design is a hunt, not a supermarket

Back in the days I was at Intel, I ran into a fellow employee at a get-together. He worked in the “Fabs” which is the manufacturing division of the company. At one point of the conversation, out of nowhere he leans in and says “I could never do what you do.” By now I’m used to people telling me they could never be designers maybe because they “can’t draw,” or because they don’t think they’re very creative. My typical response is “everyone is a designer” and I try to encourage them…but in this case the man stopped me:

”I could never do what you do because everyday I show up to my job and I know exactly what I need to get done - its all right there planned out, and that is what I need to go home satisfied. But I’ll bet you have no idea what what will happen when you show up for work in the morning” Holy shit. He was right! Ideas, breakthroughs and solutions to tough problems are not something you plan in advance. Some days are grand-slam home runs and some days are big, fat zeroes and setbacks. Every designer shows up for work in the morning with a shot of cortisol in their system to chase their shot of esspresso.

Over time, I’ve come to think of creativity as a kind of hunter-gatherer activity. One where there is a lot of uncertainly, desperation, loneliness and doubt, but also an undeniable and addictive thrill that inevitably comes with every discovery. It’s a hunt, and there is nothing better than venturing out into the wilderness and coming home with good game, nothing worse than coming back empty-handed and hungry.

Design is also a business, and to make this work firms and product teams often frame design teams more as a supermarket. Predictable equations like Time + Money + Process = Innovation. IDEO, in my view, was so smart to sell process through “Design Thinking” rather than sell ideas in their own right - and they may be correct in describing DT as one of the most reliable mechanisms for hunting down innovation. But then again, any IDEO designer can tell you that design thinking process is far from a predictable supermarket where innovation is waiting to be plucked from the shelves. Within this process there are still corridors that lead nowhere, dark places and elbows thrown.

It is here, in this false hope that somehow ideas are “there for the taking” that companies (and designers too!) can get disillusioned with one another. It is smart to think of your designers as hunters and not store clerks, to acknowledge the risk they take every day and the conditions they need to succeed.

In this post, I’m going to explore what I think are unique aspects of a designer’s work and their emotional connection to it. What get’s ‘em out of bed in the morning and what burns ‘em out.

Just shoot me

“If someone walked up to me with a gun and said “give me an idea” I’d tell them to just shoot me”

Brian Moose a design leader I greatly admire, described a night when he realized that the company he was designing for had reached the point where it was taking more than it gave for too long.

From that point, Brian began studying how the brain works and where ideas really come from and this informed his views as a leader of design. He spoke with great passion and pride about the environment he had helped create for his team, and the relationships they were building to foster creativity in the company. The day I met him (over a decade ago), I recognized for the first time a design leader who cared deeply for the minds of his designers and was dedicated wholly to feeding and caring for them. His focus on fostering where ideas come from (rather than just the output) was refreshing and enlightening.

Since then, I’ve become a design leader as well and I can see firsthand the many challenges designers face in finding themselves and their work. From Brian, I learned that designers must be fed (not mined) and this perspective has made me aware of so many ways we leaders often fail our designers.

A secret lounge Moose developed, hidden in the walls of the design center intended to help designers escape the treadmill and get creativity flowing again.

the joy of the hunt: the flow state

Ask a designer what gets them out of bed every day and they will inevitably describe the “flow” state.

My first experience in the joy of designing was in school. I had been stressed about a deadline approaching in my perspective and rendering class, and per my usual fashion, I procrastinated until the night before. When I finally sat down with a sketchpad and markers, however, my world changed - it felt like there was nothing outside me and my work, and even my body felt different. My nostrils (this was particularly odd to me) were wide open and I was taking deep breaths through them. I was completely relaxed, inspired, stimulated and having….fun. I realized, as if coming out of a fog, that I was on my fifth page of sketches and I had 35 more to go that night. I was experiencing the flow state - described psychologically as a state in which a person is so focused on their task that all other things disappear. It is a wonderful and gratifying feeling, particularly when associated with mastery. It is fleeting, though, and only lasts a few hours at best. That night, the feeling soon evaporated and was replaced by a sense of hopelessness and anxiety as I chomped through page after page of my assignment. Procrastination was one of many self-imposed challenges I needed to overcome in order to tip the joy/misery scales in my favor.

The above chart describes the degree that challenge and ability can combine to create an emotional and physical state in human beings. Challenge can quickly shift from being a motivator to an assassin of great ideas. For a designer, challenge comes in many forms, but here are some key ones: time to solve, health of partnerships, knowledge, and desire for excellence.

dont’ lose yourself

A piece of advice for the designer - take a break from the problem solving to engage in more reliable joy-generating creative pursuits. Areas where your skills are high, and the challenges are simple. This will fill your bucket with positive creative experiences and help you build confidence where often confidence can be hard to come by. Below are creative side-pursuits from two designers I admire, as well as my own side obsession, which serves to offset the stress of work with reliable creative joy.

Joyful watercolor illustrations by Margaret Blacknicka

My joyful creative activity is Photography, writing and archiving.

Most of the good ideas come in the shower or on the toilet.

Its true. I’m going to talk a lot about “the wilderness” as a metaphor for a scary and lonely place where designers search for novel and innovative ideas….but the moment when things “click” and a good idea just feels right? Yeah that’s usually on the toilet. Ask any designer.

It’s not actually that weird, and it has a lot to do with how our brain works. A good creative brain needs focus and activity and stimulation, sure. Design studios differ from typical productivity spaces because much of design work is spatial and visual. I can easily sketch and have a conversation about something else at the same time, for example. And I can walk by a hubcap and be inspired by its material for a completely different product I’m working on. So the process of thinking about design can and does happen anywhere and everywhere actually benefits from having all sorts of stimulation. But studies show that all sorts of brain activity is associated with the creative process - and one big one is relaxation and the effect of dopamine on the brain: a crucial state for knitting together the subconscious mind and the conscious one.

Should designers give up the desk for showers and toilets? I doubt anyone has ever tried it so I can’t say no….but I’d offer that taking a predictable, static approach to the environment (or “supermarket” approach) where design thinking happens is not advised. You need a few types of spaces where different types of work can flourish, all within reach. A good reason not to simply set aside some of the “bigger cubicles” for your design team and be done with it. Instead, think variety and encourage different types of timescales and spaces for your designers to contemplate solutions. Referring back to Brian Moose’s well-researched approach, check out this interesting space he created for designers to escape the treadmill from time to time.

the agony:

back to the wilderness

A page from the children’s book “bring me a rock”

Venturing into the great unknown every day in search of ideas is it’s own emotional journey, and as I was reminded earlier, it isn’t for everyone. The other things designers face every day is the prospect of having their ideas rejected and being effectively sent back out into the cold to try again. Much of the time it can feel like braving the wild and enduring the harshest elements and thinnest margins to bring back “good game” - only to be told that folks prefer rabbit to venison. Leaders and patrons of design who are insensitive to this typically fall into a couple of process traps that often lead to disillusionment between them and their designers.

honor the ideas

The first trap is to insist on shooting first and aiming later. The idea that you can use pumped up creative work to tease out what the priorities are instead of feeding those priorities into the work beforehand. I see this in firms that generate 30 handle shapes and put them on a wall and ask clients to “pick one” instead of developing a POV, considering context and curating the options down to 3 or 4. For any designer who cares about excellence, it can be painful to watch your ideas rot on the vine. It is also untenable to be focused on quantity rather than quality during day to day creative work. While there are many that enjoy this process (who wouldn’t LOVE to walk down the supermarket aisle and pick their favorite designs?), it burns out the designer, reduces the potency and purpose of the work and leaves an empty husk where happiness should be.

encourage excellence

Designers can struggle to match the values of their work with the priorities of their orgs.

The second trap is assuming that there are different times in which excellence is required and rejecting good ideas because of it. One of the best compliments I ever received from a process partner was when they compared me to a Master Chef. “But,” they said, “We don’t need gourmet on this project, we need fast food.” The project they were referring to was certainly on a tight schedule, but they felt the standards of design was putting too much risk on the program. They were right about the schedule, but they were wrong about fast food. That product has been in the market for 6 years already and will be there another decade at least. Not exactly fast food for their customer or the brand.

There are no “quick jobs” or “hills not worth dying on” for a designer that is driven toward excellence. They are detail oriented, that’s what makes em good. The thing that gets them out bed into the cold in the morning is the idea that great design matters and they are willing to go above and beyond to make it happen. Hunting is opportunistic, and designers will often come back with more than what was asked for. When I hear the oft-praised terms like “Ruthless prioritization” it is too often ascribed to management priorities, not user priorities. A good design leader needs to head that off and advocate for excellence to avoid perceptions that their excellent hunters are instead self-absorbed troublemakers.

scout ahead

Third trap is leadership forgetting to or failing to feed the designer with knowledge. Do-overs, setbacks and loopbacks in the design process are natural (often painful) occurrences, but they are attributable to one thing specifically: new insight. Avoid sending your designer back into the cold by arming them properly in the first place. Think about what success should look like, get research lined up, review the work before it gets “precious” to the designer, keep your ears perked up for new stakeholders, jettison validation studies in favor of participatory design and good ethnographic study which the designer attends, know the “known unknowns” vs the “unknown unknowns.” Realize if you are “learning late” you are inevitably wasting time and copious amounts of creative juice. Learn always, but most essential: learn early and develop a keen radar for when new learnings will hit the program. Information will inevitably lead to changes in the design, remember that as both an ingredient of great design and a warning to everyone who insists on moving fast. Insight and the reality of a situation will always put your designers back on the hunt, regardless of the weather..

a fear of winding up empty handed.

Showing up to work every day with a question mark looming over your desk is frightening. But its not like you wont have a pile of sketches and design ideas by the end of it. You know you will. The frightening thing is you don’t know whether any of it will be any good. The agony of design is not doing the work on time - it is finding that answer which is special, thoughtful, new and better, beautiful and worth existing. To say good design is about serving business and function (even user needs!) is like saying golf is about getting a ball in a hole. It certainly is…but without elegance the game is nothing. To spend one’s time designing something that does not deserve to exist, maybe only adds to or emulates the sea of worthless objects in the world people will buy but won’t love or enjoy….it is like wasting one’s life.

When you factor in the uncertainty combined with the desire companies come to designers with, its clear that this is so much more than a job. It’s a risk and a creative obsession every day. This perspective is something leaders who are not designers often fail to recognize and support, and this leads to disillusionment.

no, not everyone is a designer

I used to think everyone was a designer, but now I know they are not. I still believe everyone could be, but now I see why most people would never choose this profession for themselves. I also see the struggle designers have in partnering with the orgs and clients they work for - who often strive to organize the creative work into something linear and predictable. As much as I resonate with a designer’s role as facilitator and advocator for others, I don’t believe designers are vessels for user needs to flow through, nor are they translators for business and technology. If they were, it would be a simpler job - like driving up to the supermarket, plucking insight from the shelves and throwing it into the cart. If it were like that anyone could do it. Designers don’t just assemble, they catalyze. They create. They come up with answers that are greater than the sum of the parts.

Good hunting

I wrote this POV because it took a fellow from the Intel “fab” to explain why design is hard…so I wouldn’t be surprised if many designers out there didn’t yet know for themselves why the job is so thrilling and important and scary. Certainly many clients and folks who lead design teams but were never designers might not see it. And finally, a lot of design leaders lose sight of it - maybe when their days at the drawing board diminish.

Design is a Hunt, not a Supermarket