Design is also a matter of ego Because it’s not just what you design that matters, but also who gets to take credit for it

Nobody really warns you. At school, they teach you how to build a concept, conduct research, choose a reference, design a chair or present a project without seeming too insecure. They talk to you about form, function, material, context, sustainability, innovation and they teach you how to defend an idea, at least in theory. Almost nobody, however, prepares you for the most delicate part of creative work: understanding who, in that room, has the power to speak, decide and sign.

Because in design the official brief is only part of the work. The rest is written nowhere: it is made of hierarchies, sensitivities, status, credits, small insecurities and power dynamics. It is the creative director asking for fresh ideas, as long as they do not challenge his vision too much. It is the senior studio that lets you do the work, but not always lets you appear. It is the system that calls all this experience, when sometimes it is simply survival diplomacy.

Ego and ideas

In design, we like to think that the best idea wins. It is an elegant lie, one of those stories the industry tells itself in order to appear cleaner than it really is. The best idea only wins when it manages to pass through power without being weakened, domesticated or credited to someone else. Before becoming a render, prototype, installation or image, a project must pass through a sort of emotional customs checkpoint: who is allowed to say it, who can approve it, who can sign it or who needs to feel included in it. Those entering the creative world today understand this fairly quickly: the problem is not only being talented. Being talented is the foundation, perhaps not even enough anymore. You also need to understand when to speak, which battle is worth fighting, whose name should appear first or which balance is better left untouched.

It is an unspoken but decisive grammar that often separates those who manage to stay from those who, after a while, simply burn out. The point is not to demonize ego. Without ego, many projects probably would never even come into existence. Ego can be ambition, vision or the desire to leave a mark. Italian design, especially that of the twentieth century, is full of strong, recognizable and imposing authorial figures in the best possible sense. People who turned an object into a manifesto, a house into a declaration, a chair into a small statement about the world. The problem begins when ego stops being creative energy and becomes a gatekeeping mechanism or when an idea is no longer evaluated for what it could become, but for how much it reinforces the centrality of the person making the decisions.

Who decides, who creates

This is where design stops being only a design discipline and becomes a small daily politics, where every meeting is a negotiation and every review is a test of balance. Every “in my opinion” can either be a sincere contribution or a polite way of reasserting hierarchy. In creative environments, the final form of a project never depends solely on the talent of the person producing it, but on the relational structure surrounding it. The ego within studios is difficult to name because it does not come from outside. It lives inside creative structures, in the transitions between junior, mid-level, senior, art director and founder.

Creative Review has written about how creative job titles have become increasingly ambiguous, often incapable of truly describing responsibilities, expectations and growth paths; that same ambiguity also makes it harder to understand who actually did what, who decided what and who should receive recognition. It is an “old” issue. In graphic design, the problem of credit attribution has been discussed for years: Design Observer was already writing in 2008 about how graphic work was often published, awarded or exhibited without a clear identification of areas of authorship. Another article from the same publication, released in 2016, described fair and accurate attribution as a recurring issue in evaluating a designer’s work, precisely because in collaborative processes the boundaries of authorship become increasingly slippery.

Having a voice, but not disturbing

Meanwhile, the discourse around the designer as author, popularized by Michael Rock in 1996, attempted to move the designer beyond the role of mere facilitator, reclaiming voice, responsibility and agency. Yet in everyday practice many young designers still discover that authorship is a beautiful word only until it collides with a hierarchical structure. The paradox is that contemporary design asks young people to have a voice, yet often rewards them only when that voice does not disturb too much. You must be recognizable, but not arrogant. Autonomous, but not too independent. You are expected to bring fresh ideas, as long as they do not destabilize those who until yesterday made every decision.

It is a subtle form of training: you are not only asked to design, but to constantly calibrate your own presence. This dynamic is not exclusive to Italian design, but in Italy it carries particular weight because the industry still relies heavily on relationships, proximity, reputation, professional genealogies and access to the right places. Design is international when it tells its story, but often very local when decisions are made: projects matter, of course, but so do introductions, surnames, schools, studios you have worked for and who can vouch for you.

The cost of ego

For many young people, then, the answer to the question “how do you really get in?” is not simply “with a good project.” It is through a combination of talent, resilience, diplomacy, the ability not to appear too threatening and, at times, social luck. Design constantly speaks about innovation, yet it does not always tolerate those who arrive with a different way of thinking, especially when that way places the position of those already recognized into crisis. This is where a concept often used in the corporate world, but perhaps too rarely in design, becomes relevant: psychological safety. A study published in PLOS ONE in 2024 linked psychological safety to innovative performance through communicative behavior: essentially, teams innovate better when people feel free to share ideas, information and risks without fear of negative consequences.

Translated into design: if a junior stays silent out of fear of appearing presumptuous, if a collaborator avoids proposing an alternative because they know someone would perceive it as a threat or if a younger person lets an intuition fall aside in order not to disturb the balance of the room, the project does not become more organized. It becomes poorer. Perhaps this is the least discussed aspect: ego has a cost. It costs time, clarity and quality. Every idea weakened in order not to hurt someone, every stolen credit, every strategic silence, every meeting in which everyone understands the problem but nobody can openly say it produces a design that is less alive. Not necessarily ugly, simply more cautious or more conformist.

The double language of design

The result is that many young people quickly learn a double language: the official one, made of moodboards, materials, concepts, references and prototypes. And the real one, made of soft phrasing, timing, renunciations, alliances and psychological intuitions. They learn that an idea expressed too early may be ignored, but if repeated by someone else it can suddenly become brilliant. They learn that, sometimes, the most effective way to make a vision accepted is to let someone else believe they came up with it.

Perhaps, then, the problem is not eliminating ego from design, since that would be impossible, perhaps even useless. The problem is resizing it: taking away ego’s automatic right to become method. Understanding that creative leadership is not measured by how many ideas it controls, but by how many ideas it manages to bring forward without feeling threatened or that a young designer should not have to prove humility by disappearing and that credit is not a concession, but part of design culture.

In the end, the real brief of contemporary design may be this: learning how to build spaces in which ideas do not first have to survive someone’s ego in order to exist. Young designers already know this, even if they often do not yet have the words to say it. They enter the industry thinking that design is form, function and culture. Then they discover that it is also relationship, status, fear, vanity and trust. They discover that the project is only half of the work. The other half is understanding who, in the room, needs to feel important and deciding, every single time, how much that need should really weigh on the final outcome.