How we work
Adam Garcia recently held a workshop at Portland State University and on the whiteboard he wrote several things about how future designers should work.
Some choice selects that caught my eye were “Don’t be a dick” and “Be nice” along with others in relation to process, research, and ways of knowing.
It inspired me to write this post not only to future designers but anyone working anywhere, in any industry. I defer to a quote, from a very famous comedian on a famous night in his career that changed how we see late night television:
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“To all the people watching, I can never, ever thank you enough for the kindness to me, I’ll think about it for the rest of my life.
And all I ask is one thing, please do not be cynical.
I hate cynicism, for the record it’s my least favorite quality, it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
I’m telling you, amazing things will happen. It’s just true.”
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That man was Conan O’brien in a speech that left me stunned & humbled, not only for its amazing message…but that on network television, America was exposed to a message that has been passed down through generations from the mouth of a comedian that was poignant and ever so meaningful. This is how our grandparents worked. This is what their parents instilled in them. And it is a universal truth to all industries that is simple, honored, and timeless.
Be kind, and work hard. Or as the ubiquitous poster reads WORK HARD & BE NICE.
Here is what this means, in a variety of ways, but particularly in the field of creativity and design.
1. Your wealth is determined
by your relationships
50% of design is relationship.
No, that’s a lie. It’s more. Maybe much more. This means your neighbors, sisters, not-so-close friends, barbers, chefs, old bosses, heroes & archenemies are all your wealth. How do you treat your wealth? Do you protect it in a safe place that is tended and nurtured? Or do you wield it recklessly like a disposable tool.
Relationships are interesting organisms. They fade naturally, they grow exponentially, they are even unpredictable, just like us. But what is predictable is if you damage them, they change.
In work, relationships are as important as the work. Do not think that good work will replace your need for relationship. It will not. If you damage important relationships in your work, you have damaged your work. You may have no money in your bank account, living paycheck to paycheck, or maybe even borrowing from the future to pay for the past. But if you have strong relationships built on trust, dignity, and respect, you are wealthy. Your relationships are your savings accounts. Protect, nourish, and enrich them! Perhaps it’s time to say out-loud “My relationships are my wealth.”
2. Be kind
We may not all be outgoing, even fewer are bubbly. And that’s a blessing because our differences are fantastic. But what we can all be is kind.
Kindness is an interesting thing, being such a simple idea. But what it infers is where the true value of kindness is revealed. Kindness infers respect, mutual understanding, and dignity. Couple kindness with even a modest amount of talent and you are immediately employable. Kindness says something about your character; that you are interested in being treated with respect because you are acting in the realm of respect. It’s easy to accidentally step out of the realm of respect, but a kind person can jump right back in and get back to being a rad human in no time.
Once one has accidentally (or emotionally) stepped out of the realm of respect or kindness, and follows it up with further undignified or disrespectful behavior, it is more difficult to work. Magically, work will flee you.
Whatever your mother taught you about kindness, apply to work. It will be noticed, and get you more work. I believe this is where Mr. Adam Garcia would interject “Don’t be a dick,” and Mr. Conan O’brien would say “It’s just true.”
3. Sell your abilities, not your ego
There are seasons when you need to be sharky. Sharing your resumé or networking your black little heart out as authentically as you can to find the right place to work or land a client. I like to refer to this period as Shark Week. It usually lasts longer than a week.
It’s a delicate balance where you’ve got to talk about what you can do, but try not to sound like your ego is enormous. If you’re a young gun with the ability to wrap the internet around your pinky finger at will, then your ego should be even more in the backseat. Other people will tell your story for you, but if you consistently let your mouth tell others how awesome you are, you’re gonna get bad work. Making others who are less bad-ass than you feel like it’s an honor to be in your presence will also lead to your work demise.
Be kind, control that ego sweetheart. It’s kindof like a slug. Neat, but mostly slimy.
4. Say goodbye with a smile!
Most things are temporary. Especially in the field of design, work is rarely long-term. Which means we must be great, no, excellent at saying goodbye. Because not only is the work temporary, so is the goodbye. People will come back to you and all of a sudden you are saying hello again!
How you say your goodbye’s reflects your character. Actually, Jelly Helm is famous for saying “Everything you do reflects your character” — but more so when you say goodbye. The job may be over, the client may not be right, you may have been fired, laid-off, down-sized, cast-out unfairly with lousy terms, given the finger, let go quietly, or any list of shady circumstances that warrant a mouth off and a slammed door, but I urge you, do not. In the event of a valid expression of emotion, it is possible to express yourself while staying in the realm of respect and kindness, however!
Pull yourself together, holster those guns, and let your character shine. Usually the goodbye is an anxious event, and generally short-lived. Take these auspicious moments to leave an impression that will not be forgotten. Guys, gentleman up, ladies, charm their faces off. Even the worst most in-human boss will remember your goodbye. If it’s the end of a business partnership and you decide to say goodbye with legal notices and a quick fire over email, your work will suffer. This is true in New York City, Portland, Shanghai, or Abu Dhabi.
Let’s not forget that the work we do is made up of humans.
Treat a human like a human instead of a business transaction and you will be a magnet for good work. And compensation.
Often these 4 skills come naturally to people. Because these 4 skills are universal and timeless, they will always hold true no matter where you are. The other universal truth is to work hard. Most people understand that to be noticed or respected you must work hard. But coupling hard work with kindness, dignity, and respect will get you more than noticed, it will get you what you want. Apply these skills towards your passion and your work/play dividing line will blur in a matter of months.
In a nod to Garrison Keillor:
Be well (and kind!), do good work, and keep in touch.
Edits Quarterly
Ian Coyle starts Chapter 2 this way:
“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and
the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like
home, and love, and understanding companionship.”– A. Earhart
The quote on it’s own is stirring but coupling that with the realization that Earhart presumably died while pursuing a life of rich experience and adventure, gives the quote that much more weight on the page. It is the pursuit of these kind of adventures that Ian is sharing with us with his new website/publication/public journal he calls Edits Quarterly.
Each entry documents an experience, person or place that has shaped Ian Coyle in some way. The photography is striking and the short stories explaining each vignette are immersive. Ian doesn’t go into great detail, instead, he paints with both with words and images in broad strokes and we are left to fill in rest of the details. Saying the imagery he provides is an adequate starting point does not do justice to the moody, beautifully composed pictures and video.
While it is undoubtedly the content itself that carries the bulk of the storytelling load, it is assisted in no small part by the design and pacing of the site. In my mind, the user interface the visitor is presented with is the future of storytelling on the web. Unencumbered by clumsy user interfaces or menus, the arrow key are simply used to glide from one “spread” to the next. An experience that shares more in common with flipping through a well crafted magazine than reading online. The subject matter was presented in such a way as to feel as if it were right in front of you—like you could just reach up and pluck any of the pictures right off the screen. This experience seemingly gives the content more weight both emotionally as well as physically.
Edits Quarterly is not best experienced through my secondhand account so I will keep analysis of my experience with it short. However, I can’t understate how affected I was while first interacting with it both because the content presented was simple and truthful, but also because I realized that this interaction I was having was my first glimpse at the future of mature storytelling on the web.
Armchair travel – North Africa
It is still the dark continent in many ways. Dark not in absence of light, but dark in a positive, mysterious and thrilling way. I’ve wanted to touch African soil my entire life, and some strange sequence of events lead me there this holiday season. Just the upper left corner of it, Saharan Morocco. This is a very image heavy post, and there are stories behind each image. But I can’t tell them here, I’ll let you fill in the rest.
This experience I keep comparing to what I understand about skydiving. Exciting and terrifying at the same time. Some days were shady and sketch, others made me feel like young Indiana Jones with heart pounding and mind spinning.
As my insides lead me to more areas of the world that are considered corners or empty spaces, I am continually perplexed by this planet. I wanted to put my hand in the sun, eat Saharan honey, and listen to the ringing in my ears between whistling dunes.
There’s quite a few, all from the interior of Morocco from the day after Christmas 2011 to the second week of January 2012.
What I’m excited about now is to finish compiling the video footage and relive the experience with a bit of drama on the internet. And if you’ve never heard of the Jemaa El-fnaa (two translations, “Assembly of the Dead” and “Mosque at the end of the World”) find out what it is, because it is the most exciting place on planet Earth. Seriously.
It is difficult to speak in brief about any one experience, but I’ll try one scene for you.
In the Jemaa El-fnaa there are snake charmers. Men with drums and flutes play music to calm Cobras and Asps. There is also a man who performs with them, in a trance, on all fours sweating in the sun, rocking back and forth to the African rhythms and brushing the noses of the Cobras with his wild hair as he moves around like an animal. Between the Cobras (four of them, all hooded and ready to strike) are trained chipmunks that dart in and around the bodies of the snakes, taunting them. Beside the Cobras is a writhing pile of Adders and Asps that occasionally get unruly and slither off the pile.
The man in the trance simply grabs their tail and pulls them back in the pile, always just missing the strike. He continues his trance and charming until after the sun sets on the third holiest place in all Islam, and retires for the evening, all his snakes in boxes with no lids. The chipmunks follow uncaged as he drops bits of lettuce for their dinner, just as the evening call to prayer echoes off the pink city.
Poler Camp Vibes
Portland has a reputation (or stereotype) of being a town full of artisan crafted goods for very specific types of consumers. It’s rare to find a company offering a very Portland-style set of products that also have the potential to be offered to a much wider audience.
It would be easy at first glance to lump Poler into one of those niche shops I just mentioned. But it’s not, it’s much more subtle and accessible than most shops in this town. At Poler you won’t find $125 plaid shirts. Or aloof lumberjacks slinging shoes no one wants to get dirty. You’ll find quality camping gear, genuine humans, and ad campaigns that make you want to drop what you are doing and throw a tent and a dog in a truck, rather than blindly buy advanced technical gear.
There are plenty of outdoor shops to be found that could potentially crush Poler. Huge gallery-style stores tower around downtown like stern sentinels reminding you that you are close to a wilderness, but definitely in an urban area, and to get into the wild you should probably fork over $350. Their guts are filled with jumbo images featuring athletes scaling glacial ridges on K2. Consumers look up, realizing they’ll never be that person, and buy their way to what they think must be closer to the wild.
Poler, instead of following suit, shows images of campers around a campfire in natural light.
I can do that. I’ve done that, and I remember I needed a napsack for it.
Poler! You just got a new customer and didn’t even have to make me feel inferior.
This is a way companies must speak to their customers today. Underscore their intelligence rather than undermine it with manipulation. Yes, plenty of firms are wildly successful today showing unattainable people and things, but more and more humans are resistant to that game.
It’s a tired story.
Beyond excellent human-based images on their site, Poler maintains one of the best Instagram feeds on the west coast. They don’t clog it up with product shots and sale announcements. It is treated like an ongoing, evolving conversation about this thing called #campvibes. It’s such a brilliant hashtag that it could be used as a verb.
That dude is total campvibes.
For those that prefer a web experience outside an app, Poler maintains a Tumblr that will make you dream and itch to get outside from your very chair. On a recent post you will find one of the most interesting links you’ll see all week – a man’s moleskin journals written while hiking Pacific Crest Trail. Wonderful.
As a company, I respect their approach and product list, as I’d like to use pretty much everything there. But their voice shows that there is honor in the source of their work. Poler, your price is perfect, your tone is accessible, and your campvibes are more effective than any multinational sportswear company I’ve seen. Looking forward to what you’ve got in store for 2012.
The perfect end to this post is this spot of theirs called Quiet Camp Vibes:
GOOD + PSU + Your Ideas
You know that problem. The one that drives you crazy. The one that always ends with the sentence or thought “why don’t they fix that?”
Well now you can be the they and the fixer. And present your solutions in a public place with some serious support behind you.
This is your chance! Want to see more public art? Want to pitch solar-powered driverless cabs? Want a garden every 10 blocks? Here, let me hand you that megaphone, people are looking your way.
Here’s what you need to know. GOOD Ideas for Cities is teaming up with Portland State University’s Graphic Design Department and offering something that would be dumb to not consider.
So consider this:
This is a call for creatives.
GOOD is looking for Portland-based designers, artists, architects, thinkers, makers, urban planners, writers, teachers, gardeners, entrepreneurs and more to tackle an urban challenge relevant to the Portland community.
The success of this project relies on interaction, contact and collaboration across disciplines, and so designers as well as non-designers are encouraged to apply.
Stop reading and look at the application, because this deadline is in about 5 minutes.
December 14 folks!
Application online:
http://www.good.is/post/good-ideas-for-cities-is-coming-to-portland-and-st-louis/
Teams as well as individuals are encouraged to apply; the process is collaborative and individuals who apply may be paired with others. Teams will be linked up with local civic leaders in early January and presented a challenge based on their indicated interests.
