I looked at the “T” in T-Shaped Designer under a microscope and the vertical is actually a lot more complex. Though the name is simplified to a marketable catch-phrase, it looks more like the image below:

The misunderstanding of the T-Shaped Designer (specialization + generalist knowledge/experience/outlook) is explained in real-world terms in much more detail here and offers solutions to some of the questions pondered in this article. Though the T’s complexity greatly enhances the value of a designer, the truly comprehensive designer needs to do better than a T.

The T in the T-Shape Designer (or any other letter in the alphabet) certainly needs to be reshaped to solve the wicked problems. “the T” is too simplistic and anglocentric to accurately explain the skills necessary for a designer of tomorrow. A critic without a proposal is just a jerk (or a republican), so I propose this:

a 概(gai)-shaped designer. (I could propose the TTTTT-shaped designer but that would just sound like I’m stuttering, or the T-Cell shaped designer but that would only apply to consultancies, or the Mr-T-Shaped Designer which is just gonna get you sucka.)

The 概-shaped designer can only be achieved by a philomath, a lover of learning, paired with a life-long pursuit culminating in some resemblance to Buckminster Fuller’s “Great Pirates”. The Great Pirates were a seaworthy “Leonardo’s” of their time, who was an expert in many sets of skills from navigation, shipbuilding, logistical strategies, experimentation, and economics. An interconnected web of experiences, an expert in the relevant century’s skills, a recognition of ignorance, a combination of learned-sense to fill in the blanks, and a master of the unformulaed-methods, the Great Pirates, flexible and creative, ruled the seas for hundreds of years. They could do all things that people on land could do, and then some. The T-shaped landlubber specialized in one-area, even with a broad perspective, couldn’t dare to compete with those with many specializations and knew the applications and realities of those said theoretical perspectives.

These Great Pirates who Fuller considered to be “Comprehensive Design-Scientists” thought more long-term and were keenly aware of their resources. In the venture-by-sea, everything is finite. Creativity, knowledge, and skills need to work in harmony at a furious pace and at a highly elevated level of standard. Or you die. It’s not so different than the companies of today sailing in a sea of publicly traded wall-street waters or our travel through time in Spaceship Earth. As they say, it’s “sink or swim.” and the 概-shaped designer knows the butterfly, breast-stroke, deadman’s float and can say “help” in 10 different languages.

Buckminster Fuller advocated people to have expertise in many fields. Being specialized in only one created too much of a narrow view. “Such over simplified viewpoints are misleading, blinding, and debilitating, because they preclude possible discovery of the significance of our integrated experiences.” The 概-shaped designer avoids this narrowing of the perspective and cross-breeds new thoughts and ideas in their own minds. It goes beyond just mere empathy that the horizontal-T gets from working with other fields, but births new fields and areas of study. The T-shaped group-project does cross-breed ideas but at a frighteningly slow pace. Their attempt at an unrefined “anticipatory-divide-and-conquer” strategy is noble but having seen one too many programs end a tragic-fate, regardless of a bunch of T’s in the room, I’d rather have a couple of 概’s working closely together.

I’ve worn the hat of a future-forecaster many times. One thing I can tell you is that your profession, whatever it may be, will disappear in your lifetime. It won’t exist in any recognizable form compared to today. Much like Iriving Penn’s “Small Trades” portraits, professions come-and-go to extinction in one-generations time. Like that of chimney sweeps, coal man, and the chamois sellers, the T-shaped designer will be replaced. To compete with the youth-of- tomorrow, with their embrace of technology, multi-tasking abilities, learning a-la-carte from the internet, fueled by the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, we need to start learning to become a 概-shaped designer.