I have spent 10000+ hours doing design and I've got to say that my leap into code (especially backend) has been incredibly eye-opening. I've realized how so much of design is ego-driven, how design studios design for design awards, and what a crime it is that so many technical minds are steered to work on problems more related to fashion than accessibility or productivity.
Designers should definitely code. Too much of design is siloed in fanciful thinking, and fancy people competing with fancy people over fancy things perpetuate delusion.
I agree, but would like to add that there is a caveat to 'designers should code' that is not letting a programming language or framework dictate design through its limitations or structure.
I am a designer who codes, in fact my background is UX and my job is as a developer. It's easy to think about implementation during design, for example, designing a web-app and knowing it will be implemented in Angular leads to thinking about how Angular will implement it, leading generally to modals everywhere, just everywhere. If I knew nothing about the technical implementation I wonder if it would be a smoother design process, possibly better results. But then I see so much poor design everywhere that I can never be sure if something was designed by a coder who knows little about design or a designer who knows nothing about implementation.
Ive spent maybe 1000 hours designing and now 1000 hours coding and i can say actually developing something certainly feels alot more wholesome than designing the layout of an interface.
I constantly have to export my work in webflow for further development on Node, React Webpack, etc. Nothing like fine grained control over the digital elements! :-)
Designers should definitely code. Too much of design is siloed in fanciful thinking, and fancy people competing with fancy people over fancy things perpetuate delusion.