s Best Teacher
This environment births new designers. It transforms someone who “makes images for other people” into a professional who impacts a SYSTEM at every level—from initial ideas and requirements to the information architecture, user interface, and beyond. Complexity challenges designers to think not just creatively, but systematically. One moment you are out front, pioneering new ideas; the next, you are in the weeds, tightening down every last screw.
You forge new relationships with people who think in opposite ways, like financially minded or linear thinkers. You learn that taking a process from analog to digital requires rethinking every single step to ensure it functions as well as it did in the non-digital world.
As designers, we were taught how to “see.” But working within these complex environments gives us an additional superpower: we truly learn how to think. When combined, these two skills make a designer incredibly powerful.
Designing Through Complexity
So, what qualifies as truly “complex”? To illustrate this, we can look at the Cynefin Framework. Cynefin (pronounced kuh-nev-in), is a Welsh word signifying the intertwined factors in our experience that influence us in ways we can never fully understand. The framework provides a lens to differentiate simple problems from truly complex ones.
Source: https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/
In short, a complex design problem typically has a few key tenets:
- It has no obvious solutions.
- It has constraints that demand an exaptive process—repurposing something that exists for a completely new purpose, rather than just evolving a known solution.
- It involves multiple systems, integrations, and dependencies at play.
- It requires you to probe, sense, and then respond, not just follow a well-known pattern.
In robotics, for example, the easiest human tasks are often the most difficult for a machine. This forces designers to find non-obvious solutions while navigating immense constraints like hardware physics, technical dependencies, and safety compliance. To succeed, designers must often repurpose existing interaction models for entirely new purposes.
To do this, a designer—who typically thinks visually, non-linearly, and with great empathy—must form a powerful bond with the team. This is where the most profound learning happens. You learn logic, precision, scalability, and the laws of a system from the engineers. You learn the language of business, how to grok the market, and the art of prioritization from the product managers. You even learn from electrical engineers… or at least you nod along and hope someday it sinks in.
It’s a beautiful dance of human and machine, and it dances to the sounds of complexity.
How to Elevate the Designer’s Role
Designers aren’t just image makers. We don’t just “make it pretty.” While those skills have immense value, they aren’t our only value. Whether the project is a new AI tool, an autonomous robot, a faceless interface, or a trip to the moon and back, a designer can earn a seat at the table in the most complex industries.
To get that seat, you have to be exaptive. You must speak the language of everyone involved. You have to dive headfirst into complexity, absorbing new information by the minute and consistently applying a design lens to it. Most importantly, you must gain the trust of those around you by proving that you listen, consider all aspects of a decision, and will always make the best choice for the product, not for any single individual.
When the time is right, after emulating and learning from all those other roles, the designer is uniquely positioned to contribute that piece of design magic that elevates the entire system. That is how we are forged.
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