When did design become a job?
I recently went to the Design Museum after putting it off for almost a year since I’ve moved to London (a post on that later). Full confession I usually don’t like museums, they are too sterile and devoid of context for me put that along with the fact that the museum is across the city - you can see why I avoided it for so long.
As I walked along to see the exhibits one by one, I felt a familiar feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. I was feeling the joy and excitement that I used to associate with design back in grad school, where I had a network of some of the most inspirational classmates and teachers I know. Grad school finished and I got a job that I was very excited about, somewhere along those few years since then I started equating design with this role at a company, with Silicon Valley, with this work I was doing, intentionally separated from the rest of my life. Of course that helped me tease out other things that were a substantial part of my identity that I had so far ignored - things like poetry, reading, pottery etc but it did box in the one thing that got me out of my own inward facing self- in the service of others. I don’t know when design became a negotiation, perhaps when I started to quantify the value of design in fickle attention spans or when I started to find satisfaction in good enough for now or when I forgot that design was bigger than designing for an app.
I came home and watched the new documentary series on Netflix called Abstract unknowingly trying to make my way back into the world of design that was so inspirational, so attractive and exciting to me, although it made me miss New York terribly.
So here I am writing again with no purpose but to find my way back to a curiosity for design and its value in the world, to disentangle myself from the role of design in the corporate world and invite friends, collaborators and strangers to a conversation and some tea. Join me?
