Design assimilated into business, but did business ever understand design?

But beneath the headlines, something more foundational is unraveling: the quiet collapse of a larger delusion – that design could fully integrate into capitalism without being flattened by it.

Design worked hard to be ‘legible to power’

Over the past two decades, design has worked hard to become legible to power. Designers learned the language of business. We became fluent in strategy, ROI and stakeholder alignment. We turned critique into decks. We rebranded ourselves as ‘transformation partners.’ We believed that if we could just sit at the table, we could shape the conversation.

And for a while, it worked. The table got bigger. The decks got slicker. ‘Design thinking’ became a ticket to the boardroom. But now, with the fall of Ideo and the ‘shopping cart-to-despair’ arc complete, we’re left asking: what did we actually gain? And what did we lose?

Now brands ‘perform but don’t resonate’

Design has assimilated – but the assimilation was not mutual. Designers now speak business fluently. But business has not learned to see design. It still treats form as polish, emotion as indulgence and ambiguity as inefficiency. This is not a neutral stance – it’s a form of cultural illiteracy. And it’s everywhere.

The result is a monoculture of metrics. Brands are engineered, optimized, tested, templated. They perform. But they no longer resonate. Somewhere along the way, the visual intelligence of design – its rhythm, tension, friction – was replaced by a vocabulary of efficiency. And we accepted it because we thought that was the price of relevance.

Real design is ‘a lens, a language, a cultural force’

But what if that bargain was flawed from the start? Design is not just a service to business. It is a way of constructing reality – a lens, a language, a cultural force. To reduce it to business utility is not just a missed opportunity – it’s a profound misunderstanding.

So here we are: designers fluent in business and executives blind to design. The asymmetry is now complete. And still, the profession keeps asking itself how to be more useful, more strategic, more like them.

Never mistake clarity for depth

But maybe the question is no longer how to fit in. Maybe it’s how to unassimilate. To reclaim design’s ambiguity. Its resistance. Its ability to shape meaning and not just move product.

The system won’t ask for it, but it needs it because, until business becomes literate in design, it will keep mistaking clarity for depth. And it will keep missing what it doesn’t yet know how to see.