POV: Designers are facing upskilling exhaustion

At It’s Nice That, we often talk about the pressures of keeping up with the demands of in-house creative workloads, but we speak less about the pressures of self-initiated creative growth. Here, Tabitha Swanson unpacks the obligations designers face as they hustle to improve their practices and secure work.

Through creating, we create ourselves. It’s a quote I heard recently that I can’t stop repeating. As creatives, we’ve all chosen to create on a daily basis. What I’ve always loved about design is that it feels like creative problem-solving – like a puzzle that can be assembled in multiple ways, and that each of us are uniquely placed to solve. Recently, having the time and space to sit with that creative puzzle has started to feel like a luxury, not a given.

I’ve been working as a creative for a long time and my journey has seen many eras. I started studying design in 2009, and my education in design was a moderate balance between old-school techniques (think Mad Men-era design approaches) and digital. I remember going on special excursions to smell paper with my friends and getting nerdy about paper weights, printing techniques and finishes. We learned how to bind our own books and mount artwork on cardstock backing for our IRL portfolio. This feels like so long ago now. I’ve always been curious, and as the world of design has shifted through many phases, I’ve adapted along with it. I’ve worked in UX/UI, 3D, AR, VR and now I’m also working with AI. I’ve really enjoyed continuing to grow, but lately, it’s felt like things have been moving faster and faster.

A few years ago, I realised that within a week, I was using about 25 different design programs, each with their own nuances, shortcuts, and technological learning curves. (That number has continued to grow.) I also began to notice less time to rest in the state of full technological proficiency in a tool before trends and software change again and it became time to learn a new one. I’ve learned so many skills over the years, both to stay current, but also out of genuine curiosity. But the pressure to adapt to new technologies as well as perform on social media, update every platform, my portfolio, website and LinkedIn and keep relations with clients, is spiritually draining. Working as a creative has never felt more tiring. I posted about this exhaustion on Instagram recently and many people got in touch saying they felt the same – do you feel it too?

In the last few years, the creative industry has experienced sweeping technological bubbles that at times felt very frantic and chaotic. We’ve had NFTs, the Metaverse, digital fashion and now AI. Each of these bubbles came with their own softwares, platforms and techniques to learn. Companies were scrambling out of FOMO of potential revenue to hop on these trends and creatives were scrambling to meet companies there for the same reason. I participated in creating work during these movements, but I was also quite critical of them. For example, digital fashion initially appeared to offer a more sustainable model. However, if digital engagement with fashion trends also drives more real-life purchases, we end up creating two streams of waste: traditional material waste and massive digital (URL) energy consumption. Many of these movements were marketed as utopias by companies and organisations that wanted to sell us things. Unfortunately, utopias are not possible in this life.

And what do these technological bubbles mean for our creative practices? One thing is certain: I am responsible for myself and my career and I’ve chosen to continue evolving as the creative landscape shifts – out of curiosity, but also to stay current and appealing to potential clients (a girl’s gotta eat!). However, the constant need to learn new tools and upgrade our skillsets just to stay relevant in the design world leaves us with less time for craft. Craft means taking the time to experiment, make mistakes and sit with ideas and let them stew. Production and consumption are two sides of the same coin and, in their extremes, both lack stillness. By constantly existing within a technological learning curve, we’re foresaking the time we could have spent with our craft.

With the advent of AI, it feels like the speed of things has shifted into high-gear. I love design and I also love AI. I’ve been using it since 2019 and have been lucky to work on some incredible projects, including a Vodafone AI commercial, collaborating with Lenovo as an AI artist, creating content for Zalando x Highsnobiety, and presenting an AI short film at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. However, even with a great love for new technology, I’ve found myself wondering if this pace is going to continue for myself and other creatives. And if it is, how sustainable is it before burnout starts looming? As AI reshapes the creative industry, many of us are wondering what comes next. Uncertainty is generally more tiring than knowing.

I think these stark and rapid changes in the industry have raised some more philosophical questions about our identities as image makers, too. A question I keep asking myself and others is: “what is the value of an image?” For many people, part of our identities has been tied up in creating things of beauty. Now, AI has given a whole new meaning to artists being referenced on a “moodboard”. Now, an artist’s work is increasingly becoming more akin to content, which people can use to generate further content within their own style. With the concept of dead internet theory proving itself ever more relevant, many of us are now asking ourselves: what is all this (content) for?

This leads us to another pressure that contributes to the lethargy in design: the production of content. A friend once said that Instagram is Linkedin for designers and I think I agree. Posting our work online on these platforms has become essential, as many of us rely on clients discovering our work online in order to secure work. It’s hard to opt out; algorithmic death is certainly a thing, if we don’t post, people don’t remember we exist. At the same time, many designers I know are introverted and got into design specifically so they wouldn’t have to show their face. As such, being a designer online can often feel like engaging in a new kind of tiring performance art: making reels and showing face in order to appease Instagram’s new platform goals.

For many people, I think there’s a sense of collective grief that accompanies this collective exhaustion. Grief often follows a sense of loss. Perhaps what we’ve lost is the time to enjoy the process. The journey is more important than the destination, but with the way social media functions, we don’t really see that journey – nor are we able to enjoy it before having to turn it into sanitised platform-friendly content for Instagram. In an interview, the CEO of Suno, spoke about how his program would remove the entire process of creating music, claiming that was a good thing because people rarely enjoy this process. Perhaps this was a marketing ploy, but it stood out to me because it’s the opposite of why a lot of creatives got into this field. Many creatives love the process (in creating, we create ourselves).

Change is inevitable in the creative industry, but the rate of change we’re having to grapple with is very quick. I think it’s this rapid pace that’s exacerbating this sense of grief the most. As I get older, I’ve started to realise that almost everything comes down to our relationship with control – what we feel we can control vs. what is out of our control. Feeling out of control can induce suffering. In Buddhism, attachment is a pillar of suffering, and that includes attachment to superficial forms of identity – it’s a form of ego. We are all being challenged to practice detachment. That’s the high-level and more philosophical challenge, but the more immediate and material challenge is that for many of us, these changes affect our financial stability and we’re being forced to pivot.

Some people have been mocking creatives struggling to continue pivoting with each new technological update with the changes AI brings, but it’s reasonable for creatives to feel this way and want to talk about it. We may be among the first to feel these tectonic shifts, but soon, people in every industry will face similar disruptions. It might actually be a benefit to us that we’re confronted with this new reality sooner rather than later, so we can understand how we want to re-orient ourselves in it. As I’ve said many times, AI is not going anywhere and this pace will not slow down. We cannot control the events and speed of the world around us, but we do have control over how we react and respond.

For me, I’ll always work in creative work – but later this year, I’ll be attending Columbia University to study international tech policy, and I hope to share what I learn there with the greater creative community.

During the pandemic, I started a podcast called SEEK/FIND. It was during a time when I was trying to understand what was important to me and I wanted to hear from other creatives about their journeys and what was driving for them. Since then, I’ve been creating spaces for the community to engage in dialogue about creativity, technology, policy and more. Recently, we had an AI Film Festival at Soho House Berlin and we’re planning another in June (stay tuned for the open call). The goal with these events is to celebrate creativity in these spaces, but also to have very honest conversations about technology, including all the difficult stuff. In April, SOFTER invited SEEK/FIND out for a residency to record five podcast episodes in Copenhagen, Denmark. If you’d like to listen, please check out SEEK/FIND’s Spotify.