Any hard working professional in any field can say exactly the same, in that designers are not unique. I’d like to play off of your statement to point out a realization I had recently about these prejudices, and to do that I will ask everyone a very simple question.
At what point in your life did you begin to cultivate those skills that led you down the path of becoming a designer?
I would guess most people here would say when they were very young doing “creative” things like drawing, making “stuff”, arts and crafts. Basic, fundamental, elementary school level “fun time”, “craft time”, activities. Walk into any Kindergarten classroom and you will see tons of tools available for these kinds of activities. Walk into any 6th grade class, different story.
I’ll come back to that. I recently read “Orbiting the Giant Hairball”, by Gordon MacKenzie, excellent read for any designer, but specifically designers in a corporate setting. Gordon worked at Hallmark, but he also enjoyed sculpture. He would go to elementary schools and give sculpture demonstrations to each grade. He would begin his demonstration by asking for a show of hands from the kids who considered themselves artists, or creative. The first few grade levels would have lots of hands raised, but with each grade higher there would be less and less until he got to the highest grade where a handful would sheepishly raise their hands. Gordon has his own things to say about this, but here’s my reflection…
What happened to all of the artists? Simple, and not to go all cliche, but they conformed to a system. They chose the established rewards that an institution (INSTITUTION Definition & Usage Examples | Dictionary.com) offers over what rewards they could reap by doing things their own way or finding new ways to do things. One of those rewards was that if you accept a curriculum you are more likely to be accepted by peers, so, social rewards. Why did that handful of kids timidly raise their hands? Fear, since art and creativity are not weighed and measured as equally as other subjects their peers view this as an inferior pursuit. To be fair, there’s TONS of pressure on kids to excel in subjects that are perceived to lead to the best careers (money). Kids learn to get good grades to get rewards because they don’t have an income. That also leads kids to believe that if you get good grades then you will get into a good college and get a good job and this is exactly the conformist’s institution of “success”. Also in the spirit of fairness almost all schools have an “art program”, but many of those programs weigh execution (skills) higher than creativity (thought). Those designers that can bang out slick renderings of snoozer ideas, same thing. Any designer worth their ass is going to tell you the process is more important than the rendering. Is it any wonder why kids are pressured out of art classes when the perception is that the commercial byproduct of their education is artwork and not profitable ideas?
Back to Kindergarten. Math, designers like to bring up math and accounting folks as sort of this antithesis of design and creativity. Math is probably fun for about .01% of the global population, and even then that’s probably generous. How many of those kids in Gordon’s class would’ve raised their hand to show they are a mathematician? Like art and design math also starts with fundamental foundation tools that gradually progress; addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, algebra, calculus, trigonometry, proofs, Steven Hawking supermathy stuff. I got to Calculus with Applications (engineering math)when I was 23, but I had to take it twice, that was enough math for me. I understood and respected it’s importance in 4th grade. It becomes more advanced as you follow a math curriculum. Similarly, designers progress from crayons and finger paint, to charcoal and oils, to clay, metal, wood, to Adobe Suite, to research, to 3D illustration/animation, to model making, etc, etc, etc. Designers’ paths also become more advanced and complex, just like any other career path, but few outside of it see that progression and professional growth.
My point, all those young kids that stopped raising their hands tuned out of creative endeavors to pursue the more institutional stuff. The last impressions that they had of artistic creative tools and processes were those from elementary school “arts and crafts”, you know, fun time kid stuff where you played with a box of fuzz balls and tongue depressors. They left that childish stuff behind for other rewards, and that’s a bummer man, because I’d bet some of them could have had very promising creative career paths, but while they might have been very creative their execution skills might have sucked so they thought they actually weren’t creative. So now some of these people are my workplace peers and they have the creative aptitude of a 4th grader. So, that’s my theory on where a lot of this creative prejudice comes from; people’s childhood perceptions of art and creativity, ie. ignorance.
NURB, I’ve thought about whether or not a lot of this perception is more of a Midwest thing and I think it is. The way I prefer to deal with the snide comments, eye-rolling, and ignorance is to confront it directly and have a dialogue. Midwesterners seem very conforming, approval or consensus seeking types so with that you get some passive-aggression, you know, if people disagree with your idea, they won’t give a yay or nay, they just won’t do anything. The engineer that I mentioned in my earlier post does exactly this. We might have a really long meeting and he won’t say a word, be totally expressionless, contribute nothing to the conversation, and then go have a private talk with his boss and proceed to do things his way on the project and the designer’s work gets tossed in the trash. That behavior undermines the whole point of having a team of people with different disciplines working to solve a problem. His boss acknowledges this behavior, but doesn’t take any action on it because that would be “personal”, and they’ve worked together for a really long time. It is entirely political and does a lot of damage because this engineer and his boss see everything through a soda straw. I believe in and promote constructive conflict and critique, people here seem to think that denotes issues and anger, it’s really frustrating.