Why We Design
My typical solution to problems
I think I have one of those faces, an approachability that makes people feel “this guy looks harmless enough; let’s ask him.” I avoid giving directions (I get lost a lot), but I’m told I give good career advice. I get approached by a lot of young and aspiring designers struggling to navigate the early phases of their careers.
I’m a lucky guy. I’ve led experience design on very large products and services at several well-known technology companies. My work is fulfilling and impactful, and when I’m really lucky, I hear stories about how my work has touched other peoples’ lives in ways that are both surprising and humbling.
I think that’s why I’m such a disappointment to those young designers; I have no secret knowledge to share. I am just another human navigating a poorly marked trail like they are.
Most success comes down to being in the right place at the right time with the right mix of skills, hustle, and the willingness to “wing it” like you know what you’re doing until you learn a better way. My career has more twists and turns than most (as I said, I get lost a lot), but that doesn’t mean I’ve been randomly wandering, I’ve always had a calling to make a difference; eventually, it led me to design.
That’s how luck and vocation work. Everyone dreams of being great at something and having an impact. Some of us are even delusional enough to believe we can change the world in small ways. My design career started as a Jesuit Volunteer, teaching high school in one of the poorest and most remote communities in the United States; The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
1999–2000 Red Cloud Volunteers
““Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation.” ”
From Service to Service Design
Welcome to Pine Ridge, bumpy roads ahead.
The Jesuits are big on the concept of Vocation, that all people have a calling to grow, and use their talents to have an impact in the world; they call it “Magis”, latin for “the greater”, or better outcome.
It’s not a uniquely religious point of view, but after eight years in their schools and two years of service at one of their missions, its a point of view that serves as underpainting of the person I’ve become.
In the volunteers, we called it being “ruined for life”; the double-edged sword of seeing the world as it is, knowing it could be better, and being cursed with the talent and desire to do something about it. Its a burden many designers and creatives share, and its a defining characteristic of my colleagues at Group of Humans. We were created for impact regardless of the diverse paths that led us here.
Pine Ridge is a rough place, I won’t attempt to describe it here, but my “classroom” consisted of a basement stacked with old junk, a leaky darkroom, three “vintage” cameras, and a laughably obsolete Mac Quadra that couldn’t run the yearbook software. We had one dial-up connection in the library for the entire school. My job was driving a school bus, and teaching five sections a day of photography, journalism, and multimedia to teenagers who were initially openly hostile to an inexperienced, privileged white kid playing teacher on “the Rez.”
Why Photography and Media? Because I took two classes in photography in high school and college and was the only person that knew anything about cameras or darkrooms. It also didn’t hurt that I knew a little bit of Photoshop and desktop publishing from a previous job in marketing.
Luckily, what I lacked in skills, experience and subject matter expertise, I made up for in enthusiasm and self-confidence. After all, the best part about living in a place called The Badlands is that it features a year’s worth of ways to murder you with the weather, so there’s lots of time to think, plan and work without the distractions of logic or reality.
Arlo, Nick, Paul, and Damon in their natural habitat as teenagers
I have a talent for big picture problem solving and pitching crazy ideas, so I started with the most straightforward problem to solve, money and resources. I spent the first six months scrounging donations, cleaning junk out my classroom and slowly building what at the time was one of the best creative technology labs in the State. My students warmed up to me as we discovered new storytelling tools together. They were coming to school early and staying late creating music videos, performing spoken word Lakota language poetry, or covering the overthrow of the tribal government in journalism class (being “the White Guy” on that field trip was interesting). My students were discovering tools that enabled them to tell their own stories in their own voices. We hacked our way through the earliest versions of Flash and Dreamweaver and Final Cut Pro, creating very ugly web pages, animations and bad Photoshop fails. I slowly realized that not only was I getting pretty good at these tools, I had a real knack for solving problems and empowering people with technology.
Amanda, Minnie, Joni, Eileen, Nicole…and Chief Crazy Horse
Of course, my story is much longer and more complicated. You don’t move from “bad Photoshop in the basement” to designing Photoshop, leading parts of Alexa or scaling a global logistics network in a single step. It’s a much longer story, filled with distracting details like graduate school, and plenty of bumps and lucky breaks along the way to keep it interesting; but none of those minor details change the truest part of my story.
Me and the Herman sisters at the Red Cloud Pow Wow
My audacity and talents for problem-solving, storytelling and teaching, met head-on with the needs of the world in a leaky basement on a wind-swept tundra in South Dakota and it ruined me for life, I became a designer. Being “Ruined for Life” is a trait many of us share in the GROUP OF HUMANS. Our motto, #wastenot doesn’t merely apply to resources like time or money. #wastenot embraces the spirit of “Magis”, that sense of vocation where all humans seek to use their talents to serve the world for better outcomes on problems that matter. Keep “winging it”, push your boundaries, and #wastenot.