See if I can get this to work...
That was pretty- it was a little bit too easy. It's kind of waiting for my theme music. It's
not queuing up. Run through the jungle, you ignorant fool. Okay.
I'm Michael Gibson. I teach Visual Communication Design, and Interaction
Design, and Design Research. It's kind of a mouthful in the Department of Design
and the College of Visual Arts and Design here. And, the way that my career
started in education, it started in Detroit after a few years of graduate
school at a place called the University of Michigan. And, I came out of- like a lot
of designers do- I came out of a lot of play- a lot of professional experiences
where we would critique each other's work as we were developing. It's pretty
typical in a design firm. You're designing brand identity systems, and
magazines, and packaging, and more recently websites, and user interface
designs. And we would talk about liking things, you know, I like that. I think that
color works well. And we wouldn't really explain it very well, because we were
designers talking to each other. We understood why we liked things and why
we didn't like things. What I had to learn the hard way in Detroit in my
first teaching experience at Wayne State University: it's not ok for students not
to like anything. They like things- if they like things that means they
don't know how to go deep in conversations about a lot- they don't
know how to get into critical analysis. What it says backwards up there is, "It's
not okay to- it's not okay to like things. It's not okay to like
anything in a design class room except for baby pandas, candy corn, and Aretha
Franklin," okay? You can like those things. You can't like anything else, okay?
Students fall in- students in my Detroit classrooms kept falling into
this trap of, "I like this. It's my favorite color."
Why do you like that? Why is that your favorite color? And then what I realized
is they were missing one of the most crucial aspects of the design process. We
have to make things that actually work, but the crucial aspect is this: you're
not designing for yourself. You're designing to try to bridge a gap between
a client or an organization over here in an audience or, would be called a group
of users, over here. What you like has nothing to do with whether or not that
target audience, or the users, are going to be able to use what
you've designed for them effectively, or interpret your messaging, or anything
like that. Also, if you like things, "I like that, I'm having fun, I've got good tunes
on my headphones, I'm drawing, it's great, I've got cheese puffs over here," it's
really easy to fall in love with your first ideas and design's a process of
decision making. So, you've got to get past your IBD, or as my very first design
director in Chicago many years ago said, "In between change, smoking Lucky Strikes."
-"IBE." -"What?"
-"It's been done."
He used to call me "Young Gibson" too.
-"Young Gibson, what the hell is on your desk?
-You know we did that in 1955. It sucks then, it sucks now.
-but I'm gonna tell you why."
And that was the kicker. That's what- that's what not
liking does. It gets you past that fall-in-love-with-the-first-idea. Why doesn't
it work? How can you get to something that's more effective? The other thing
that I learned in those Detroit experiences. This was at Wayne State
University in downtown Detroit, and a lot of the students there were first time
college students. Nobody else in their family had been to college before. And
one of the things that you- I found that you have to teach design students, and I
think a variety of college students is, if they're gonna have effective learning
experiences, is you have to get them comfortable with being uncomfortable.
That's where invention comes from. That's where creativity comes from. So, you have
to do this stuff. You have to embrace negative capability. You have to learn
how to enjoy not knowing something. Go into that territory where you're not
sure how it's gonna turn out. You have to let yourself get enthralled by uncertain
things. Designs not predictable. You don't know how it's gonna wind up. There are no
algorithms. There are no formulas. "Hey Michael, why is there duct tape in the
background of your supposedly cool slide here?" We'll get to that soon, okay?
Actually, we'll get to it right now. Okay so, the fellow that runs- I just got back
from a national conference in Minneapolis late last night and- the
fellow who runs Airbnb, I wanna says his name is Beby or Gebby, I've got it
in my notes somewhere. But when my eyelids stop clicking when I blink and I've
slept more, I'll remember it. But not liking allows you to start where the
duct tape ends. One of the things that he talked about, and that I learned early on
in that teaching experience in Detroit: one of the things they used to see a lot,
and students used to see a lot, they're driving around in beater cars but duct
tape is a really popular thing to use in Detroit to repair your car. You tape
things together with it and, if duct tape is there, that means something's failed.
Something's not working. So you have to look for the duct tape and, often what I
had to learn and what I had to- what was hard to get through to students and not
liking things: we tend to like things that are perfect and that are working
well or reasonably perfect. We don't like things that aren't, but if you see that
duct tape on a car fender. You can actually use duct tape to repair a
puncture in your tire in a lot of cases. It's got all kinds of uses, but it means
something's not working. So, not liking something, embracing what's ugly, what you
don't like, that's where the process of design starts. So the other thing that I
got in those early experiences in Detroit, my students would say, "Well, you
know, these assignment parameters are kind of boring. You know, I- I don't know."
One of the things I had to learn in those experiences that- and this is an
old line from a teacher of my name, Richard Matson, from many years ago- and
his line was, "Nothing in the world is boring. Boring is the curse of the
unimaginative and, by the way you're in design school and you don't get to be
that way." So, it also- design also requires that you use both halves of your brain
you've got to make connections between the left and the right halves and work
between them. So if you're liking is too comfortable, if you're liking things,
okay? Liking things. If you like things too much, what you really like now- like
that song that you really like now- you're not gonna like it a month from
now. And so, if- if you're- and it starts to get boring. So when you're bored, there's
another great line, "Boring people are- boring people are easily
bored. Bored people tend to be boring." You've got to use your imagination. It
always strikes me on airplanes how few people read anymore. And it was actually-
that it's not me that brought that up- it was a student of mine in that same
Detroit classroom, and that was a long time ago. It was in the 90s. People were
looking for entertainment. So the other thing that not liking things, and this is
something that design students have a hard time learning, we have this sort of
comfort zone that we're in. "Hey, we're the people that know how to make stuff look
cool." Yes, we do, but that's the floor rather than the ceiling of what we do. So
if you don't like things, if you start to analyze things, "I don't like that because
I think that's ugly," " Because I think it's beautiful," "Because I think that's
ineffective," "I don't think that's gonna work for a particular group of users or
an audience." Then you start to shatter that perception. And all of a sudden,
doors open up to you to working in areas that maybe you couldn't work in before.
By the way, all these little snippets these come out of dialogues with
students. We spend 90% of the time in our classrooms engaging in scaffolded
dialogue critiquing. Our classes last three hours long and they go by like a
rocket. Okay, the other thing that's really important that I've learned from
some of these things that students actually brought me to in those early
days is they talked about, "Gee, I do really better- instead of you just
breaking down and breaking it down into a series of simple steps- give us
everything up front. Let us embrace the complexity first. If we're going to have
careers we can sustain, we have to be able to design and develop complex
systems that benefit lots of different kinds of people who don't always agree
with each other. One of the things about those Detroit experiences: in my very
first brand identity classroom, I had members of students that put students
into teams. Mr. Greig made me- Dr. Greig made me think about this. I didn't know
it when I put those teams together. There were members from three different rival
street gangs in those different teams and being forced to embrace the
complexity and a branding project. Actually, for the city of
Detroit, they actually had to start to empathize with each other and get past
some of their differences. So the other thing that's really important about not
liking things: if you like things too easily, you don't question them. And it's
just something, again, learning over the years and lots of design classrooms,
engaging in students, them teaching me way more than I'm teaching them. It
forces you, if you don't like something, you have to start to figure out, "why do
other people like that?" You have to- the slang that I learned, actually from
one of those students in Detroit who's now a design director in Toronto, a guy
named Ray Page, "How do you put yourself behind the eyes of someone who's very
different from yourself and see things, and discern things, and make decisions
based on those particular points of view?" So, it really helps you develop empathy
when you start to not like things and understand why you don't like them. Okay.
Not liking. Also, one of the really important things about, just sort of, the
worlds- plural- that students are heading into now and again: this came out of
those early days of teaching at Wayne State in Detroit, "You've got to be able
to sustain a career where success will depend on how well you learn to do
things differently than you do now." And that came out of another young woman
who'd never been to college before, and she was really really struggling in what
we call a systems class or a publication design class. Dealing with real
complexity, and what she kept bringing in were just sets of drawings, after sets of
drawings, after sets of drawings. Where she was making one minute change.
She changed the color, she changed a typeface on a layout, she would- but she
wasn't making sweeping changes. And finally, it was her classmates and myself.
Classmates have to speak in these dialogues. It's not just us, as professors,
it's dialogic. That means, in a 22 student classroom, everybody speaks. And when it
works most effectively, everybody speaks for about the same amount of time. And, it
was her classmates who challenged her, "Why don't you try working on this upside
down?" "What if you turn the paper over and hold it up to a window so you see
everything backwards?" So it was looking at something differently, framing
something differently, and that became kind of a metaphor that I've carried
with me in the almost 25 years since I did that. You've got to be able to- how
well are you gonna be able to do things differently than you do them now? This
idea that what we learn in our college classrooms: we're gonna do them that same
way as the rest of our careers evolve, not if you're gonna sustain a career. And
I would argue, that's not just in design, that cuts across many disciplines. And
then, finally, so the other thing, that I became really conscious of in
those early days in Detroit, was that what you're really doing if you're
teaching- not just design, well for me it was design at first, but now I work with
people in a variety of other disciplines- what you're really doing is you're
helping people design experiences. So as you learn to develop whatever it is
you're developing, making something that actually has to work. Whether it's a
website or a user interface design for an app. If you get beyond that a little
bit, you can design experiences and services. What's a better way to get your
breakfast in the morning? What's a better way to navigate your way through a
parking garage? By the way, if you've ever been lost in a parking garage, that means
a designer hasn't done his or her job. Because the signage wasn't effective
enough for you to find your way in or out. So you get beyond just designing
artifacts and you start to think about, "How are you gonna make people's
experiences better to improve particular aspects of their lives?" So I know my
story's a little different. This is my last slide, so I'm just sharing
snippets of experiences that I've had with students over the years. Where once
again, they taught me way more than I taught
them. Thanks very much.