August 24, 2007 Vocation: It’s Not Just for Preachers (Part I)
With this post, I’m inaugurating a new blog category: “Navel Gazing”. Like a good introvert, I tend to do a lot of that, and I thought I would share some of it with you.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, and about what that means to me, and how I can create meaningful work for myself. And I’ve been thinking about what Matters, by which I mean: solves a problem, helps people, or makes the world a better place in some way. These are the questions I’ve been wrestling with:
How much does design Matter, really?
And are there certain types of design that matter more than others?
I started out thinking that the answer was yes. That, since I’m so interested in this Whole Design Thing, maybe I just had to get into the right field and then I would be able to work on Things That Matter. I wrote this in my UX Week program while I was at that conference: “It seems like some types of design are pure nicety; others are beneficial but not essential; and others have the potential to impact real problems and make a huge difference.”
At that time I was thinking, maybe if I were an industrial designer, or a product designer, or an architect, maybe then I’d be able to work on Things That Matter and make a real difference.
And I was thinking especially that I needed to move away from interaction design, because how much does anything that happens on the Internet really matter in the grand scheme of things?
(Looking back, I’m tempted to turn that into a sarcastic statement. At the time, though, it really wasn’t at all.)
Then throughout the course of the conference, I was presented over and over again with examples of design that Mattered, that addressed real problems. In the keynotes, we learned about Charmr, Adaptive Path’s R&D project to redesign a medical device for diabetics. We got to hear about ClearRx, a redesign of prescription drug labeling to make it easier to understand and safer to use. And we saw a UI demo from One Laptop per Child, with its innovative new operating system created for schoolchildren in developing countries.
I was very impressed by all of these examples. And the thing about them that struck me the most was how they all came from different fields of design, from graphics design (ClearRx), to industrial & product design (Charmr), to interaction design (OLPC). And really, none of those projects was pure — they all drew on and mixed up all of those fields and more, to varying degrees.
The conclusion that I’ve come to, and where I’m at right now, is that it’s more the problem than the discipline that makes a design project Matter. It’s not an issue, in the broad view of things, what I end up calling myself, or even what my diploma says. Rather, it’s an issue of looking at the problems that are out there in the world, and looking at the skillset that I have and the skillset I could reasonably gain, and then applying the one to the other in order to try and fix some shit.
And we all know there’s a lot of broken shit that needs fixing.
(Stay tuned for Part II, in which I continue to gaze fixedly at my navel.)
A topic near and dear to my heart. I used to be completely obsessed with User Experience Design, ethnography, and the idea of Design That Mattered. I took a hiatus to get back in touch with my spirituality, and to begin the leadership program at the Grove. What I’m hoping to do now is marry the experiential design experience I have with planning and facilitating rituals, plus my leadership experience from the Grove, with doing the aforementioned Design That Matters.
Here’s my philosophical/navel gazing thoughts on this. Design is an innately problem solving discipline. AIGA has written a lot of marketing materials to convince employers that designers need to have a seat at the leadership/management table because they’re good at things beyond typography. I agree with this, and I don’t.
I believe that *some* designers are strategic problem solvers. Some are typography grunts. But, the inherent idea that I like about the approach is that, indeed, design means to plan. Designers are planning, and design work can train us to be strategic planners.
My own design process begins with strategy–make sure we’re making the right thing, before we make the thing right.
In other words, we need to know what the design problem is that we’re solving, before we derive solutions to it. It doesn’t matter how fantastic a logo I design for a client if what they actually *needed* was a redesigned process.
I agree that, in general, the design process can be applied agnostic to the end solution. The same strategic design process can be used for graphic design, web design, interaction design, product design, event design, ritual design. There are variations, and different expertises required, but the basic talents and skills needed are the same at a high level.
The philosophical problem I’m currently facing is, how do I design for things that are important. Most clients that would hire me are going to hire me so they can make more money. There’s a tricky balance in this; ethical design is important to me, and I refuse to do work that doesn’t align with my integrity.
I’m in love with design based on ethnographically-derived needs from consumers. Things that solve problems. The problem for me is when the companies that employ ethnographic/user research methods, and use designers to help them create useful products, is when it’s putting more product crap out there that uses natural resources, creates pollution, and is just to get people to spend more money.
The places that are the most broken can’t afford to pay designers to fix their problems most of the time.
I once heard of a case study where a public housing authority in a city hired an experience design firm headed by Mark Oldach to redesign its logo. The housing authority was trying to organize several of its groups into a new initiative, and thought a new logo might pull several teams together and signal a fresh start. The experience design firm did what they do, and actually discovered what the real problem was. The housing authority needed a whole new process for applying for housing, it needed redesigned and easier to fill out forms, it needed retrained staff. The experience design firm helped them do that, and the initial feedback from housing applicants was incredible. They never realized it could be that easy.
That’s the kind of design that floats my boat, and one of my quests over the next year or so is to find out how I can do design like that, and still make a living.
The design I most enjoy crosses disciplines. I love doing event design, while also managing the marketing strategy and graphic design, designing the web site and registration, and designing the overall experience of the day for the participants.
There are places that teach this cross disciplinary approach. The yearlong program at Archeworks is looking more and more appealing. I’d love to do a Masters at the Institute of Design in Chicago, but I’m not sure I have the patience or money for it. AIGA offers the Image Space Object workshop http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/image-space-object .
I’m interested in your plans/ideas/thoughts on what you want to do to be able to address the problems that matter. It’s an area of navel gazing that I’m pretty invested in as I work to figure out what’s next in my life.
Comment by Shauna — August 28, 2007 @ 9:08 pm