The State of Design — Swedish Edition 2022

3 min readJan 6, 2023

This is a summary of the, The State of Design — Swedish Edition 2022 which is conducted once a year by, Design Leadership Community, a non-profit organisation.

The data for this report was collected from July through September 2022, with 864 responses.

Executive Summary

As designers and leaders, we live and work in a complex and volatile world. Unfortunately, the climate and earth are not feeling well at all. There is a war in Ukraine, and COVID-19 is still here. There is a global economic downturn, and many large companies are dismissing numerous people and creating personal tragedies.

From the troubles and hardship, people stand up, rise and search for new opportunities. As a result, we, as designers and leaders, can positively impact our families, friends, colleagues, and many other human lives.

This report is a tiny part of making this happen. Our purpose is to support designers and leaders to amplify the impact of Design and share experiences & knowledge.

How might we, as designers and leaders, support our family, friends, colleagues, and humans in creating something that makes a positive impact?

A few pics from this year’s insights

If you are looking for more data and insights, there is the Premium and Premium+ plan. In these plans, you can find for example find more and more in-depth insights and data about leadership, ownership, process, and responsibility, investment trends and recruitment, organization, working overtime, demography and richer salary information

Work situation for leaders and designers

People still love to solve problems, find and understand people’s needs and meet customers.
People feel less satisfied at work because of poor leadership, politics & bureaucracy, difficult colleagues or dysfunctional team, and lack of learning and focus. It would be interesting to continue to learn more about what makes poor leadership for the coming years.
When we asked people, What is important for you right now? we were surprised that Accessibility is now number 1, up from 21st place last year. It pushed Design Thinking down from the top in the previous two years. Last year we had Inclusive Design at 3rd place, which might be similar. It might be that new rules and regulations are on the way about accessibility. Design Systems and Design Ops are still interesting topics, indicating that Design functions exist in larger organisations.

Eduction and competence

About 64% of main design schools are rated between 7–10 (good to excellent).
There are some interesting numbers when people rate their school regarding how much it has helped them in their daily work.

Salary and benefits

The median salary for all responses increased since last year (this is probably because more design leaders and managers have answered this year).
There is still a gap between salaries for men and women, especially in Malmö. Let’s make 2023 the year when this is not an issue, OK?
There is still a significant salary gap for women working in Stockholm compared to other cities.
The prices for design consultants are slightly higher than last year.

Demography and who answered this year

More Senior Designers and Head of, VP and Directors of… have answered this year compared to last year. Hopefully, this is because there are more tactical and strategic roles within the design area, but it might also be that just more design leaders have decided to answer this year. We can’t be certain.
More women, 56% answered this year than men, 43%.
The largest group who answered the survey were between 26 and 45, unchanged from previous years.
Most people using the title UX Designer, Service Designer, UX Lead and Product Designer answered the survey.
There is still an extensive list of different roles and titles, causing much confusion.
88% of the respondents work in Sweden’s three largest cities, even though there is a spread in many other smaller towns.