The Designer's Data Problem
There is a moment in every product's life when the data that will ever exist about it is largely determined. It is not the moment of manufacture, or the point of sale, or the date a compliance deadline falls due. It is the brief.
The materials specified at the brief stage define what composition data is collectable. The construction methods chosen determine whether disassembly and end-of-life data is meaningful or theoretical. The supplier relationships established for a new material set the ceiling on how far back in the supply chain traceability will ever reach. By the time a product enters production, many of the data questions the DPP will ask have already been answered — not by a data governance decision, but by a design one.
Most designers are unaware that this is happening.
That is not a criticism of the design function. It is a description of how the data conversation has been structured — or rather, how it has not been. Data requirements have historically arrived in design as constraints from other functions: material restrictions from Procurement, certification requirements from Sustainability, testing standards from Legal. The DPP adds a new layer to that stack. But if it arrives the same way — as a list of requirements appended to the brief after the creative decisions have been made — it will produce the same result: design working around a data problem it had no hand in shaping.
The organisations beginning to close this gap are approaching it differently. They are introducing data considerations at the point where they have the most influence and the least cost — before the brief is set. Not as a constraint on creative direction, but as a dimension of it. What materials have traceable provenance to the depth the DPP requires? Which construction methods allow for the kind of disassembly that circular business models depend on? Which supplier relationships can actually produce the verified data a credible passport needs?
Those are design questions. They are also data questions. The organisations treating them as both are discovering that the answer set is larger than the constraint framing suggested.
The irreversibility point runs deeper than it first appears. A sourcing decision made on aesthetics and cost, without considering the data it will or will not produce, is not easily revisited. Switching a material mid-season to one with better traceability characteristics disrupts production schedules and supplier relationships that were built around the original choice. Adding a data requirement to a supplier relationship after the commercial terms have been agreed is a different negotiation — and often a less successful one — than building it in from the outset.
In most organisations, the brief is not solely the design function's document. Merchandising shapes it. Procurement influences it. Product development sits alongside it. That shared authorship is precisely why the data dimension needs to be present from the outset rather than appended later — by the time the brief reaches any single function for sign-off, the decisions that determine data collectability are often already made. The question of who introduces the data lens into that process is a leadership question as much as a functional one.
This is the design function's specific version of the accumulated data debt that runs through this cluster. Each brief that goes out without a data dimension is a decision made by omission. The product it produces may be commercially successful. It will also carry data gaps that no downstream function can close — not IT, not Sustainability, not the DPP implementation team. The data either exists, traceable to the decisions made at the brief stage, or it does not.
Design-for-data is not a new discipline imposed on an existing creative process. It is a lens applied to decisions that designers are already making — about materials, about construction, about supplier relationships, about end-of-life intent. That lens asks: what will be knowable about this product, and for how long? The question has creative implications as well as operational ones. A product designed with circularity in mind looks different from one designed for single-season use. A material chosen for traceability as well as handle and colour is a different material conversation than one optimised for cost alone.
The difference shows up early. A brief that specifies a recycled fibre blend without identifying a supplier capable of providing verified origin documentation is a brief that has made a sustainability claim it cannot yet substantiate. A brief that specifies the same blend with a named supplier, a known certification chain, and a confirmed data-sharing arrangement is one that has begun building the passport before the product exists. The creative decision is the same. The data outcome is not.
The DPP is, among other things, a forcing function for that conversation. Organisations that introduce it into the design process early will find it reshapes the brief in productive ways. Those that introduce it late — after the creative direction is set, the materials are specified, the suppliers are confirmed — will find it produces friction without corresponding benefit. The data problem will still need to be managed. It will simply be harder, and more expensive, to manage.
The competitive dimension here is less visible than in Finance or Legal, but no less real. Brands that build data capability into their design process are building products that are easier to passport, easier to trace, easier to resell, repair, or recover at end of life. Those capabilities are not compliance features. They are the operational foundation of business models that the market is moving toward and that regulation is accelerating. The brands that cannot demonstrate them will find themselves excluded from those models — not by choice, but by the absence of the data that would make participation possible. That absence traces back, in most cases, to decisions that were never made at the brief stage.
Design is where that future is either built in or designed out. That is a different kind of creative responsibility than the brief has traditionally carried. It is also, for the designers and design leaders who grasp it, a significant expansion of the function's strategic relevance.
Michael Shea is a digital excellence advisor, non-executive director, and leadership coach working with organisations navigating the human and technical dimensions of digital transformation. He hosts The Aeolian Discourse and writes at The Aeolian.