Symbols, not Switches
There was a moment, sometime in the fall of 2013, when I picked up my iPhone and something had changed. Apple had deleted the felt, the leather, the marble and the glossy buttons. With the release of iOS 7, the iPhone’s software design language shifted from glossy kitsch to what later became known as “flat design”. I had just started my studies in communications and design, and I remember that for the first time, holding my phone, the interface felt like something made from the same stuff as the screen itself. This genuinely felt like something new was invented and it was this moment in time when I fell in love with the possibilities of designing for the digital.
A year later, Google released Material Design, acknowledging that designing for digital screens was about more than mimicking the physical world. Both moments felt like design had widened our world, liberating the digital from everything that came before it. Fast forward ten years and that promise has collapsed into something else entirely: brands and digital products look and feel more interchangeable than ever before.
This isn’t a coincidence. Somewhere along the way, the tech industry decided that design was an engineering problem and started treating it as such. Much like startups follow the Silicon Valley playbook of build-measure-learn, design is now understood as something mechanical, something fully quantifiable and logically approachable. As if the ideal solution to every design problem is just waiting to be measured into existence.
Digital design has started treating the conventions it has established as if they were natural laws. As if a button or a card carried meaning on its own. As if through A/B tests or AI optimization of interfaces, the optimal combination of these conventions could eventually be found. This turns design into a problem with a predetermined solution, reducing the humans interacting with these designs to little more than lab rats, conditioned through reward and repetition to produce the desired response.
A symbol’s meaning is entirely the product of repitition and implicit consensus.
But design elements are symbols, not binary switches. They mean something before they can cause something. They speak to people, who interpret them based on context and prior experience. Systems of signs work very differently from mechanical systems: there is no fixed center, no ground truth that everything else refers back to. A sign does not mean anything because of what it is, but rather because of what it is not. Meaning is created through difference, through contrast, through implicit agreement accumulating over time.
Consider the hamburger icon. Those three horizontal lines now universally understood as “hidden navigation” would have meant nothing to you in 2009. There is no logical reason why three lines should end up signifying what they do today. Their meaning is entirely the product of repetition and consensus. No A/B test could have predicted it. No optimization algorithm could have invented it.
Design elements don’t just carry meaning, they can also shift it. Context can change what something means. Time can change it. New patterns emerge and old ones fade or become ironic. This makes design a genuinely fuzzy discipline, one that operates in a space where meaning is always an ephemeral snapshot rather than an objective truth. Treating conventions and patterns as natural laws freezes design into one particular version of that snapshot. But snapshots are static. They reproduce themselves rather than questioning or pushing forward.
Let’s remind ourselves that not everything can be measured into existence.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If you surfed the pre-web 2.0 internet you’ll remember how strange it was. Websites that looked like nothing else. Chaotic, sometimes genuinely great, more often than not just spectacularly awful. What mattered was that designers were inventing visual language rather than inheriting one. The same spirit showed, briefly, in the shift towards “flat design”, before it was institutionalized and turned into conventions and constraints.
Design has always had the ability to expand what we can imagine to be possible. Not by finding the optimal arrangement of existing patterns, but by proposing new ones. It’s time to recover this disposition. Not as a return to chaos, but as a return to invention. It’s time to remind ourselves that not everything can be measured into existence. Design is capable of widening the world. But only if it dares to question its own conventions.