A Designer’s Faith: Thinking by Making
“Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.” — Shaker Insight
Strange but not a stranger. This line from the Talking Heads song Burning Down the House has always resonated with me. My parents divorced when I was young and between the both of them we moved around quite a bit. I never went to the same school for more than two years at a time. Switching schools so often I was always on the outside, never having enough time to find my tribe. I learned to appreciate what it’s like to be a stranger and how to empathize with those on the margins because I was one of them. I came to appreciate the feeling of being strange but I was never going to be the stranger. My intense curiosity (about everything and everyone) stems from this part of my life. I learned how to relate to people that were often hostile to my offerings of friendship. I learned how to build bridges though my creativity. Murals, zines, posters, skateboard graphics, whatever I could do to express my point of view to a new crowd. It was my strange language. I began to have faith in making as a way to find common ground with others. When we strategize how to connect with people through making, we try to understand their expectations and prior experiences. Think about all the times you’ve made a gift for someone and how they occupy your thoughts during that “making” time (if you’ve never have then stop reading this article and do it now). Whether making for, or making with, directing your creative energy at others creates a faith in the possibilities of tangible social connections and you begin to see society as medium for change. This is design faith.
Cooperation, not competition. In my 20+ years as a designer I’ve worked the gamut of product and service design projects, spent time in-house, donated my skills to useful causes, as well as pursued selfish quests for power for the sake of design influence. I recently left Droga5 where I was the first Chief Design Officer in the company’s history. After three years in the ad game I realized it wasn’t for me. I’m not a megaphone, I’m a maker. I care more about how systems work and why they should exist, rather than uncritical promotion of any system. Why would a designer from the innovation side of the tracks go into advertising? When I was at frog design we’d regularly lament about the size of ad budgets in comparison to the budgets we were allocated. If they’d only give the designers millions of dollars we could change the world through thoughtfully iterated and well-researched product and service design. Advertising challenge solved! I now see the flaw in this thinking. Whether it’s product promotion or product development, they both can play a critical role in shaping social efforts and outcomes, both positive and negative. Advertising and brand strategy can be a tool for interrogating product purpose and social meaning. Participatory design and development can be harnessed to interrogate social and environmental impacts. If only product design could find a symbiotic relationship with traditional advertising creative and high-quality production, we’d be capable of shaping a superview on business design. A movie studio for the future. In hindsight, this was like asking people who love making short films and writing comedy to envision an actionable future for human progress. The ambitions don’t align due to the passive nature of many communication outcomes. But just as technocratic solutionism plagues meaningful design projects, advertising is lost in a sea of celebrity infatuation and self-promotion. Advertising’s obsession with awards (similar to Design’s obsession with technology) creates uncritical and hyper-competitive cultures. Design faith withers in hostile territory of competition because conflict is binary, zero-sum. It’s always a reduction of the needs of the many to the desires of the few.
Near the end of my time at Droga5 I had a spirited debate with one of the Chief Creative Officers regarding the value of competition versus cooperative outcomes. Droga’s brilliance comes from their hyper-competitive culture. Ideas are owned by and credited to individuals, rather than the whole. You have large staffs of creatives generating tons of ideas in hopes that they align with the ideas and ambitions CDs/ECDs/CCOs already have in mind. In this system, creatives fight for position in the pecking order to claim the top prizes in the vast pay-to-play awards factory. In an environment built solely on competition you can produce groundbreaking work but only at the expense of collective power. I saw a lot of amazing ideas fall to the cutting room floor simply because they lacked charisma and political influence. Rather than flat teams investing time in shared discovery and learning, you get outcomes relying mostly on shock-value. To each their own.
I still believe bringing together creative minds capable of shaping big brand ideas to drive cultural momentum, with creative minds that focus on addressing human needs through product and service innovation could be a game-changer. My original motivation to cross the creative streams was focused on establishing a new creative workflow, or a new way of cooperative making. I was convinced the power, influence, and ultra-fast metabolism of advertising could energize the rigor, thoughtfulness and empathy of design. Looking back this was a naive ambition, but hey, I’m still looking for those strange relationships. Unfortunately, I was never able to be more than a stranger in ad-land. Design is a lived practice that strives to go deeper on any project. Advertising on the other hand must move with the pace of 360 campaigns, measured by the second, relying on abstracted human data, across broad ecosystems of communication tech and CRM.
Design can fix this, right? I’ve always viewed the world through a designer’s eyes. I believe thoughtful plans, carried out by people of cooperative intent and humble spirit can meet any challenge. Everything is designable and everyone can aspire to bigger goals through design. I believe that all the problems my kids see in our current reality could be fixed if we all adopted a designer’s faith. What I failed to admit to myself until recently was that design is not a job, it’s a life choice. For example, consumer waste. I’ve helped fuel this problem by contributing to product lifecycles through packaging design, marketing, and branding. With all of the time we’ve spent at home lately this problem has become more visible to me, especially with all of the food delivery. My family set a goal to reduce the amount of waste leaving our home. We have been cleaning, storing, and re-using plastics and glass. Not quite zero-waste but a focus on reducing our impact by finding new ways to keep waste out of the global system. We refer to it as “slow-cycling.” We’re not capable of significantly reducing our waste at the moment but we can slow it down, keeping harmful materials out of the global waste system for as long as possible. This is an example of what it means to live with design faith. See a challenge, iterate through solutions and keep improving with a purpose. You’re never finished incorporating your theories of change into daily life. It’s wabi-sabi in that respect. You must embrace the imperfection of change and ritualize the process into experience. The Shaker philosophy eloquently speaks to this relationship between utility and living. In essence, we should strive for both the necessary and useful; and if it’s necessary and useful, feel free to make it beautiful. Design faith is a life-long commitment to the human project of living.
Thinking by making. I recently joined argodesign, a product design consultancy, a growth partner to entrepreneurs, and an incubator of new experiences. I’m fortunate to have the privilege of optionality in choosing where I work. In my recent search I had a much stricter selection criteria focused on fair compensation models, action-oriented diversity goals, an honest and humble work culture supported by a thoughtful company ambition. I considered starting my own shop built on the principles I shared in this post but that seems wasteful and selfish when there are others with similar ambitions who already have the momentum. Most importantly, I wanted to be somewhere where “strangeness” is an asset and curiosity is the driving force. Where everyone sees thought as intertwingled with the act of making. There is no life without connected action. Products, services, and intentional experiences are the language we have chosen for our civilization so we must treat them as sacred acts. We’re by no means perfect at argodesign but we believe we can make our way through together with respect and humility. We are colleagues, not family. Work and life are separate but we all live the life of the designer and infuse this passion into the work our clients engage us to do. Our operation does not rely on hierarchical winnowing systems. We work flat. We don’t argue, we deliberate. We learn, make, analyze and iterate. Our clients are partners in this process. There is no spin, only action. Cooperation, not competition. A faith by design.
