Welcome to the Practice Initiatives Guide ! In this document, you will find:
<aside> ✨ Our why, our vision
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<aside> 💼 Introduction to Practice Initiatives
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<aside> 👊 **Your role in this ⬅️ skip to this if you just want to know what’s expected**
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As we scale, it is more important than ever to address teething pains we face as designers, and create opportunities for resolving them as a team. We want to build systems that work for us, produce better outcomes, grow our confidence as designers, maintain high design quality, and ultimately, ensure that we are all feeling **happy, empowered, and enabled to do our best work.
However, to begin, we need to get honest with ourselves and talk about the challenges we do face within our daily workflow. Enter, Practice Initiatives.
The Practice Initiatives are a series of issues voted on in the State of Design; a longitudinal survey that aims to check the pulse of the design practice. In the latest Sep 2022 version, the team was asked to rate their agreement of 24 statements, focused around current working styles, design processes, and impact. These statements were then ranked on urgency to solve by the team. We discovered 10 major issues that would shape the focus of growing and scaling the design team, and selected 4 as the focus, based on urgency to solve. Pairings for each issue were assigned accordingly, based on a combination of self-nomination and relevant area of design (Design Research, Product Design, Industrial Design and Visual Design).
Important note
We are continuously working towards team inclusivity, to ensure that areas of design (visual, product, industrial, research) are holistically represented. The next version of this survey will aim to include a revised set of questions to accomodate the variety of skills and need across all design disciplines. We will aim to rerun this survey towards June, and in the future, keep up a bi-yearly cadence.
Our top four identified issues
To get a more in-depth view of how we arrived at this, here are some links to check out: