It was December 2007 when a former professor and mentor recommended me for a one-day paying gig to help a New York gallery prepare its display for Art Basel in Miami Beach. Some of my readers who know me know that my undergraduate degree was a double major in Fine Arts and Art History at Florida International University in Miami. This was a great time of my life, where I discovered how to really unleash my creativity, while simultaneously learning that I didn’t really want to be a professional artist. This is not a reflection on FIU, for the record– some of the most valuable people I’ve ever met in my life were the Arts faculty at that school, who made a great education possible with the art budget you’d expect from a public university in a red state.
But I digress.
Back at the Miami Beach Convention Center, prepping for Art Basel, I found myself moving heavy crates around, drilling screws into panels to hang works, and basically being a grunt, while the gallery owners and artists ordered us around. Not a big deal, I knew what I signed up for and I got free entrance to the fair afterwards, which was a pretty big deal.
This experience, however, was a pivotal one in my decision to eventually move away from art and towards design. One of the pieces that we were installing, which I am guessing was the centerpiece of the display (since the artist who created it was the only one present during our time there), was a large, geometric abstract piece made of extremely shiny polished metal.
This thing was beautiful; the angles were dynamic, the reflection made the light bounce off it in all directions, it was just really cool. It was also really heavy. We moved it around the space we were working in, much like the cartoon scenario in which the typical cartoon wife orders the typical cartoon husband to move a large piece of furniture around a room until she’s happy with the placement. For all this, we were given white cotton gloves, as people who handle fine works of art are usually required to wear, so as to not tarnish the perfect polish of the piece. Well, at some point, someone must have slipped off a glove, or the skin of a bare arm, or maybe even a drop of sweat fell onto the pristine surface of the sculpture, which was thankfully noticed after the artist and curator were both happy with the placement of the piece.
What followed is nothing short of a scene in a poorly-written comedy. The artist and curator both panicked. They walked away from us working class schlubs, and had a very worried conversation in a corner. The artist was crying.
Now, before I go on, I want to remind you, dear reader, of the reality of the situation:
- This was a treated, strong metal object
- The tarnishing in question was far less than an iPhone user does to their device’s screen in the first five seconds of owning it (the smudge a finger swipe leaves on the screen after sliding across the screen is about 5 times more than this had)
- This was a grown-ass man weeping over a smudge. I understand having passion for your craft, and I understand being upset at an inconvenience, but this was a bit much.
For some reason, the curator saw hope in me. Out of all the other people working there on that day, he felt I was the only one responsible enough to save the day:
Him: Do you know this area?
Me: Yes, fairly well.
Him: Do you know where we can find some of those cloths to clean sunglass lenses?
Me (thinking): In Miami Beach? Sorry dude, you’re shit out of luck.
Me (out loud): Yes, there’s a CVS five minutes away from here.
Next thing I know, im spendning $20 worth of this man’s money in five microfiber cloths to wipe up the boo-boo on the giant metal monolith. We only really needed one. After less than five minutes, everything was good as new. The artist thanked me as if I had saved his firstborn from drowning.
The reason why this experience was pivotal in my way of thinking about art and design is because I never considered that what I make would get destroyed by simple touching. I never considered my stuff to be some sort of precious artifact that was to be looked at and not used. I was doing drawing and painting, which are made specifically for that purpose alone, and I realized that not only did that remove me from the people I was trying to reach, but also my work would be placed in venues as unreachable as the one I was working in at the moment– if you want to observe this statement on the human condition (or whatever the hell that spaceship was supposed to represent), you have to pay for an expensive ticket or work your ass off setting up shows and buying lint-free cloths to wipe away the tears from a French sculptor with a tendency to overract. I didn’t like that premise and it kept eating away at me until I started thinking about design.
In contrast, let’s look at a fictional designer from one of my favorite movies, Pixar’s The Incredibles. Superhero fashion designer Edna Mode is one of the highlights of that movie for so many reasons. Aside from the geeky side of me that enjoys the concept of this one tailor to the superpowered (which makes a lot more sense than Peter Parker making his spider-suit in Aunt May’s basement), what I love about Edna is that, in one short scene, she displays true human-centered design (superhuman-centered design?) to Mr. Incredible. The whole “no capes” monologue is a superhero-world design speech worthy of Don Norman.
I bring up these two stories to highlight something I’ve observed in the perceptions of who designers are and who artists are as well. The myth is that we’re both snooty, conceited, egotistical maniacs that want everything done our way and everyone else is beneath us. Obviously, this cannot possibly be true of either profession, but if there is a stigma, I think artists are to blame, and designers just got piled onto that bandwagon just because we’re also “creative types.”
Certainly, personalities run the gamut in every type of industry. But when all accounts of the greatest artists from Michelangelo to Picasso is that they were– well, assholes– the creative class has a label to deal with. But further than that, the episode with the crying sculptor made me realize something about a lot of artists that I have crossed paths with: Their work is an expression of themselves. They produce an object that is to be experienced by the rest of us, but never used in any practical sense. Note that all this comes from someone who deeply appreciates art; I think art has a place in society, even though it seems to be lost at the time (that’s a subject for a different post). I just think that when a person’s job is to express his or her relative subjective interpretation of reality, it can be very hard to see them as anything but self-absorved.
That is not the job of a designer, however. Designers, by definition, are making things for you. As a result, we have to understand you, and how you’re going to be using, touching, ruining our “babies.” As a result, what designers make are objects that are practically and pragmatically more useful than art is (again: I won’t argue the usefulness of art in this post, I’m simply saying you’re more likely to use an iPhone on a daily basis than a painting or sculpture).
In order to design for people, designers have to understand people. In order to understand people, designers need to talk to people. In order to talk to people, designers have to be open, charismatic, empathetic and kind. These attributes are all opposed to the stigmas placed on the steretype of the designer.
Have you ever had a beer with a designer? I find that we are just delightful. And maybe that should be your measuring stick if you’re looking for a good designer. Does the designer understand you, or at least make an effort to do so? Does the designer show curiosity for your culture and habits? Does the designer want to find out about you and lets you talk more than doing the talking? These are traits of someone who will put that empathy and passionate curiosity to the work they do: they will strive to understand the users and their pain points; they will probe and examine the user’s culture in order to design for them; they will listen to the user and make sure they have a clear understanding of the problem and how it should be solved.
The end result, I guarantee, will be far more usable than a giant chunk of untouchable, polished steel.
