I was shooting the shit with my brother Scott, and he raised a crucial question. When would I address the issue of dogshit?

How about now?

I am a designer by profession, which is why I am angry nearly all the time.

One of the worst things about this being a designer, besides the usual chickenshit, is one particularly noxious bit of bullshit, that I’m pretty sure nobody else has to deal with.

That bullshit is the deeply untrue insistence that “everyone is a designer.”

I don’t see other professionals running around assuring everyone that they can do their job.

And this bullshit invites people to do our jobs instead of us. Tragically, thanks to the maleficent magic of metacognitive incompetence, aka Dunning-Kruger, aka double-ignorance, they are unable to notice how much worse at design they are than designers.

This happened with “design thinking” when business executives actually believed designers and decided that learning a bunch of chickenshit techniques would help them solve a bunch of bullshit problems. “HMW we waste our time leveraging methods we have no business messing with, on problems nobody really cares about?” Design Thinking, that’s how!

And it happened again with product management. A bunch of clever, incompetent jacks-of-all-trades with MBAs who learned to talk like engineers decided to reinvent strategic design from scratch as if design never existed because this was a job far too important to let designers do.

The result of these efforts is pure dogshit.

“Dogshit” is incompetent nonsense — the result of nondesigners who think they are designers trying to design and bungling it, and then repeating the bungling as rapidly and randomly as possible. They call the repetition “iteration” and their bungling “failing fast” or “moving fast and breaking things” or “discovery”, missing the point that things are supposed to move steadily toward improvement, not just spasm every which way in perpetual brokenness.

I suppose we could expand the definition of dogshit to cover more takeovers of professions by hordes of incompetents. We could discuss how ideologues have invaded the humanities, or activists have taken over journalism, education and entertainment media, professional marketers have displaced artists, ?and just about everybody and their cousin cranking out vibecoded dogshit apps… ?and so on.

But I am the author of Shit Theory, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m nailing the shit out of it.