The State of Design — Swedish Edition 2020 by Design Leadership Sweden

Jens Wedin
2 min readNov 4, 2020

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The median salary in Sweden 2020 for people working with design

So finally the result of State of Design — Swedish Edition 2020 is out. You can find the link to the full result in en end of this post.

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The State of Design 2021 Survey is now live!
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The responses were collected during May and September 2020 in Sweden and 468 people answered this year (hey, we got a record 🚀).

Here is s short summary and analysis of the data.

  • There are different areas and levels where designers can bring value to the organisation — operational, business, human and technology, all on operational, tactical and strategic level
  • More companies are building their own design capability and starting to operationalise their design capability with more designers, design leaders and design systems
  • The design maturity seems to be rising in many organisations
  • The rise of Design Thinking has come to Sweden. There seems to be more focus on process and tools and basic knowledge about design — Back to the basics
  • Other roles than designers are starting to use design as a tool to solve problems
  • Corona hits the world and we all start to work with online tools like Mural, Miro, Custellence and Figma. More people seem to be looking for a new job, probably because of the virus. But we can’t see too much comments or patterns because of Corona.
  • Designers get more mandat, respect and understanding as design matures in organisations but company politics and misunderstanding about what value design can bring is still present
  • Agile goes mainstream and designers find way to work with or around the process
  • The salaries is rising but consulting fees are declining
  • There is still a gap between salaries for men and women, let’s make 2021 the year where this is not an issue, ok?
  • If we see beyond the survey we see a trend of greater design maturity in buying design. The questions, briefs and tasks are more precise and prepared, they are more about structuring design and create in-house capacity to perform the everyday design work.
  • Business Design is becoming more and more established and are well connected to innovation and Design Thinking. We would love to hear more from Business Designers next year.

Huge thanks for everyone who have answered, helped with feedback, the design leadership community and the design leadership team.

http://designleadership.se/state-of-design-the-swedish-edition/the-state-of-design-swedish-edition-2020-report/

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Jens Wedin

Design + Coaching + Transformation + Leadership @ Seventyone Consulting // Mostly in English // http://jenswedin.com