Embracing Design

My first paid design job earned me a tidy $20 as an 11th grade high-school student back in the late ‘90s.

A friend of mine approached me to design some advertising for a collectible card tournament he was running. Magic: The Gathering was a popular game at the time, and he needed a poster to get word out about the tournament. Naturally, I jumped at the chance. Not only was this what I wanted to do with my life, but my fast-food job was only paying a comparatively measly $4.92 per hour. When I realised I could make posters and make more money, the decision was made.

This was the start of my career in design. A career that has since taken me around the world and allowed me to work with clients from multinational corporations and million-dollar start-ups, to Governments and global NGOs. 

But here’s the thing: Design isn’t about being a professional designer. 

Design isn’t about the degrees, the titles, the clients, or the studios. It’s so much bigger than that. Design is something we can all engage in, whether we call ourselves designs or not. You don’t have to work in fashion, architecture or branding, or be an artist, musician or filmmaker. Design is not tribal.

What design is is a set of tools – tools we all have access to that can help us transform ourselves and the world around us.

This chapter is our foundation. Here we will pack our bags for the journey and prepare to step out with confidence, no matter what lies ahead. We will be getting to grips with what design really is, how it shapes the world around us, and why you can use it just as readily as any major brand. 

Once you can see how design works, and how you can use its tools, processes and strategies in positive ways, we’ll be ready to take our first steps towards the Heart of Design.

In the pages ahead we will:

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Creative Confidence

The one rule I have when I lead the Heart of Design online course is that nobody is allowed to say they’re not creative.

It’s often something people say when they can’t draw particularly accurately, don’t work in a creative field, or don’t find it easy to think up business plans on the fly.

Creativity is everywhere in various guises, but it’s sometimes hard for us to see.

But that’s not what creativity is. Most five year olds can’t draw accurately, but they will share incredibly creative stories. Education might not be classed as a creative industry, but sit in on a class or two and you’ll realise that teachers are surely among some of the most creative professionals you could meet. And people who hesitate to call themselves ‘quick-thinkers’ can often be the ones who find unique and beautiful ways to make you feel safe, valued and heard.

Creativity is everywhere in various guises, but it’s sometimes hard for us to see or appreciate. So we often resist the label of creativity and deny ourselves the possibilities and opportunities that creativity can bring.

One of my favourite books about creativity is Creative Confidence, by the founder of IDEO and Stanford d. School, David Kelly. He wrote:

Kelly reiterates the point that creativity isn’t something magical and elusive reserved only for ‘creative people’.

On the contrary, you can find creativity in your daily life, whatever your passion, profession or craft is. Perhaps you use creativity to find a way to spend more time with your kids? Maybe you’re creative while launching a new business, or growing vegetables in your garden?

This is a hurdle that we have to overcome right at the start. Unless we’re prepared to shift our beliefs and understandings about creativity, it can be easy to trip ourselves up, and stifle our potential for doing something wonderful.

Once we believe we have the ability to be creative, we start to see things differently, and start to trust in the path ahead – despite the fact we can never guarantee where it leads.

This is something Rumi wrote about more than 800 years ago in this passage from his timeless Masnavi, which is still relevant today.

No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor.

Cautious people say, 'I'll do nothing until I can be sure.'  Merchants know better.

If you do nothing, you lose.

Don't be one of those merchants who won’t risk the ocean.”

– Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Masnavi Book III: 3080-3100Translation: Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi

Put simply, Rumi is telling us that we need to be brave and take a risk. We have our dreams, aspirations and imagination, but there are no guarantees of what the outcome will be – of what might be on the island on the far side of the sea. Yet the journey is still worth the risk, because the alternative is that you do nothing.

Creative confidence gives us that courage to be bold. With creative confidence, we can prepare ourselves for the journey ahead, and become ready to face whatever challenges, opportunities, insights and openings might meet us along the way.

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Design Around You

An extra benefit of having creative confidence is that it helps us to appreciate design more easily. It helps us understand what design really is, what its role and potential is, and how we both experience it and are impacted by it on a daily basis.

In his Design Maturity Report, one of my mentors, Greg Branson, wrote: “Design is an ambiguous term that can be misunderstood and misused. Asked to identify a type of design, most people outside the industry may be able to name fashion, products, and perhaps web design, but it’s rare they can recall many more.”

This is probably only reasonable, given that most of us don’t have a full understanding of how design shows up in the world around us. But once you tune into everyday design, you can gain an entirely new perspective.

At its most basic level, design is change. Design is solving a problem.

Something I love to do when I’m leading courses or workshops is to ask people to look around and pick out a single object that is nearby. It can be anything – something old, something new, something high-tech, low-tech, expensive, cheap. Anything.

Whatever they pick out is a piece of design. Because everything is a piece of design. It started in somebody’s imagination as a potential solution to a problem, before going through a process of prototyping, testing and iteration until it got to where it is now.

I ask them to think about the problem that the object is solving. What change is it creating? How is it helping? Is it doing a good job of that? Then I ask them to go a bit further and think about what the process was behind creating it. How was it made? How and why did it arrive at its current location?

If you look at a wireless mouse, for example, you can start to imagine the conversations that took place at a big tech company. You can start to imagine the intention of somebody within the product design department to make it easier for you to use your computer without sitting so close to it. You can imagine and appreciate the various different prototypes that they drew up before hitting upon the best option, and then the system of testing and approvals it would have to go through before going to a production facility to be made and shipped around the world.

There would have been hundreds if not thousands of little decisions along the way, just to get it onto your desk – not just for the product itself, but the ordering system, the shop signage, the packaging, the logistics, and much more.

These design decisions surround us, barely noticed. But once you think about those decisions and intentions, you start to see how design is an integral part of our life experience.

For some audiences, I like to go a little deeper, and ask them to think about why the object might be there from a metaphysical perspective. Early into my exploration of Islam, I came across the works of Said Nursi, a great thinker from 20th Turkiye, who helped me think like this. For example I came to appreciate how his perspective "Mana-yı ismi" is when you look at beings as they are, like just their physical appearance. "Mana-yı Harfi" is when you look behind and see its Creator, its true meaning.