1. Assuming that everyone at Acme Design Firm reviewed your resume and your portfolio before your interview.

I have watched this happen over and over again. Invariably, what happens is as follows:

Employer: We didn't have our creative director scheduled for this interview. But we decided to invite her along. Do you have a copy of your resume for her?

You: No... Could you print one off for her from the PDF I sent along?

Employer: [frustrated, but not showing it] Sure, that wouldn't be a problem. Also, our Wi-Fi network is down and the conference room that we're in doesn't have a computer. Could you bring out your laptop and show your portfolio from there?

You: Errr... My portfolio only works from my Web site.

In these kinds of situations, you can hear the punctured balloon of your professionalism starting to leak air. From here, you need to claw your way out.

2. Talking about what you did instead of the process of how you did it—and who helped you along the way.

Yes, the portfolio is the most important thing you'll present as a designer in your interview. But unless you're gunning for a design job where you're the solo-flight do-it-all type, how you describe your work in the context of your client and your collaborators will have a major impact on how your work style and personality are perceived by an employer.

Designers who can speak about their work in sophisticated terms—who are aware not only of the outcome of their design work, but can also describe the process thinking that carried them through a successful project—ascend a few notches in the eyes of their interviewers. If a designer can transcend the making and talk cogently about their thinking, they often exhibit other qualities, such as the ability to adapt their working processes to solve new and challenging projects. In highly complex design engagements with new technologies, there is no cookie-cutter approach, and this flexibility is key to survival.

Plus, I'm sure your interviewers want to hear how much your team loves working with you. "We want to hire you because you're an amazing designer who's going to do career-defining work, but that we're all going to hate to be around you after two months..." Not going to happen.

3. Thinking that, based on your Internet research, you understand what it's like to work at the company you're now interviewing with.

This is my general rule of thumb: If you're doing research on a company, assume that their Web site is at least 6 months out of date—even if it just went live! And no matter how thoroughly detailed a company's Web site is, always have questions for your interviewer that plumb the details of how they work: their corporate process, how the work is done individually and in groups, the details regarding your job role, and an idea of the long-term vision of your employer.

This last question is key, because if your employers don't know where they're headed in three to five years, you won't either—and it helps for an employer to have a very clear understanding of what they want to accomplish. Otherwise, it can be hard to align the employees with the company trajectory.

Along the way, you could also read blogs or tweets from current employees to get a sense of what life is like at their office—but I don't think you'll ever get the unvarnished truth from those people unless you ask them point-blank in an interview—and ask for complete honesty. If they aren't truthful in the interview, then you're being told something very important about their corporate culture by what they aren't saying...

4. Forgetting to ask what you should bring to the (next) interview.

You should always ask when going to an interview what they're looking to see. And if you have multiple rounds of interviews, when you've shown your book for the first time, you should always ask the interviewer if there are any specific areas you should focus on for the next round.

And just like any client project, there's what a potential employer tells you to bring and what you should bring if you really want the job.

For example: When working as a junior or mid-level designer, what's most critical to show in your interview is a well-considered portfolio and resume. (Fun leave-behinds are neat, but they only come in handy if you're trying to overcome a gap in your portfolio. I'd rather see more time investment in the work in their book.)

As you start to move into senior-level design thinking, the expectations shift. The designers who land big-time jobs will craft portfolio material and process work into a presentation that specifically addresses points of interest for the role they're targeting.

This sounds like a big time investment—and it is! But if you've thought very carefully about how you structure your portfolio in a modular fashion, you can quickly re-arrange and shape material before an interview without a major time cost. Besides, wouldn't you go to meet with a new client with a range of project samples that address the needs that they're seeking to fulfill with your services? Same thinking applies for your interview. There is no "one size fits all" portfolio when you start reaching for larger opportunities.

5. Being dishonest about what skills you have, versus which will need to be acquired on the job.

You need to be brutally honest with your potential employers about any skill gaps that may exist before you start your job. This issue only comes out when the designer shows up for work—and it often happens with designers looking to get their "foot in the door." In the process, however, they often break their big toe.

For example: If you're looking to be a print designer at a design firm and you have a solid portfolio of logos, that doesn't mean that you're an expert when it comes to print production. So be up front with your interviewer that you don't know how to read a press sheet or estimate a print project.

It's totally fine to say you don't know something. Hell, in this industry it's amazing to consider just how much we need to know in order to succeed. If you say that you're hungry for knowledge, that is considered a desirable trait for a new hire. It shows you're aware of just how much you don't know.

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So... did I miss any major gaffes here?

Can you help me solve these challenges? It would be a great help, as I'd really like to promote more of the amazing talents that are out there in the design community.

And thank you, in advance, if you'd like to participate. Contact me at dksherwin at msn dot com if you want to take one of the following design problems on and potentially get your solution into my upcoming book from HOW Design Press.*

* Disclaimer: While I'd love to give everyone involved unlimited time to work on these projects, having extra time really doesn't help—and has led many designers to ruin in attempting these problems. So from the date of this posting (July 12), I am allowing two weeks for anyone on the Internet to take a crack at these projects. This means that all solutions must be in to me by July 26th at 12 midnight PST.

The Game of Sustainability

Paper or plastic? Glass or aluminum? Eat local or buy foreign? When we are asked to make these kinds of decisions, the consequences of our actions are difficult to apprehend.

Take purchasing asparagus. You may be buying locally grown asparagus that was raised using hydroponics—which consumes power and water from your local utilities and watershed. Upon maturity, those vegetables were then driven 100 miles to your farmer’s market in a gasoline-powered truck and sold for a premium. Meanwhile, the delicious asparagus tips at your supermarket—flown to you from Argentina on a carbon-offset flight—were sun-grown, watered from a local river, certified by a third-party to be produced sans pesticides, and processed in a wind-powered factory equipped with a fleet of biodiesel vehicles.

From these descriptions, any person would be hard-pressed to decide which asparagus was more or less sustainable. When it comes to issues of sustainability, there are few easy choices.

Now, imagine trying to describe the complexities of sustainability to a child. How could they even begin to comprehend the impact of their actions on the world? In the following challenge, you’ll need to determine a way to help children understand the issue of sustainability.

Create a simple game that teaches young children how to think about the natural resources that they use as they go throughout their day. Consider the rules of gameplay, whether the game would be a solo or group activity, and what design choices you would need to make in order to best engage your audience. And one last constraint: the game has to demonstrate the principles of sustainability itself-—by being eaten, recycled, composted, or otherwise returned to the earth in the process of being played.

Hey, You Made That Up!

There are some things in life that can’t be faked. Sugar in your morning coffee. Fresh-cut flowers in a crystal vase. Hair that hasn’t been dyed, streaked, or chemically treated within an inch of its life.

The same thinking applies to a person’s first name. When you meet a man named Fred, you know when the name fits the smile and handshake. It’s rare that you meet someone named Fragilux or Dynocorpus. Yet we’re surrounded by thousands of brands whose names are just empty containers until we’ve had a chance to fill them with meaning.

In the following challenge, you’ll need to bring out the meaning in what could otherwise be meaningless.

Write down three 3-syllable adjectives. Create a new made-up word by mashing together the first syllable from the first adjective, the second syllable from the second, and the third from the third adjective. This is your client’s new brand name. Apparently, they spent a billion dollars coming up with this name—the market research supports the choice—and as their designer of choice, you’re responsible for creating a six-panel storyboard for a motion graphics piece that will be shown at the shareholder’s meeting.

The video should convey through typography, color, and movement exactly what their company does in the market. Is this name describing a new product or service in the marketplace? A nonprofit initiative? Be as inventive as possible.

Free Association

Yes, I’d love to sit down and read your Form 10K—as long as you include some beautiful charts, graphs, and smiling children frolicking in a dandelion-laden meadow. And be sure to print the thing on 100% recycled, post-consumer waste paper with soy inks on a printing press powered by wind.

Well, designing an annual report isn’t that easy. Any designer that has lived through an annual report project knows the struggle of digesting a few dozen interviews with clients and customers, seeking that magical thread of story that will weave a full year of business and community activities into a cogent narrative. If you fail in making the story tangible in your overall copy and design, this long-form document just becomes a jumble of disparate elements that lack a grand, cohesive vision. Plus, as times grow tough for businesses and nonprofits, production values on the annual report receive the axe—further placing the handcuffs on your creative vision.

Never had a chance to design an annual report? Take this challenge and discover what it’s like to summon a grand business narrative from seemingly random elements.

Write down the name of an animal, a physical location somewhere in the world, and the name of a nonprofit that you admire. Using this information, create the cover design of this year’s annual report for said nonprofit, including some form of textual or visual reference to the animal and location. If you have time left, design the layout for the first and second spreads of the report, including considerations of the grid, while deftly weaving in the details that you’ve improvised.

Hello, My Name Is

In my trash can are dozens of crumpled-up sketches. Nested in a folder on my desktop are Illustrator files jam-packed with lovingly executed logos composed of delicate, hand-finessed Bezier curves. It's been almost three months, and no matter how many times I try to design for this client, I'm just not satisfied with the work.

This is a branding assignment for... well... me.

Identity development is the most poetic of the design disciplines, where all excess is pared away to reveal the pure essence of a client's brand. But when it comes to self-promotion, most designers can't easily gain the self-detachment necessary to summarize their own practice in an artful mark. (And without spending eons on the result.) That's what makes this challenge a form of self-help.

Over ten minutes, answer the following questions: What are my three strengths as a designer? My weaknesses? What's my favorite color? What designers do I love? What design work do I enjoy? What kind of work do I want to do in the future? Then design a logo for yourself that is clearly informed by your off-the-cuff responses. Only give yourself half an hour to sketch out your initial ideas—don't cheat!

Two caterpillars, three baby slugs, and a spider. That's what I discovered when I was washing my broccoli from the farmer's market.

I'm a big proponent for supporting my local farms. But for a city slicker like myself, raised in the suburbs and weaned on sparkling clean Costco-sized produce, the brand experience I'm having with eating local produce is taking me straight back to nature—and in a way that makes me a little queasy.

Until about four years ago, my process of eating fruits and vegetables had been managed by large factories bent on quality assurance and pallet-perfect stacks of nectarines. As a result, the inherent waste in the activity was disguised from moi, the consumer.

Now, a little bit of the factory is me. And really, that's how it should be. If I was a farmer born in the 1860s, things would be a hell of a lot harder in this regard: I would be growing these fresh strawberries, weeding them, watering them, killing any major pests or bugs, crouching down on my knees to pluck their sweet fruit off the bushes—thereby dirtying my knees.

A whole world of physical labor has now been replaced by reading "1 pint 4–" off a chalkboard, peeling cash out of my wallet, carrying the carton home, turning out the berries into a colander, and picking out of the bunch the five or six berries consumed by rot or sporting a happy little worm. Really, I need to get over my squeamish stomach (and my allergy to spider bites... whenever I find a spider in my produce, I'm apt to throw him into the compost bin instead of carrying the poor arachnid outside, where he's likely to get chomped instantly by the birds that live around our apartment.)

Just as the process of buying a bag with three pristine red peppers plays into our notions of packaged food perfection—and disguises the waste inherent in the plant-to-store manufacturing process—what in our genetic makeup causes us to reach for the unblemished fruit instead of the peach sporting a black eye?

The problem, really, is our notion of short-term value overtaking the impact of our long-term actions. And this is made manifest through our notion of waste.

Any of us who grow vegetables in a garden (which I have) or pick fruit from trees and bushes on public land (I've been spotted plucking blackberries and huckleberries from the bushes near Shilsole Marina in Ballard) don't feel so bad when birds and bugs chew through a handful of our yearly crop, or mold reclaims a few berries that are a few minutes shy of overripe. Time and energy invested in, for a product yielded from seed.

But when we step up to the fruit stand with four singles and a hankering for blueberries—this is where the trouble begins, and our mindset flips from a natural-world order to that of the transaction. This happens without us even realizing it. My money is a proxy for value borne out of another person's labor. I feel good about supporting Tiny's Organic Orchard with the purchase of a bag of cherries, but deep in my mind, I'm weighing the value of $4.50 per lb against the heft of the perfectly ripe, sweet fruit in my hand. And I feel good eating the cherries, knowing that it was money well spent for the amount of pleasure extracted from them.

I'm telling myself that by eating local (a.k.a. spending money for "product"), I am reducing my carbon footprint, fostering a closer connection to the Earth and reclaiming some of the grit under my nails. Now how much of that description is just a story that I'm fitting to this moment? Can I get out my scorecard and notch down the two pounds of carbon that I just kept out of the atmosphere?

I'm not arguing against buying local, or suggesting that we live in a manner that willfully contributes to the destruction of our planet, etc. I'm more interested in exploring as follows: how our fava bean-counting mindset is inherent to our relativistic notions of long-term environmental change extrapolated from short-term actions. The problem isn't the product, so much as the system within which it's delivered.

We spend so much time picking through the pile of apples for the perfect capital-A piece of fruit that we can then take home and drop in the bowl for a future day's lunch. This pursuit of the perfect sample has been beaten into us by a society laser-focused on 100% polish as a fundamental attribute of value.

However, we feel so good about finding the great buy in the produce stack that we (un)consciously attempt to forget what happens to the fifty other pieces of fruit that never find their way into our homes or our mouths. Back that spoiled produce goes into the environment, via compost or trash. We confuse the short-term gain for the long-term cost: to our local grower, to our supermarket, to the megafarm in Chile churning out brussel sprouts, and so forth. The chain of impact cascades so far back from that single transaction that being mindful of our choices is entirely paralyzing. As a species living in a consumerist society, we almost have to focus exclusively on the short-term effects of our actions to put on our pants and go to work.

It's no wonder so many pundits slag companies hopping on the green-washing bandwagon. It's the only way they know how to operate as people, let alone a corporation. And while they're working to improve their systems of production as much as they can, there's always a point of hypocrisy hidden away in their labors. No matter how hard the fruit seller tries to hide the blemish, we discover it when we pick the piece of fruit/product up from the stand.

There's only really one way to get people past this issue completely: Stop trying to hide it. Obliterate the concept of waste as a negative attribute of consumption, and embrace it as part of a living process that goes hand in hand with notions of product reuse and rebirth.

For designers, this means being unafraid to present options to our clients that have extraordinarily low impact and considering solutions that exploit waste products as design opportunities. (This has more impact for print and product design than interactive work.) And this isn't a novel activity—designers have been doing it for decades. But when a project reaches a certain scale, we force in economies of mass production. This is also when we lose a direct connection to the material at hand.

Since we're often tasked with projects that require mass reproduction, choosing to invest physical time and labor into an activity of making forces active awareness and a personal connection to the material. Just as growing tomatoes in a garden forces a deep personal bond between you and the fruit—which flips your mindset from transaction to interaction—clients can shift from paying you for a service rendered (and washing their hands of the production impact) to truly understanding the physical effect of their marketing and product design choices.

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So for all of us, the real question here is: What do you consider waste in your life—as a person and a designer? And which of those types of waste can't be returned to the Earth in a meaningful way? We need to put aside clients here, because the litmus test for creating waste is not through a client's eyes.

Could you imagine asking your clients to hand-assemble a brochure with you that's made from paper reclaimed from a printer's remainder bin, then printed with soy inks—on a wind-powered press—which had then been hand-tied with paper belly bands that are made from the leavings trimmed off the same press sheets?

To a client's ear, this sounds just plain crazy. Why would they spend a week assembling that, when they can just outsource it to a vendor?

Well, why would I grow asparagus in my garden, losing a few dozen stalks in the process and expending many weekends of effort for a meager output, when I could buy the same amount of asparagus air-shipped from Argentina for $3.99 a bunch? Hmm... the arguments are starting to sound quite similar.

These are all variations of the same kinds of problem—just manifested in different ways. Waste is a byproduct of human development. It is a thought construct, made manifest in our lives via rubbish on the trash heap.

I can only hope that will we find ways to put these kinds of problems to better use. Otherwise, they'll be solved for us—and in ways we can neither anticipate or desire.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this piece.

4. Structure your client conversation around the error so it is unerringly constructive.

Set up a formal meeting with your client—you'll need a chunk of uninterrupted time to talk through your plan. Without formally initiating the meeting and preparing the client for the tough dialogue you're about to take part in, you'll immediately raise hackles, put them on guard, and lower the level of respect you've gained to date.

Use neutral language during the call. Be clear that this is a difficult conversation and that there will be a tough conversation ahead, but do it in a personally meaningful way: "This is hard for me to share with you. We care very deeply about the success of your project and want to outline what happened yesterday to the shopping cart on your website, and the actions that we're taking to resolve the situation..."

Take responsibility where appropriate, and provide a clear course of action that rights the perceived problem. Transcend the issue and be clear as to how you've already gone down the path of resolving the problem with a clearly defined solution. If there are a range of solutions to deal with the issue, outline each of them clearly before soliciting feedback.

Do not allow your client the opportunity to use this as leverage to ask for things like discounts, new features, and so forth. Resolving a project error is not horse trading. And as far as I know, there is no way to provide a discount for stress caused due to an unforeseen circumstances.

Also, there is no way to barter a new feature based on another feature failing. Instead, the error should be righted before there is a discussion of compensation or barter.

Don't ever formally engage your client without a very clear idea of how you can resolve the problem. If you do have to have client contact over the hours it'll take you to formulate your plan, keep it as simple as, "We're aware of the issue and are currently creating a plan that we will present to you on [date and time] to resolve it." Otherwise, you'll end up working out a solution with the client, and unless you're an expert negotiator or have an exceedingly tight relationship with your client, everything you say during your conversation may create liability. As such, you may need to say, "I wish I could answer that question, but I need to talk with [insert name of important person] before I can make an assessment. Can we talk later today, when I have the specifics?" Don't put your firm at risk for taking on liability for something said in the heat of the moment!

And honestly, this is where most design firms blow it. I can't count how many times major errors—even those caused directly by a client—have been wiped clean by a mea culpa on the part of the studio principal. The client was then unaware that the cost impact of the error was rolled into the next client's project with nary a word.

While ensuring maximum client satisfaction, this approach can yield negative returns in the long run—especially if the client questions why your pricing has risen over the past three months...

I describe this approach as the "abject fear" method of client service. It only goes to infantilize your business relationship.

5. Execute on the plan as swiftly as you can.

This requires no description. Show your hustle.

6. Record the error in a manner that helps you assess future risk and educate your peers.

If you knew that an upcoming, highly complex project was going to put a lot of strain on your client relationship, would you call it out before you even started?

This is where most designers feign forgetfulness—and part of the reason why I started writing this blog in the first place. Documenting failure, and having constructive methods of dealing with failure in the future, provides the learnings that can make your design business more efficient, effective, and downright mature.

Plus, if you're working on projects of great magnitude—such as Web applications or galactic-scale Web sites—you have to conduct a risk assessment before you move too far through the design and build phase. Otherwise, you're just asking for an unanticipated error to occur.

Sitting down with the client and troubleshooting all the things that could go wrong along the way may sound painful, but it can be conducted in a constructive manner that makes it clear how serious you are about meeting your delivery date, your client's expectations, and delivering a quality product.

Plus, I'll let you in on a little secret: If you've documented your work processes, you can easily fold your learnings you've gained from failures into the document in an unobtrusive manner.

One of the best ways to do this involves creating living pages, not binders that you put up on the shelf or Microsoft Word or Excel docs. Start a simple wiki that outlines the process steps you take when working through different kinds of client engagements. Then, in the wiki, write up a brief paragraph of learnings during various phases of the project that can then be referenced when you're writing up estimates for new projects. Yes, this document could get a little unwieldy in scale over a few years... but it's completely searchable, entirely malleable in structure, and can better withstand sharing and co-editing by your peers and superiors.

Failure Can Bring Clients and Designers Closer

No designer or developer has a 100% perfect delivery record. But a good designer knows how to manage errors that come up in produced materials—whether online or offline—in order to create compelling interactive work. You need to manage delivery, from your initial research to the final build, to maintain a perception of quality in the eyes of your client. Otherwise, your reputation can suffer. Failure in delivery, when poorly managed, can be fatal for your livelihood.

But in the midst of dealing with a project error—especially one caused by both client and designer—there is always a silver lining. It's not until things go wrong that you see the true personality of your client. And vice versa, your client understands more intimately your depth of character.

Your client will respect you even more if you can disclose and erase a mistake, all while showing your true mettle in how you handle it.

Read Part 1 of this piece.

Here's where you should always begin:

1. Determine your role in the error's genesis.

To gauge the error's impact, start from the point that it manifested itself and work backward. Where in your business process did the fruit of this error begin to flourish?

Now is not the time to reprimand a staffer or lay waste to a project team with harsh words. If it was your delegate that made the mistake, that doesn't mean that they're responsible. Know where in the chain of command the error happened, whom it impacted, and how everyone—both designer and client alike—may have contributed to the outcome.

This activity is not about blame. It is about systematically assessing the actors on the stage, and examining how their behavior may have influenced the project's progress. This is what's known as root-cause analysis. In doing so, you'll need to keep yourself from thinking, "In hindsight, I would have..." and focus on the basic facts of what went wrong. This is when you get to dig through your email, interview your colleagues, explore documentation and functional requirements, crack open design files, sift through code, and otherwise reconstruct the path your project has taken through the design process. Ideally, you should document in writing what you discover. There may be legal ramifications to what you've found, and having a trail documented in writing may be critical if you end up in court.

If your team can handle it (while they're working hard to right the error), have them aid you in the process. After all, they're going to feel just as bad as you do until the problem is solved.

2. Gauge the impact of the error to your client.

Try to quantify in hard numbers what your client will suffer until the error is righted. If you're working on an interactive project, gauge through metrics exactly what the impact may have been to your client. Did they lose $10,000 in potential sales due to people clicking a button in an email and going to a 404 page? Or did a thousand people receive the email and only two people clicked on it? You need to understand what the client has tangibly suffered as the result of the error, and using best-case metrics, what potential outcomes they may have suffered. These hard numbers should help guide your action plan.

A critical point here is that your assessment of financial impact does not need to be disclosed in full, unless the client is on the hook for hard costs or a change order due to their role in the error. You'll need to tread carefully if the latter is the case, because first they'll need to be convinced that the error is their onus to bear. Much like in court, the client is often innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

If the real root cause is something of a black box, such as beta-grade technology or a partner that has failed due to inscrutable reasons, I hope that you've outlined the risks and contingencies associated with their use or participation. Otherwise, you're going to need to disclose those issues as swiftly as possible to the client as part of your plan...

3. Write a plan as to how the error will be mitigated, and by whom.

Once you know where the error cropped up in your business process, and it's clear how much damage your client may have suffered to date, you need to formally write a plan of action. This plan can then be sent to the client via email after you've discussed the error over the phone.

What shape should your plan take? It needs to address the following:

• Where did the error appear?
• When did the error happen?
• Who was involved in the error?
• Why did the error happen?
• What are we doing to fix the error?
• How are we ensuring that the error never happens again?
• What are the impacts on your business, both in terms of dollars, schedule, and customer service?

You may need to outline more than one course of action to resolve the error, especially if there's a cost or schedule impact on the client. In these cases, always advocate the best option for the situation that puts the least amount of burden on your client. (That is, unless they caused the error and need to assume responsibility for helping to resolve it. I've seen the latter happen when working off client-hosted servers, or using client-selected vendors for photography or printing.)

It's definitely a sign of maturity to take responsibility when anything major goes wrong on a project. Even if you didn't foresee the consequences of your actions, you get to fall on your sword. If you hired the vendor, you have to manage their failures as well, and work together with them to make things right.

Don't wait to communicate the plan. The longer an error remains unaddressed, the more risk you assume from it. However, don't rush through your plan to get it in front of the client. Have it vetted by the highest levels within your organization.

*

In my next post, I'll cover the rest of these action steps and a few glimmers of hope in the midst of a hard fail.

Go on to Part 3.

Refreshed by your first eight hours of sleep in what feels like a decade, you stroll into your office, only to be stopped cold by the message light blinking on your voicemail.

It's your client, with a three-minute description of how their new shopping cart system—which you'd been slaving over for months, and finally deployed late last night—has been balking while trying to process credit card purchases. For hours. To the tune of many thousands of dollars lost in sales.

How will you resolve this issue, and how are you going to communicate a plan of action to your client?

Where we most often fail in the client management process is when, after all that work, errors still slip through—and we can't formally explain to our clients how we'll resolve them to their benefit.

Depending on the scale of your client's business, an error in project implementation could have a major fiscal impact—not to mention the drag on your long-term customer experience. Errors like the ones I noted above happen more often than we would care to admit. Most web designers understand the value of testing protocols, debugging code, and stabilizing a build in order to deploy a website or web app. But it's how we manage the errors that slip through while testing, printing, or fulfilling your design work that forges project success. Dealing with project errors in a professional manner is what defines the longevity of designer-client relationships.

Here's a quick primer on how to maintain your professionalism and protect the integrity of your client relationships when resolving these kinds of major project errors.

A Project Error in Right Field

I hate sports metaphors, but this one seems apropos.

You're watching a Mariners baseball game. Two outfielders collide while both reaching for a long fly ball in center field, thereby yielding two runs and a horde of pissed fans. That's a major error that could cost the team the game. It gets put up on the scoreboard, for all to see.

In client relationships, small errors can be smoothed over, especially if you are in a review cycle. In my mind, a major error is one that will go up on the project scoreboard for your clients and customers to see. In these situations, your relationship is in jeopardy if you don't follow a formal protocol in how you manage the error's effect.

The following is a six-step process for working through a major mistake and resolving it with your client:

1. Determine your role in the error's genesis.
2. Gauge the impact of the error to your client and to your project team.
3. Write a plan describing how the error will be mitigated.
4. Share the plan with your client, ensuring that all conversation around the error is unerringly constructive.
5. Execute on the plan as swiftly as you can.
6. Record the error in a public manner that helps you assess future risk and educate your peers.

In my next posts, I'll describe in depth how you can work through each of these steps to mitigate a major error.

Go on to Part 2.

This July, I'll be making the leap to the Seattle office of frog design—as a senior interaction designer.

I'm very excited to be joining a firm whose work and legacy I've followed through my career. Their recent establishment of the publication Design Mind—as well as their devotion to engaging high-impact pro bono work alongside their always-stunning client projects—are borne out of a sustained commitment to design's pivotal role in industry and culture.

It's been quite a journey to arrive at this destination.

*

September, 1993. University of Virginia. I was sitting in the back of my "Introduction to Systems Engineering" class, and our teacher Thomas Hutchinson was handing out our first group assignment. I eagerly fished my notebook out of my backpack, brushing aside The Design of Everyday Things, the obligatory issue of Ray Gun, and Mark Strand's Selected Poems. Most students were already in awe of Thomas; the previous year he and his graduate class had invented an eye-gaze control for computers. His classes were innovative, formative, and pragmatic.

"For this project, I would like you to build an MRI...for horses."

As Professor Hutchinson began to frame the problem, the excitement level in the room rose palpably. We would work together to create a business case for the product, then research, visually render, and formally present a design solution. And while this product was most useful for racehorses, for whom a hairline fracture was an expensive and often deadly proposition, there was the potential to extend the application to many other potential human needs.

As I began to turn the problem over in my head, I realized that what I thought of as "design" did not even begin to encompass this problem. I had only designed the high school literary magazine—and it was clear here that I had to abandon considerations of surface and interface. I had to go more deeply into observing human need. Graphic design was a flat point of contact between a product and a viewer. This kind of design? This was a completely different beast that would draw on every ounce of expertise that I had at my disposal.

Which wasn't a whole lot. Did I mention that I was a freshman? My knowledge store was empty. Four years later I graduated with an English degree.

*

After two years in the Systems Engineering program, I had discovered that, while I was deeply interested in researching and crafting the experience of things, I was not so interested in building the nuts and bolts that made it technically possible. I returned to my first love, writing, and took design and art classes to round out my education.

Three weeks before I matriculated, a dozen of us were honored with the opportunity to share our work at a department-wide reading. My advisor stepped to the podium, over a hundred of my fellow peers and writing professors seated before her. Her generous introduction that night was prophetic: "I could easily see David having a successful career in writing, editing, or advertising."

I had already interned at Houghton Mifflin. I'd been applying to editorial assistant jobs in New York and had been sniffing at opportunities to string or edit local magazines. (This is back when people were actually paid a decent wage for publication.) So, I did fulfill my advisor's predictions in full.

The first three years of my career were spent working in publishing, with a magazine that supported professional writers. It was enough to scare me off writing for almost four years, and to immerse myself in the world of graphic design, which pushed me to advertising and direct marketing.

In my engineering school in 1993, they hadn't yet discovered the vocabulary of interaction design—a high-level awareness of how "design" informs "engineering" and vice versa. I had no words for it either, even after a decade of playing in the visual design space and crafting a good number of Web sites. Without a framework, I would internalize lessons and principles with each new project, but I simply had no way to look at them holistically.

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Then, along came Worktank. This Seattle-based agency is where I have been privileged to work with some insanely talented designers whose experience firmly straddled the worlds of visual design and interaction design. These past two years of my life led to tackling some really rewarding projects. Colleagues like Carrie Byrne, Ric Ewing, and Kalie Kimball-Malone had an amazing depth of expertise in user experience design and information architecture that they were quite generous to share with me. (And if you're looking for a great job as a user experience lead in Seattle, feel free to apply for my former position.)

My Worktank team also led me to start this blog and begin writing again on a regular basis. I'm extraordinarily grateful and could never have anticipated the rewards it has brought me. My work here taught me that one could truly integrate art and engineering—Worktank gave me the framework.

*

Last fall, I realized that I wanted to see what I could build on this framework. How I could approach the same kinds of challenges that I'd faced when I was in engineering school—only this time as an interaction designer.

After a number of discussions with frog, it became clear that it was a place to test my interaction design experience and push the boundaries of technology to their limit. Well, except for the limit on horse MRIs—they were introduced to the U.S. market in 2004.

While my employer will be changing, the focus and tenor of ChangeOrder won't be changing one bit. I'm devoted to making this blog a practical resource for working designers—no matter what adjective you place before your job title.

The following advice sounds easy to put into practice, but it isn't.

If you're participating in a major brainstorm, you need to move beyond conversation as a way of communicating your creative ideas.

Act out your layouts. Make physical prototypes. Role-play different scenarios in character. Challenge the need to provide critique. Leave your rational mind behind and feel free to go random, as long as your launch pad is the creative brief. And always have someone record every idea that's being shared in the room, from start to finish—both in word and in sketch form. Record everything on video if you can't take notes fast enough.

Why is it so hard to foster ideation that extends past the spoken word? Companies like IDEO have been plugging this mindset for eons, but I sit in brainstorm after brainstorm where people fall into ideation patterns. One person has an idea, which they share out loud. Then another person has an idea, which is verbalized in the same manner. There's a slow verbal dance back and forth about those ideas. Sometimes, someone writes that idea down on a whiteboard or notepad. We explore through language the nooks and crannies of what's being communicated through only one medium: spoken words.

This is a real shame, because there is important information not being communicated about your ideas—nuances and options that aren't being communicated, captured, and otherwise emoted.

And that extra information is where the real surprises happen in a brainstorm. The more information you get into the brainstorming group, the more ideas you'll get out as a result. This is just simple math.

If you don't understand this need to include verbal, written, sketched, and acted-out information as part of your brainstorming output, watch this great brief video by Maya:

Why does struggle persist around moving from conversation into performance in a brainstorm? I think this has to do with falling into patterns: in behavior, in choice of methods, in history with a client, in who likes or dislikes whom as part of a group of employees. You may not even be conscious of the patterns, but they will govern the dynamic of your meeting.

And the common result of falling into a brainstorming pattern is that you only collect one type of information as the output—most often, the spoken word. Also, based on previous efforts with your team, you jump to conclusions about other people's ideas based on perceived biases.

These patterns can be broken more easily than you can imagine.

No matter whether it's the first time you're brainstorming with a new client team, or if you're sitting down with your close friends and colleagues for ideation meeting #234, apply concerted effort to stop loosely repeating patterns. You need to consciously choose how you're going to vary the meeting activities to make your brainstorm more effective.

Not more productive, mind you. The end goal should be to launch into orbit. Try these tips:

Snap the brainstorming team into smaller working groups, then reconvene those groups to share ideas. In small working groups, you can have three or four conversations going concurrently instead of one large one. In those groups, you can choose to use different brainstorming methods to encourage different kinds of ideas as output. Then, after those small groups have met, bring them all back together to share their learnings and synthesize the ideas into more radical results. Also, by choosing to split the room into teams, and pairing people together that have had less time to form working patterns, you can use that fresh contact to encourage creative friction.

Collapse your timeframe and force the process of making. You'd think that endless time would encourage more creative thinking. I've found the opposite: Cutting long brainstorms into discrete "time-boxes" of even ten minutes in length, stopping for brief assessments, then moving into new activities forces more ideas out more quickly. However, this approach requires discipline. During those time-boxed segments, there must always be output on paper. Otherwise, ideas get lost in the quick flow of activity.

Give people license to not be themselves. Hand out hats or other physical objects that give your team the license to get "outside themselves" and act in ways that may be considered silly or stupid by a layperson. Again, the goal here is to break patterns and create empathy. Perhaps you could dress up as your persona and spend some time talking about problems you've been having throughout your day—then act out how those problems are solved. Another person on your team could then pick up another object that makes them the computer, and they can have a conversation with your persona about why they just can't get along.

Be radically divergent in how you gather brainstorming inputs. Brainstorming always has inputs, usually from research, a creative brief, lived experience, and so forth. Augment that data by leaving the office and getting into the flow of real-world experience as a launch-pad. If you're trying to prototype how to create a better espresso maker, go to the coffee shop and have two of your teammates chat up the barrista while another teammates takes notes and observes how the coffee is made with their machine. And maybe another person goes and asks commuters how they like their coffee, and why they buy it there. Then quickly convene and commence ideating off your observations. Your brainstorming may come from being out in the world and in the flow of experiencing the world, not from talking in a conference room.

Don't make it work to do the brainstorming work. The idea of brainstorming as work is an illusion that should be killed without mercy. Find ways to remove the context of work from the experience. This can be as simple as describing ground rules for your brainstorm at the start of the meeting, then enforcing them by demonstrating the rules through your behavior. Yes, this means that you'll be the one acting out how the blind person is trying to find their boxer shorts when they wake up in the morning. Tough.

Be unforgiving when people snipe at ideas. Don't allow criticism or judgment to impede the flow of ideation until critique is absolutely necessary. Don't wait to nip negative comments in the bud!

Forget considerations of quality until you've got quantity. Don't stop at three or seven ideas, even if a few of them are deemed midstream by the group as killer. There are always more ideas out there that could augment your thinking in unique ways.

I listen to the nest of baby starlings outside my front window. In the midst of their morning song, I have picked out their attempts to recreate the sounds of car alarms, police sirens, foghorns from boats on Lake Union, cars accelerating, the cry of a toddler, doors shutting, and the calls of robins, crows, flickers, and a wide range of other birds that throng the trees and marshes near our home.

The song of the starling seems like a random melange of clicks, whistles, warbles, and otherwise incongruous chatter. But the starling does speak in a pattern—one that is barely perceptible to the human ear, but possible to decode. Philosophy professor and musician David Rothenberg wrote a lovely book called Why Birds Sing that delves into this very subject:

"Starlings eat everything, and they absorb all manner of peculiar sounds, choosing those that fit their own aesthetic... a full starling song, which takes about a minute to sing, is composed of four distinct kinds of phrases... [where] each [phrase] is repeated two or more times before the bird moves on to the next type... First, one or two descending whistles, out of a repertoire of two to twelve different kinds; then a quieter, continuous warbling, in which imitations of various birds living in the starling's territory are often inserted; the third part of the song is a series of rapid clicks, up to fifteen per second, a rattling or ratcheting with no clear breaks between; finally, the song concludes with loud, high-pitched squeals, repeated many times."

Mr. Rothenberg encourages us to listen to a starling after reading this description. "You'll immediately hear things you did not hear before," he says.

I did what he said, and he was right: the structure of the song was immediately perceptible. I could actually pick up the shifts between phases of the song.

But what still stood out for me through all the of the buzzing and clanking of this small poofy bird was his clattletrap accumulation of observed sounds. I often feel like my job as a designer is much like the starling's everyday song.

My daily task is to curate what I've observed—whether pictorial, linguistic, auditory, and so forth—and find opportunities to fold those details into my work. That work is composed of predetermined patterns made up of an ever-expanding repertoire of elements, blending the components of my client's brands with details that resonate with my personal aesthetic.

Often, we struggle against the patterns that underly what we create—but when you break these patterns with intent, the design you're crafting won't function properly. The meaning of the work veers into the realm of art and personal expression, instead of opening up more widely into public expression.

Or, another way to think about this: imagine a bird building a nest where, instead of resting their eggs on top of a finely woven bed of leaves and sticks, the eggs are resting under it. Not common bird behavior. The pattern of nest-making has been broken in a very unusual way, and the utility of the form has been intentionally lost. Some designers use this type of design behavior to great effect, but their work is not the norm—and their audience is intentionally narrowed by their choices.

I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, as I love design work that has wit and intelligence, and there are many projects that require this approach. But the obverse is more often true: by trying to do something unique, the form of their design work is poorly asserted. Wit can't salvage miscommunication.

You've experienced this a million times. You look at a logo or an advertisement and you can't understand what you're looking at. Instead of a nest in front of you, it's a pile of leaves and sticks. Where do the eggs go?

The form within your design has to be perceivable in an intuitive manner—clearly visible only in the clarity of the message's expression. Other people don't look at designed artifacts like we do. It's like when mechanics drive cars. They hear a clanking under the hood, and start imagining which parts aren't functioning quite right. Everyone else, they just drive the car, listen to the radio, and drink their morning coffee while hoping that the express lanes aren't jammed up.

But there's a further, critical consideration here. For a design to be successful—and by that, I hope to imply great—there must be at least one detail within that design that is luminous. Much like the starling song being attractive and unusual to the human ear, when we hear the luminous detail of the baby crying amidst the clicks and whistles, we feel wonder.

It is a humble goal to design an artifact that contains even one little glimmer of wonder. So hard, and so rare to fulfill. Often I feel like it's a lifetime's work.

Yet there's a certain kind of satisfaction that comes from providing wonder that all can feel, however briefly, in one blinding flash. Amazing design, like great art, can cause you to rethink your life in a moment.

But as designers, we have to be prepared for the other side of that coin: that for design to function properly, its output dies and is eternally reborn. The idea of Keats's grecian urn—with its lovers lost in an unfulfilled embrace—will last forever. The iPod will be a footnote in history.

This is our Faustian bargain with human progress: it never ends, and it is always dying.

*

When you see a starling and they aren't caught up in their usual arguments and conversations, they are acquiring sounds. Once my wife and I found this out, we began trying to teach the starlings to say a single word. Whenever we see them on the power lines outside our window, we coo that single word over and over to them: "Hello... Hello... Hello..."

The hope is that in a few days, we will hear our own voices back, translated and submerged in that strange mechanical language they employ.

What a strange gift, this shallow mimicry.

“If you wanna innovate, you gotta design.” —Marty Neumeier

From the airy confines of interior design to the tailored minutae of the type designer, the varied disciplines of our profession continue to rush outwards like galaxies fleeing the Big Bang. And the force that drives our profession’s expansion? The universal process we call design.

As designers, we have lived and breathed this process often enough to embody its power, in whatever domain we choose. For a businessperson, however, design is nebulous. A slippery fish. When placed on a slide under the accountant’s microscope, design can perish—even in the most progressive corporate culture. And without design, there is no innovation.

But do not fear. To the rescue is Marty Neumeier, with The Designful Company. Much like Mr. Neumeier’s other bestsellers, The Brand Gap and Zag, his new whiteboard overview is set to completely reinvigorate how our profession engages executives in the boardroom. Finally, we have a shared vocabulary that marries aesthetics to business—and from a book with such simplicity, elegance, and verve, it’s downright humbling...

Read my full review of The Designful Company on The Designer's Review of Books.

Apple's announcement on Monday regarding the iPhone 3G S, with voice control, represents more than just a way to manage your iPod state and dial phone calls in a hands-free manner. It's an important step in growing new flavors of user interface that are contingent on the intangible into the mainstream.

I'm not talking solely about Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), or the profession of Voice Interaction Design (VIxD), or the many small fiefdoms and associations currently blossoming around human-computer interaction governed by conversational speech systems. These are useful and important niches, but let's think big in our increasingly fractured and over-specialized profession of design.

Let me propose a somewhat radical alternative: roll Voice User Interfaces into a category that I'd like to dub the Intangible User Interface.

We have Graphical User Interfaces, which we know quite well from decades of struggling with operating systems. Our new friends, the Touch and Natural User Interfaces, rely on our physical bodies for operation beyond things like mice and keyboards. Intangible User Interfaces, however, would be a branch of interface that relies on everything but using your physical body in motion as an input mechanism. There's some wobbly semantics around the word "intangible," as it's often used to describe the attributes of a designed system that can't be visibly measured or quantified when observing users. However, it's that specific quality that I want to focus on: input and output contingent on what cannot be seen.

With those parameters, speech is only one of a wide variety of ways to interface with a computer. What if you were provided with a ballcap that had electrodes placed at the temples, so you could transmit your thoughts to the iPhone 9G in order to control your iPod? Can an interface prompt you with a scent when dinner's ready? If you're feeling sad, will the room brighten up and the coffee maker brew you a cup of tea?

This stuff isn't so crazy. We already have the technology, in a rough form, to move beyond linguistics into how brainwaves can stimulate simple interactions. Like any nascent innovation, this field will move from novelty to the stuff of science fiction in our lifetime.

And these experiences will need to be designed, not just dictated by scientists. Exploring device control beyond considerations of visual stimuli—the senses that inform our brain, and the signals that our brains create which cause us to behave in certain ways—falls squarely into our domain as designers and communicators when to comes to how the experience unfolds. But we will have to partner with neuroscientists and technologists to try and understand such bold questions as: What does speech look like to a computer when you are voicing a thought? How does a computer understand the non-linguistic human mind without us simply recreating ourselves within the machine? (Though we may need to...) Will us forcing ourselves to think in specific ways to interface with machines radically change the shape of human thought, for better or for worse? And my favorite question of the bunch: How do we manage detailed, unique thoughts and emotions in different cultures and languages?

This is the next level of radical exploration beyond the Voice User Interface. Light will always be faster than sound, and the speed of thought will always beat out the time necessary to transmit the verbal "handshake" that voice interfaces require. Systems that mimic human-grade communication, via technologies employed in such a humble manner as "Speak or press one for movie times in your area," are now tottered beyond baby steps into a happy adolescence. But this method of interaction is only one branch of a field that will move beyond the idea of the shared gesture, whether physical or verbal, and into a more esoteric realm.

Therein lies the rub for this next great frontier: Before we can design for the intangible experience, we must first dismantle ourselves. Understanding the human mind, to date, has been beyond the human mind's comprehension. And this whole discussion verges on the idea of people becoming bionic, which is a whole other area of inquiry. (Leading us to robotics, killer machines dominating the world, and so forth.)

Until that bright future, I'm fascinated to see how we can start thinking about designing for thought and emotional input in computing. Who knows—maybe an alien race will provide us with the details, thereby saving us thousands of years of research...

To get to point B, first you need to figure out how you arrived at point A.

Take the following example: You've been asked to lead a half-year marketing project for an international cruise line. They're launching a new luxury cruise liner that serves the Caribbean via Miami. Your new client wants you to help her sell out a full season on the new boat. They have a ton of ideas to share with you on how they can accomplish their goals.

Sitting down for your first meeting—an information-gathering session at corporate headquarters—your responsibility is to determine the scope of the campaign and help brainstorm tactics. After the meeting, you'll write a creative brief and prepare to kick off the project with your design team.

After a few minutes of small talk, your client starts to rattle off the details. Three new ports of call. An Olympic-sized swimming pool on the top deck. A new five-star dining menu with a first-rate wine list. Right away, the design ideas start flowing fast and furious in your mind. In the margin of your notebook, you start a few initial sketches that you just know will sell out all the luxury berths through the entire winter season. Suddenly, you blurt out: "Send the travel agents coconuts!"

Not five minutes had elapsed in your information-gathering session, and you've gone right to work. Such scenarios, where you have a clear vision of design solutions to marry up with a stated marketing goal, often seem serendipitous. But the habit of engaging in design ideation before having a thorough understanding of your client's business context is a bad one that should be broken. I'm not denying the value of intuition in the design process, but rather seeking that we employ our intuition after we have created a strategy by which to focus it.

Which leads to the crux of this scenario. A critical skill for any client-facing designer is the ability to scape away at the surface of a marketing problem to thoroughly understand its business context. Marketing is not business. Marketing is an activity that supports doing business. If you don't have a business context for a marketing project—i.e, understanding what business decisions led to engaging a designer's services to participate in sales and marketing activity—then talking strategy and marketing tactics can be somewhat ungrounded.

So, when situations such as these emerge during a client engagement, I immediately try to "unsolve the business problem." This is the act of shifting a client's conversational focus from the stated marketing problem to the underlying system of business conditions that led to its formation. By understanding the system of challenges in which your client's stated problem stands, you can better serve your client in forging a more strategic, better-designed result.

What follows are eight critical questions you can ask your clients—and glean insight into the business context around their marketing problems.

Question #1: What business conditions caused this marketing problem to come about?

You don't need to be an expert in business to ask this question, and the answers will always inspire dialogue that furthers the project's strategy.

Take the cruise line story as an example. This business problem didn't just magically appear out of nowhere—it emerged from a tangled web of market conditions and audience expectations. Why did the cruise line decide to build a new ship? Was it for more revenue? To position themselves against a competitor? Did their customers ask for it after spending a week on a thirty-year-old ship that was falling into disrepair? In order to market something properly and be strategic in your design thinking, you can't be ignorant when considering the facts undergirding the stated marketing problem.

When you are tasked with approaching large-scale business problems, this step can only be skipped at great peril. And many designers don't even realize until they're deep into execution exactly how much information they were missing through their discovery phase.

Question #2: Is the client aware of their role in the marketing problem's formation?

This is scary territory for a designer to tread, but you can couch this question in a manner that feels empowering. It can be phrased as, "How did you determine that [name of business issue] needed to be addressed?"

Clients often create their own problems due to a host of unique concerns, such as siloed business lines, power struggles, market conditions influencing shareholder value, and poor customer experiences that can't be patched over with an increased marketing spend. Don't assume that you can stay free of said concerns in the design process. They will weave their way into your work, whether you like it or not.

If you hear a client talk 100% about the competition and not about their own actions, it's likely that there is another layer of information that needs to be sussed out in a delicate, perhaps indirect fashion. After a few lunches out, the truth always emerges.

Question #3: What other (potentially related) business and/or marketing problems have arisen that you aren't aware of?

Tackling marketing problems can often be like playing Whack-A-Mole—knock one varmint down, and another one that's tangentially related immediately pops up.

In the case of the new cruise ship, did they mention the other new ship that is servicing South America during the same season and will be co-marketed with the Caribbean ship? Or that their cruise line just had a series of poor reviews in Travel + Leisure, and as a result, they have embarked on a brand-building exercise to bolster their reputation? You may have been hired to solve just one problem, but it could be interwoven with many others. This is inevitable, unless you sell just one thing to one person in one place.

Any time a client says, "Don't worry about [X] other project/issue, it isn't related," put a little note in your notebook to be aware of it. The answer is often awaiting you, three conversations later.

Question #4: Who are the actors in tacking the marketing problem, and what is their role in the business?

You need to know who is part of the "extended client team" that may review your work, from start to finish. And the person who's the boss of all of them needs to be signing your creative brief.

Question #5: What other possible business and/or marketing strategies did you consider before settling on this specific course of action?

This question needs to be asked, because exploring the range of thinking around the marketing problem often begets larger and more constructive solutions. Though this doesn't mean you get carte blanche to play business consultant and sell your client on a new business strategy. It means you want your client to explain how their organization thinks through business challenges as a team. This lets you understand their working process, where you fit into it, and what skills or insights you may have during the engagement that evolve their thinking around the business problem. Don't come off like somebody from McKinsey & Co, as you will always lose out. Simply be curious, honest, and intentionally naive in order to see their range of thought.

Question #6: What are the conditions for success in "solving" this marketing problem?

I put the word "solving" in quotes because we usually don't solve client problems. We provide solutions that help to effect change over time, thereby changing the parameters of the problem. For my imaginary cruise line, at the end of every year that client will want to sell out all the berths on the cruise ship. The methods they employ in doing so will evolve based on marketing actions over time. You need metrics for success to make sure that your work is perceived as a success. Otherwise, they may not judge the quality of your work performance fairly. These kinds of conversations shouldn't happen when you're solving the problem. They should occur when you're framing the problem. (Unless you're just doing research.)

Question #7: What are the long-term brand considerations that undergird the problem?

You should never ignore the broader story you're telling for your client. You aren't just doing a project—you're contributing to the trajectory of your client's brand. If you're encouraging customers to go to the Caribbean during the winter months, you may also be planting the seeds for a larger marketing story that ties into other (related) business goals.

I'm not saying to dilute the effectiveness of your work by trying to put in multiple messages. I'm encouraging you to consider the broader story of your client's brand, and how your design choices in execution contribute to their overall brand strategy.

Question #8: How is your client being measured across the problem-solving effort?

Clients have performance reviews. They need to meet goals as well. They need a Plan B or Plan C to make it through any potential calamity unscathed. You need to know where the exit doors are before you get on the ship—for both of you. This doesn't need to be discussed... just be aware of how to help your client succeed with you.

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Part root-cause analysis, part client psychotherapy—unsolving a business problem takes considerate, mindful effort. But it has an amazing byproduct for any designer. It lets clients know that you want to contribute to their business success beyond mere aesthetics. And who knows? Perhaps your efforts may inspire another project or two down the line that you weren't even aware of...

The art director shut the door quietly behind me, waving me into a seat. Out the windows of his office, I could see snarls of traffic waiting at a traffic light. Rain sluiced off our building in rhythmic waves. The gray weather outside lulled me into a sense of serenity. I liked my new job and the people that worked there. This was my first big agency job, and so far everyone I'd met had been quite helpful. I didn't know what this meeting was about, but I assumed it regarded a new, exciting client engagement that I would soon tackle.

The first thing out of my boss's mouth?

"The most important rule here is that you don't miss a deadline."

This meeting was not going to be about me taking on a new project. My first set of comps would not be critiqued for the nonprofit initiative we'd just begun. No, we were going to talk about the agency's expectations for my design work.

Or, more to be more accurate, we were going to talk about deadlines. I had missed one for an internal project due to time mismanagement on my part, and I didn't let the project manager know until the time of the actual deadline that I would miss it. The project manager complained to the account manager, who then called up the creative director, who sent an email to my manager, who now had me in his office.

Apparently, this was a big deal that would not be smoothed over by me saying, "Oops."

"Our schedules here are managed very closely," he continued. "If you miss a deadline, then the account managers don't have time to review the work. If the work goes to the client and a critical detail isn't covered, then the account manager and the project manager both need to take responsibility for not catching it. But in the end, the blame for the error will be on you, because you didn't manage your time wisely."

As we continued the conversation and my defensive hackles began to lower, I realized I hadn't considered the importance of deadlines beyond my domain of control: creating the tangible, designed artifact. I had come from working at a small design firm, where each of us had had direct client contact and could smooth over tight deadlines by calling up the client and sharing our ideas verbally. Besides, we would only be late with a set of deliverables by a few hours...

Now multiply that staff load by ten, then add in a dash of inter-agency politics and a very hefty amount of strategic thinking that was going on before the work even began. Deadlines became more than just gates that stood through the design process for approval, iteration, and refinement. Deadlines were the lifeblood of ensuring large, complex projects remained on the rails. The client experience could not be influenced negatively by missing a deadline, or turning in work that was not on brief. Otherwise, we were risking long-term issues with the client relationship. And it costs more money to bring in a new client instead of retaining your current ones and initiating new projects with them.

In short, my control of my creative process was crashing up against the well-planned business process of the organization—and in the eyes of my cohorts and managers, my creative process would always need to fit into the structure they'd quite intelligently designed.

"Now, here's the trick about deadlines," my art director continued. "Just because you're given a deadline doesn't mean you need to accept it. Everything can be negotiated."

"But I didn't have any more time!" I said back. "By the time I got through the layout edits on the other project, it was too late to warn the other project manager."

"You knew that before you got through the edits," my manager shot back. "You just didn't think in advance exactly what it would take to get the work done, and tell the project manager that you might need to negotiate a new deadline. If you crack the door open a little bit that you might be late or need help, they aren't going to get upset at you for missing the deadline. They're going to want to help you get the work done as quickly as possible within your bandwidth. If other designers are free, they can help you. You aren't alone in this."

"Besides," he added, "They always pad the deadlines by an hour or two so that if you do go over your time, they aren't completely burned. But they're busy people too, and they have to do their QA to make sure the work is great. So gaming them gaming you isn't going to work. Every deadline needs a buffer."

A twenty-story-tall light bulb went off in my head at that very moment—that I was part of a living system, a corporate organism designed to effectively deliver business results to my clients. Design was the reason that our clients hired us, and consistent follow-through was a cost of doing business. The two are inseparable when applying design in a professional context. To wit:

Each person you add to a project team increases the complexity of execution by an order of magnitude—and the risk of missing a deadline. You are responsible for managing this risk. I learned this not only from being a designer, but also playing in a number of rock bands. Power trio: easy to manage. Four-piece: Sometimes a struggle to get together for practice. Five band members: Impossible to get together for practice without everyone's concerted effort. Add a few more people and things get even hairier.

The reason project managers keep their jobs is by managing risk brought about by a high number of moving parts. The same goes for working with a large client team—more clients means more feedback, which is why you always see designers encouraging a single point of contact who serves as triage and final say on all feedback. The cats need to be herded on both the design side and the client side.

If you think you are going to be late on a deliverable, you need to warn everyone impacted as soon as possible—not at the last second. If you've got two days to get the comps finished, but the studio is completely overloaded, now is the time for damage control. Either you hire people to help you finish the work, go into crazy overtime, or you have an honest negotiation with your client as to when you'll need to deliver the work and preserve your boundaries.

Yes, you can look bad in the latter situation and risk losing face with regard to your long-term working relationship. You also send a signal to your clients that you don't know how to manage your time, which dilutes your client experience.

If you wait until the day it's due to drop the bomb on Mr. Client, you're doing everyone involved in the process a disservice. Which leads to a further consideration of how you run your design practice...

You need to accept the volume of work that you can actually handle—and not fear declining or deferring the start of new work. I have trouble saying no or deferring opportunities, and there are a few outstanding obligations glimmering in my consciousness right now that have to be addressed. It was my fault that I accepted them knowing that I had twelve balls already up in the air. I need to manage my time better to accomplish what's necessary while still eating, sleeping, and having a life outside of the practice of design. Otherwise, I am going to be living in Burnout City for the foreseeable future.

Does this story sound familiar? I think every designer, at some level, doesn't want to turn away a good thing. In many ways, we need strip away the idea of "good" and make evaluating each opportunity more about knowing exactly what your pipeline looks like and knowing how much work you can tolerate without turning into a work machine. Asking to defer work before it's engaged won't make you look unprofessional. It will tell others that you have a stable working process and standards that you live by. Those are good things.

You have to continually reassess and re-estimate your time to execute projects accurately to a deadline—or make an educated guess that accommodates multiple failures in a controlled manner. Every designer wrestles with estimating their time, and generally estimates too little of it for every single project they tackle. As a result, they burn extra time up while bringing the work to their level of satisfaction.

How do you break this habit? Set up your billing fees and deadlines to accommodate the proper level of exploration, then add in buffers for project management and account management. If you can't do that, then analyze how you work to find efficiencies. You'd be stunned at how much time opens up in your day if you get very selective over when you answer the phone, check email and your social networks, Twitter, etc. Also, considering what "done" means is a major issue. Depending on the type of deliverable you're creating, showing pencil sketches at first round is completely fair.

You have to respect the time of your client, no matter whether it's a paid contract that you're legally bound to deliver or a personal project for a friend for free. Even if your client is treating you in an unprofessional manner, you should hold to your schedule or deadlines. Don't pay back your client for their behavior. If you ever end up going into mediation or some other legal forum to resolve a dispute, missing deadlines or other milestones that are part of your contract can influence how the scale tips in the final judgment.

And to be clear: In situations where the client says they don't have a deadline, that doesn't mean you can take forever to complete the work. It means you need to propose your own realistic deadline and stick to it. Otherwise, you're risking mismatched expectations for timely delivery and creating a contingency that could cause you to lose a friendship, acquaintance, or future business opportunity.

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Going down this path and asserting control over how you manage deadlines is scary for many designers. In doing so, you aren't focused exclusively on conducting the process of making—which is why we chose to participate in this profession in the first place.

I would argue, however, that one's design training is an accumulation of many skills that form a successful repertoire. Managing deadlines is just one of those skills, and if conducted well over the life of a client project, can contribute value to your overall client relationship and increase the perceived value of your services. It also helps you to manage your own time, so projects don't expand to fill your entire life.

Why would you not want to do that?

1. It's not really a brainstorm. Instead, call these meetings "Idea Validation Sessions," where everyone has done their own brainstorming in advance. Now, they simply want to confirm with the group that their ideas are worth executing (or buff their ego). In the worst case scenario, these meetings serve as an opportunity for the top brass in your firm or client organization to show the power they hold over the flow of ideas. You can nip these faux brainstorm sessions in the bud by letting all meeting participants know that their seed ideas are merely a starting point for a much grander journey.

2. The meeting has no structure. Don't carry the illusion that brainstorm means lack of organization. "Let's just get together in a room and the magic will happen," has been the status quo at some agencies I've worked at, and that tack can misfire. Even if you're working with a team so long that you've developed some level of chemistry, consider providing a structure for each meeting. If you don't have an intent for your brainstorm at the outset, including the desired result, you have no way to fulfill your goals. With a group of free-form thinkers, this can become a problem pretty darn fast.

3. You didn't work from the brief. No surer words can raise my hackles than, "Let's just forget about the brief for a second..." I'm completely comfortable with going with gut intuition and throwing on the board any random thing that comes to mind—which is a big stretch for more linear thinkers—but in the end, it always comes back to the brief. If you're ignoring it, you need to ask yourself: Was it even correct in the first place? And why are you brainstorming when you need to go back and correct it?

4. You didn't travel far enough from the realm of logic. If you're free associating, start with close associations, then move your mind into places where there's no association whatsoever. If you're thinking about lunch, write up on the board what you want for lunch. You'll be surprised how those seemingly mundane details become luminous when associated with potential concept directions.

5. There was too much bounce back and forth between free thinking and critique. The brain isn't a light switch you can just toggle back and forth mercilessly between the left and right hemispheres—but if we treat it as such, we subconsciously expect to stay logical and never submerge ourselves fully in more free-form and nonlinear thought. This is a shame, because subconscious and latent thought are what provide the real "meat" in a brainstorm. You can start out with logic when the brainstorm kicks off, but you should try to preserve a suspension of logic through the midpoint of your brainstorm. And the right place for critique is always at the end of a brainstorm, not during it.

I often think about analogues between design research and Buddhism. Not in a practical way—if there is such a thing—but more in a sense of how the process of design attempts to bring a brief moment of permanence to an idea in an ever-fluctuating world. The more meaningful an idea, the more likely it will gain root in the rich soil of our minds.

Ideas are the leavings of an insight—a deeply rooted and observed human truth. Without an insight, good ideas are mere flower petals scattered across the road and apt to float off in a stiff breeze. Beautiful to admire, but no more meaningful than wallpaper.

A strong insight binds together large and small ideas into something palpable, even beautiful—though the latter characteristic isn't required for a designed artifact to function properly. I like to think that great design, from an Eastern perspective, requires the latitude to grow and change good ideas into even greater ideas. The form of thought is never static, except when communicated through story. Design is just one form of conveying story. And stories never end.

Besides, thoughts are like molecules: they decay, recombine, and otherwise recycle themselves into new ideas born from our ever-iterative thinking. Alongside those ideas, the currents and trends of our culture flow along, memes circulating even faster in the Information Age's equivalent of the Gulf Stream. Within that fast current, we believe we are firmly rooted islands, the sandy edges of our unchanging selves being continually shaped and reshaped. But that's an illusion, per the thoughts of Buddha. We are the very thought of the current.

And as we join the information flow as information ourselves, it grows even harder to observe what other people truly want—not just what they say that they want, or what they truly need. We lack a firm awareness of physical experience. Having a dialogue online is like having a real conversation with a person, but only being able to see their lips. The full breadth of emotion that they are conveying through their eyes, cheeks, hands, and overall body language are completely lost to us. Italics and asterisks just don't cut it.

This, to me, is one of the critical roots of Buddhism and design in perfect alignment: a culling of thought into being, simply to make manifest the full force of human expression. Sitting still, being present, observing behavior with as little of a filter as possible: these skills bring forth the observations that give the best design its root in what we know, not just what we will to become.

Or, to quote the Buddha: "Do not accept anything merely because it agrees with your pre-conceived notions ... But when you know for yourselves – these things are moral, these things are blameless, these things are praised by the wise, these things, when performed and undertaken, conduce to well-being and happiness – then do you live acting accordingly."

Design research does more than root your thinking: it re-informs your world view, broadening it beyond considerations of the self and into a realm of shared human experience. For smaller-scale problems, most designers intuitively enter into conducting research without consciously engaging in the activity. The larger the problem, the more evident it becomes that we must expand our thinking beyond ourselves and become receptive to the much larger problem. Being in the flow of activity, observing what arises within yourself (and may not align with your audience's frame of reference): this is the space where insight lives. You just need to be humble enough to fumble around, grasping at what lies in the dark corridor between two lit rooms.

This is one of the reasons I spend more time watching and observing the world than thinking about making. The designed object should reflect the observation, not an idea borne of the self.

Optimism is a misunderstood force.

People may delight in such entertainments as the FAIL Blog and the Darwin Awards, but all too often, we are doing so only because the problems in our lives pale by comparison.

This kind of relativism doesn't quite do the trick when it comes to solving problems. We're in pain. We tackle these problems alone, or with a dash of input from our friends. Through much personal struggle, we emerge from these encounters with a dash of wisdom—where we're "on the upside." We most often keep these kernels to ourselves, and share them sparingly in the digital world.

I can understand why, too: we may be afraid that we're pushing solutions that may work for us personally, but don't extend to the world. In many ways, this is a problem that needs to be solved: making it more easy to share the practical, pragmatic application of optimism.

I'm not talking about self-help, so much as "news you can use" practical thoughts that can change people's behavior, and by extension, their lives and their world view. Optimism is a powerful force that designers need to acknowledge as part of their toolset, just like knowing how to use Adobe Photoshop CS4. I count myself as a fairly pragmatic person, but sheer intellect and brute design thinking alone can't always overcome challenging problems without a world-view that helps support the desired improvement in society and the world. This is thinking beyond self-centered design and on to considerations of the humane.

After hundreds of pieces I've written for ChangeOrder, today is a first: I'm going to be promoting a project that I created at work with the full force and creativity of my colleagues. I think it's noteworthy to share here because it's altruistic. We weren't paid to do it by any client, nor were our ideas swayed by any input from anyone beyond our staff. It also clearly aligns with much of the thinking I've been sharing on ChangeOrder, especially regarding the role of social change that design needs to play in today's society.

Today, I'll be covering via Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr an event in downtown Seattle called Embrace the Lemon. The entire event is centered around the launch of a website at EmbracetheLemon.com that is an aggregator for "lemons to lemonade" stories. People can come to the site, read and enter their stories, and share them with the world in order to spread "news you can use."

Alongside this website is a real-world experience happening in Seattle at Union Square (7 AM - 10 AM), Westlake Center (11 AM - 3 PM), and Safeco Field (4 PM - 7 PM) where we will be handing out lemons to people and asking them to visit the site and share their stories.

I invite you to follow along with today's events or show up, say hello, and give the big lemon a squeeze. The above poster, alongside other designed objects that go along with the event, you can find here on Flickr.

How have design thinking and design aesthetics become such strange befellows?

These past few weeks, I've been meditating on the following quote by Charles Olson regarding the two critical human inputs into a powerfully charged poem:

the HEAD, by the way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE

In Olson's quote, he's referring to his theory of organic poetics, which is a type of poetry that derives its power from closely mimicking the ebb and flow of thought as opposed to falling into the lockstep cadence and strictures of versification, meter, rhyme, and other European contrivances. As a result of this alignment of the head and the heart beyond intellectual constructs, the art that you experience through the eye and the ear inspires direct transmission of experience.

Why is there not such a unity in how we talk about design? Perhaps because we still have no vocabulary around how to describe the most important result of the design process: the direct transmission of knowledge.

I studied and wrote much poetry in college and graduate school, all while paying the bills as a designer. In many ways, my mind was split down the middle by the exercise.

When coming into class, I was expected to bring in a sheet of paper with words printed on it; said words taken as a poem would be successful if I had wrapped an idea in an aura of mystery. However, while I was at work, I was paid to arrange words and pictures in space whose overall concept and meaning had to be readily apparent. A good logo or brochure cover would provide only so many layers of meaning before being exhausted.

These seem like divergent activities—one is design making, while the other is the creation of art—but there is a thread that binds the two together.

In its purest sense, design is the craft of shaping thought forms that can then be made. When we say that "design is change," the form that the change takes always begins and ends with thought. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we make the world in our bodies, rooted in our physical experience. This is the place where change takes root.

Designers may know how to cultivate meaning via selection and arrangement, but the very mediums of design are the constraint of its growth: the user interface, the ever-dying annual report, the logo mark. Just as when writing poetry, you may choose to write in the form of a sestina, a sonnet, a villanelle, and so forth. None of those forms is required for the process of design to be applied well.

Or, to put it in another way: A poem is not poetry. A designed artifact is not design.

Which brings to mind another Charles Olson quote: "We do what we know before we know what we do." You can't be a poet and not write poems. You can't be a designer and not go through the process of design, which yields artifacts. There is nothing new here within our discipline, for many hundreds of years, from the scratchings on a cave wall to help other hunters locate the best place for felling game, to a waddling penguin on a train billboard in Japan that explains how we can use our mobile phones for paying for subway fare. All were inspired by thoughts, which led to a process of making. Change came through ideas applied in form.

I think this is why the real area of growth for design, as a both an avocation and an industry, has little to do with aesthetics and execution—though knowledge of such concerns is quite important for the overall flow of industry in general. Where I'm dwelling more and more often is in the realm of making informing thinking. The result of the infusion is direct knowing.

This idea bedevils the executive, who wants to power their left brain towards the next increment in shareholder value. It may elude them that the philosophical why and how of what makes design function independent of media is that design making cannot exist without design thinking. No one wants an "I'll know it when I see it" moment, but this is the true power of making informing knowing. You really don't know until you see it, on a gut level.

Can anyone beat us at this game? The technology of idea delivery may continue to befuddle us, but at root, as design tools become more ubiquitous and accessible for the layperson to "design" for their own needs as opposed to hire a professional, we need to become aware of what methods we can employ that our cohorts can't. We may not be able to outwit them in Illustrator, but we sure as hell can come up with better ideas employed through technology. By mindfully controlling the path from the mind to the gut, our profession can survive.

Which leads me to thinking about the future. I see two paths from here for any designer that's serious about retaining a substantial career in the next ten years: the artisan informed by thought, and the thinker informed by art.

The artisan retrenches themselves into deep mastery of a narrow slice of skills that prove more desirable than the works of the armchair designer. By connecting themselves to a legacy of a living tradition, such as type design, they will carve out a specialized niche and a depth of thinking and education that a prosumer could never touch. There will likely always be a need for those who specialize in brand, as it is the most spiritual expression of a corporation's existence—and, like the Sasquatch, the most elusive to track down and capture in a two-dimensional image.

The design thinker informed by art will help provide the shape of what thought forms are required for design to continue its ongoing evolution as a force of change. Design thinking can transform and shape not only artifacts, but extant systems, procedures, and expressions within corporations, governments, nonprofits, and practically any other organization of human beings. Design, in this realm, is a form of agency. It is a shaping of behavior made manifest through action. And within such thoughts are the seeds of artifacts that are then recognized by people for their value. But none of that value would be possible without a true quality of thought.

A designer may be both of these, depending on how they can flip the switches back and forth in their brain, but it's unlikely that a designer will be known for both of these talents. Can a student become a thinker before they have mastered being an artisan? Perhaps but they would have to prove that they understand the form of their thought and how it must be realized tangibly in the real world. This only comes with maturity and experience, if it is to be charged with truth.

Which leads me to a final quote by another poet, Denise Levertov: "Form is never more than a revelation of content." In ten years, the dominant thought form and highest echelon of progress in our design industry will be the cultivation of meaning infused into human behavior that resonates foremost at a gut emotional level.

The form that the content takes is relevant, only in that that is how the world will see the service that we provide. But as designers, we will know that the lingua franca of the realm that we travel transcends what is made and resides in what is known.

DESIGNERS: GREAT AT SOCIAL MEDIA, WEAK AT PRESS RELEASES
Self-Promotion for Designers Now Lacking in Traditional Media; Blogger Makes Case for Teaching Designers Basic Format of Press Releases

Seattle, WA, Thursday, May 7--David Sherwin is admonishing working designers and agencies for not using press releases more often for both self-promotion and coverage of client projects. Even with full-time projects for designers in decline, there are still ways to reach outside the blog and speak to the press.

Traditional media opportunities are on the decline, but they are not out of the picture. "If you don't promote yourself now, when opportunities are slim, you will risk gaining the proper level of exposure when the market improves," Mr. Sherwin said to his empty living room after eating two bites of dark chocolate. "Even if you're a highly active blogger, it doesn't hurt to reach out through traditional media channels. It can aid your blogging and self-promotional efforts when applied effectively."

As part of Mr. Sherwin's ongoing PR education campaign, he outlined the following basic structure for a press release that any designer can use. Whether you've completed a small project, won an award, or have seen the impact of your efforts over time for a client initiative, the form of a press release is always accommodating.

A great press release will contain:

• A headline and an optional subhead. Designers should seek a concise description of the angle you're taking for the overall press release, summarized in a strong headline. A subhead can be added as necessary to "unpack" the drama inherent in the headline.
• The lede. The first paragraph of any press release must include the who, what, when, where, and why of your overall story. Ideally, the lede will be concise enough to be reprinted without any editorial effort on the part of a wire service, press outlet, or blogger.
• Supporting context and quotes. The following paragraphs should provide the grounding for your lede, helping to deepen your argument and create a greater context for your story. Adding in quotes from yourself -- as much as it may hurt to put words in your own mouth in the third person -- is critical. The addition of client quotes is also a great idea, being mindful that you will need to likely write their quote and have them approve it.
• If necessary, long-form data in bullet points. If you have a ton of information to cover, a bulleted list such as this one can provide the right format to showcase the depth of thought required behind a piece of work or an overall campaign. "Quotes can also be included in these data sections as well," said Mr. Sherwin, "which helps liven up lists."
• The boilerplate. Every press release should conclude with boilerplate language, which is where you fully describe who you are, what you do, and how you can be contacted via the Web or phone.
• Showing the work. If you're discussing a campaign or a creative product, consider including photographs within your release or providing links out to downloadable files that journalists and bloggers can reference.

"Closing your press release with an expert point of view can further aid your argument," said Paul Rand, who was contacted by the author via time machine. "But to remain completely professional, be sure that you get written consent from your contributors, unlike David, who decided to utilize my name in conjunction with this fabricated tripe."

About David: Ah, forget the boilerplate. The author of this release would like you be very aware of whom you contact with your press release. Many bloggers do not appreciate being emailed with press releases. Create a list of people whom you feel would appreciate being contacted by you, and then reach out them via email with your story. They will appreciate it, and be more likely to provide you with a PR opportunity.

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Clip out the above coupon, pin it to your corkboard, and fill it out and use it whenever you're struggling to commit to an idea that just feels right.

These past few weeks, a number of people have shared with me truly game-changing design ideas. Most of those people were on the fence regarding whether they should execute on them. There was a fear that their ideas needed to scrutinized more closely before they were made real.

In every single case, without reservation, I told them to go for it. Not just because I thought their ideas were great (though they all were). My actions were grounded in recent research into heuristics, and how they can apply to design thinking.

Research by psychiatrists such as Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer have radically shaped our understanding of decision making (and led to bestsellers such as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink), but what is most interesting to me is the influence that heuristics have on design decisions.

When we need to design quickly, we seek out economies in our decision-making processes and call that intuition. In that process, we're often drawing upon the heuristic called "One Good Reason." This is a quote about it from Dr. Gigerenzer's book Gut Feelings:

Intuitions based on only one good reason tend to be accurate when one has to predict the future (or some unknown present state of affairs), where the future is difficult to foresee, and when one has only limited information. They are also more efficient in using time and information. Complex analysis, by contrast, pays when one has to explain the past, when the future is highly predictable, or when there are large amounts of information.

I think that this heuristic also explains why designers have so much trouble creating self-promotional work. We end up defaulting to complex analysis due to self-awareness and a high volume of information about our previous decisions, which is rarely a factor in paid client work.

People can design and ingrain their own heuristics as well. My friend Ric Ewing created a rule of thumb where, if he was trying to decide whether to take action on an idea, he would take out a coin and toss it -- heads for yes, tails for no. If he looked at the coin after the tos, it was tails, and he had any hint of wanting to go for best of three, he knew his answer.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you run out and start saying "Yes!" to every single thing you're told. That would be silly. I'm saying that the crucial hallmark of choosing to acknowledge this type of heuristic is that you're making a design decision and you've already formed a working hypothesis. When your mind flips from pure intuition to trying to apply complex analysis, when you start to chip away at your idea with logic instead of emotion: this is often where you're wasting your time.

So the next time you start triple-guessing an idea, you have permission to accept it and give it a try. You just might discover a new way to enjoy the act of designing...

These past few weeks, I've been trying to watch how my interaction with my laptop and desktop computer changes the quality of what I design.

As an example: When I'm writing copy for a web page, I often key it directly into the Photoshop comp and try to design the layout around it. However, if I'm writing copy divorced from layout, it invariably ends up being too long, and I end up struggling with paring it down to half of its length.

At this point, I usually go for a walk or take on another task until I've achieved enough detachment to find new angles for editing the content. But recently I thought of a new tack: reading copy off the screen and transcribing it onto a sticky note. In the process of writing the copy longhand into a tiny square, I don't even have to think about what I need to edit. New words suggest themselves just because I'm writing at the speed of my body, not the speed of my mind.

That was just one example of design hacking. Another design hack I've been experimenting with is practicing Surrealist automatism in meetings, then bringing ideas from the automatic drawing into my work. Automatism is a practice derived from Surrealist poets such as André Breton, which swiftly leapt into the drawing and painting work of André Masson, Miró, Dalî, and many others.

How do you do it? The next time you're in a meeting -- the more procedural, the better -- allow your pencil in your notebook to move freely. Keep your rational mind occupied: focus on what's being said with your rational mind, and participate in the conversation. And be sure to avoid trying to craft or shape what emerges consciously. You aren't trying to draw. You're just drawing.

After the meeting is over and when you're back at your desk, look down at what you've written. What accidents and chance marks on the page are suggestive to you? How could they evolve into ideas that, when the opportunity arises, infiltrate one of your designs?