GDE 730

WEEK 1

Planning, Strategy & Management / Philosophies, Roles & Approach  

This week begins with conversations around the idea of starting a design business. We are invited to hear from others and begin to speculate how our own design practice might look like.

The main question driving the week was:

How do you translate your perceived design ethos and positioning to your defined audience?

Lecture Part I – Practitioner Case Studies

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Starting a design studio should not be done lightly. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should and certainly doesn’t mean that you will succeed.

Simon Manchipp

What do you think are the essential logistical and practical requirements to set up a design studio/business?

I concur with the advice provided by our design practicitioners. The most important being that you don't have business unless you have atleast one significant paying client. I think one should only think of starting a business if one has some cashflow coming in, otherwise like Simon said the cashflow problem can kill your business pretty fast.

I summarize key points from their conversations in the notes below:

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What really stood out to me in how the practioners shared from their experience was that the logistics were pretty much the same across the board—computer, equipment, space, low cost, clients. What provided value to me apart from that was the personal advice that came from their experience of starting and running a business. The notion of uncertainty, knowing that as a designer you will need an accountant to handle the numbers which is not usually a strong suit, the idea of how to communicate with clients, and how to go about finding work. Such wisdom often comes only after one has been there and done that. 

How did you find your first studio space? 

The common thread amongst all the practitioners was this idea of starting small. Either by working from home with a computer or meeting up in a public area where there is WIFI to the idea of using a shared space.

I started working freelance and established a business 5 years ago to work with a client in the US on a steady retainer. I work from home and it works great, all you really need to be in business is a laptop and a great internet connection. 

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I think when you first start it's always a bit tough because of the uncertainty of never having done something other than a stable job before. And initially I had no sense of time and work-life balance. I was also taking on any sort of work. As the years went by I can take on niche projects, charge for value and have more time to spend on stuff I enjoy and that creates breathing room. 

What is the one piece of advice you can offer about running a successful studio? 

After having a listen to what all the practitioners had to say I distilled their core ideas into each 'chunk' in my written notes that I felt summed up the core essence of their advice:

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My takeaway from the advice provided by the practitioners is essentially this: BE a designer, as opposed to DO design. When we are being a designer we are thinking like one. We become problem solvers and we innovate and change processes that we think are not designed effectively (Simon), we communicate effectively and know the audience we are talkign to and how best to convey an idea to them (Intro). We are true to an approach, style or craft, we bring something unique of ourselves to it and that is what positions our work and what fuels our loving what we do at the end of the day (Sam and Regular Practice). And lastly we keep going, we break through barriers, we stay inspired, we believe in ourselves and our work and we don't shy away from tapping into our intuition and don't compromise (Sarah). 

I have often apparoached things in my life that were not design this way, I would tap into thinking like a designer to create innovative ways of doing things. As I grow through this program I am discovering more and more of who I am as I designer, what my take is on something and how to solve it my way. And as Sam said that we may not know the solution or what things look like at the end, but we need to trust ourselves and know that the answer has a way of arriving soon enough.

Lecture Part II – Interview with Gem Barton

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Play to your strengths, be consistent, perfect your personal brand—Jeff Bezos famously said that your personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room—my advice is to reverse engineer this. How do you want to be described, thought of, in your absence? Once you can identify this—your strategic approach to your own identity/media/propaganda should be centred on achieving and maintaining this message.

Gem Barton

I really enjoyed this lecture format in the form of a PDF presentation. It was nice and simple and easy to navigate. My biggest takeaway from Gem's interview was where he talks abou the idea of the personal brand. That we have to be honest with ourselves and really think about who we want to be, what we enjoy doing, how we want others to perceive us as designers. I like that he talked about it in terms of reverse engineering it from the future backwards. To speculate what you want to respresent as the designer, the practice and the brand you are and then to create that in the form of your positioning in the market. 

This particular notion really helped me to think about my workshop challenge and became the impetus for me to speculate about the kind of studio or services I'd like to be known for. I really thought about who I am in terms of strengths, which was the first thing Gem starts with where he talks about this idea. And then to think about values. Tapping into both of these helped me to construct my 'about' statement for this week. Thanks Gem!

Workshop Challenge

CHALLENGE: How do you translate your perceived design ethos and positioning to your defined audience? Write an ‘about’ paragraph— an elevator pitch on either your current positioning or one you would like to establish. You may choose to take a speculative approach and envision your global dominance as a design studio superpower. Or as a more humble sole trader who works in a freelance capacity. Have your values changed since beginning the course? Is there a strategic approach your company would communicate to potential commissioners or clients? Please consider the following in your approach: What is the idea? How does it work? Why does it work?

Who am I as a designer? A story.

My idea for the kind of design practice I'd like to set up derives from a sticky life situation I found myself in a few years ago in the year 2014. It was a very stressful time, but it taught me a great deal about who I am as a designer. 

My mother, brothers and myself got sued by my aunt (I know, embarrasing! what can I say? messed up family!). My mom co-owned her house, which was my mom's principal residence, with her sister who was an American resident and had not even set foot in the house she laid claim over. She sued to get us kicked out of the house and claim full ownership over it, even though my mom had 49% ownership of the house. It was the first time I was ever in a situation where I had to help my family navigate a legal problem. 

We had to hire a lawyer and spent the next 5 years going back and forth with lawyers, till ultimately in 2019 we settled out of court. Throughout this entire journey came mounds of documents and having to retrace steps and financials over 5 years. Money trails, residency, financial records, receipts, etc. I hate math, and I get overwhelmed with too much data. It was a collosal mess. How were we going to tell a coherent story? And how were we goign to prove that our aunt was wrong. And how on earth was I going to help us not lose our home? 

So you can imagine the stress. How did I deal with it? I poured through mounds of information and documents. Started colour coding themes. And to make sense of everything I started making one pagers of data visualizations of timelines, and events, backed up by docuements to be referenced. I wanted to make the facts so clear that if anyone looked at them they would get an idea of what was happening. I remember poring over all my mom's passports, emails of any flight tickets, and any printed boarding passes to map her residency since birth, so I could prove her status. 

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The designer in me began searching for patterns, and like an archeologist or a detective I began to uncover parts of the whole story. Needless to say, the end of the story is a happy one. We won the case via settlement and my mom got full ownership. My lawyer and the judge who sis the settlement were impressed with the visualizations I created. And I learned how important it is to be able to one: cut through complexity and two: how to tell a coherent story. 

Since then, I got a project from my lawyer for a corporate property case he was working on. He became a client since he saw the value in how he could present cases to a court if the information was laid out in a way that tells the story of corporate fraud. I created this property value timeline for him:

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I later learned the Stanford d.school actually has been running a research lab into how to make legal concepts easy by applying design thinking and visualization. 

I also created a career for myself at a research institute as their creative director, taking their academic research and creating ways to make the information easy to understand, and telling engaging stories out of dry topics which get bogged down in too much information. In this case it was a set of micro-narrative posts for an academic paper on 'Islam and the Abortion Debate':

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I also dove into helping the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada spread awareness about heart disease and stroke by creating informational graphics to convey important concepts:

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HSF

I attribute this to my skill as an educator and a designer. As a teacher I make the complex simple for my students. As a designer I find ways to tell stories using text and image. Infographics are by far my favourite design area for exploration. 

So my idea for a design practice is based on this simple idea: making the complex clear and telling coherent stories, through a variety of media. 

Final Workshop Challenge Outcome

What is the idea?

A speculative idea for a design practice that focuses on making the complex simple, by cutting through the noise and presenting design solutions that delight with the "aha!" that comes when we are able to achieve clarity! It's like a light switches on. I am creating a brand for my future studio practice with a focus towards making the complex simple. As a designer and an educator, over the years, I found that my core strength lies in communicating things simply and effectively. The amount of confusion and information overload today makes it tough to make sense of the relevant, the meaningful. In being able to provide others this kind of design service, I aspire to help clients tell their story, convey their message in ways that cut through the noise and delight the feeling that comes when we can say: "Oh! I get it!"

How does it work?

It starts with speaking to the client/subject matter expert and understanding what the topic or brand is about. Then excavating through the content to glean the essence of the message or story. Refining the message and removing any non-clarifying elements. Copywriting the message with clear language to enhance the meaning of the message. Combine the writing with visuals to tell the story about the message in a way that defines the context and meaning. Creating visual formats whether static visuals, an entire brand, a campaign, an animation or an interactive web experience. Work with clients and industries where ideas have not been explored using design thinking.

Why does it work?

We are living in the age of information overload. The attention economy of a person is low and there is too much noise. People are taking in more data than ever before. Visual+verbal content helps cut through all the static. Our brains are uniquely wired to process things visually very quickly. Reading is becoming less and less for comprehension and understanding. By using this visual+verbal strategy to tell stories, understanding and communication becomes easy and delightful. Misunderstandings and misinformation is reduced. I believe everyone wants to communicate clearly.

Here is the About Statement for my speculative design studio, called Lucent Creative:

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Final thoughts and reflection

This week was interesting, it really got me to look deeply into who I am as designer, how I think, how I problem solve, and how I want to shape my practice. Gem's idea about reverse engineering the kind of designer you want to be by thinking about how you want to be preceived formed the backdrop of my inquiry into all of these areas to explore what I can offer.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. 

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