Recently, I dealt with an unexpected interaction. It got me wondering how I misread the signals before. I am usually pretty good at gauging my students’ commitment level in my classes. This skill gives me a good edge to motivate and push them. However, this one was different. Long story short, I pushed for more iterations on an average-looking solution. The response was not just hesitant but, rather, a tad resentful.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in art education, I went back to college to study graphic design. Because my first round in college was less than stellar, during my second time at college, I vowed to do everything I could to excel. The reasons for that dip my first time around are for another post.
When I went back, I was behind in the computer proficiency department. My younger classmates knew how to use the computer and the software. Their final submissions were the object of my envy on one too many occasions. Though we were still doing many projects by hand, others required a computer.
I had to capitalize on what I knew while I learned what I did not know. I knew research and sketching. Thus, there were few projects on which I was not willing to go deep and deeper if needed. I started to realize that design can be described as a two-part process: ideation and production.
Ideation necessitates iteration. To learn to think like a designer, one needs to be willing to try things over and over and over again. Sometimes, changing all the variables, sometimes a few variables, and sometimes just changing one variable. Before a project gets fine-tuned to meet its deadline, the ideation process is full of possibilities and options. An idea can take an infinite number of twists and turns. A twist can be the result of research or more reading. A turn can be that a typeface choice is disastrous once the printouts hang on the wall (in my classes, always upside down). Or we can realize that the format needs reconsideration altogether.
Ideation involves everything from brainstorming, researching to gain a better understanding, empathizing with the intended audience, sketching solutions and ideas, sketching some more, talking about the sketches, making connections, seeing what was unseen before, revising and revising, critiquing, giving feedback, letting those aha moments come and go. Then we do it all over again. Each part of the design process is almost a Pandora’s box. However, in design, this box is full of possibilities. And I absolutely love that.
When my student reacted hesitantly to my request to revise and try at least three different options, it woke me up. It is true that some of us are in the design profession only to earn a living or simply to have a job. But design is not all “business.” Design is a very alive and organic process that enables the creator to make interesting and unexpected connections in order to make a message visual to others. The organic process creates a rich and fertile ground for work to flourish.
There is a caveat, of course. As much as design might be like a Pandora’s Box full of ideas and connections we did not know or realize, that box needs to be fed, and it needs to be fed constantly. We feed it without much effort. Our minds process many visuals daily. We don’t realize it, but we take a lot in from the object we are looking at, its texture, placement, weight, height, colors, and many other variables. I am trying to say that each particular object of visual interest possesses much more information in itself. We need to intentionally feed our brains with content—good content—be it literature, music, theater, walks, and even the occasional out-of-range source to come up with twists and turns worth pursuing. Otherwise, our mind will spit out a recycled wave of what we have seen before.
Design is engaging with ideas and having a conversation with them. To engage these ideas, we need to be committed to the process. I would lie if I did not acknowledge that my box has been less open at certain moments in my life. Of course, we have ups and downs. But, to quote something an art teacher told me: If you don’t feed your talent, it goes away. I did not believe it then until I found it hard to think creatively again.
One of my favorite TED talks is Your Elusive Creative Genius by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, and Love. In it, she recalls meeting with American poet Ruth Stone, who described how sometimes her poetry came to her in the field, and she had to run to her house and write, almost grabbing the idea by its tail so it would not go away. Gilbert remarks on how her experience makes her feel like a mule. A mule that she had to push with sweat and labor to painfully produce an idea. While this contrast is dramatic for these two creatives, one thing is true: the ideas will go away to find another vessel through which they can make their way out into the world.
I want to be there for these ideas. My description of the design process is not a scientific one. It is a practical one but sprinkled with a lot of my idealism about how design works. Yes, I believe in design. I think we should teach it in elementary and secondary schools. Though design has many valid solutions to a problem, unlike a math problem, it is through design’s process that we find solutions fitting for the problem we might be engaged with. The process makes us more human.
My student’s hesitation saddened me because their potential is great. All I can offer is a taste and hope that the taste makes them hungry for more.
Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.
Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash.