Core 77 semi-recently posted an interesting, longish interview with Nathan Shedroff, chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and the author of several books on design. His most recent book is Design is the Problem, which is about "how the design industry can approach the world in a more sustainable way."

The interview itself is broad -- Shedroff expands on ten or so related concepts, each one germane in some way to his overall view of "sustainability." Whether or not you'll find his take on every topic persuasive in every detail, they are as a whole uniformly interesting and well-measured. No small task, considering the breadth of opinions he delivers: he discusses everything from the maligned value of business to the proliferation of NGOs to rampant occidental capitalism.

His points are also admirably rooted in practical reality. One of my favorite moments from the interview comes in response to the question, "What should business be doing to change the world for the better and what can designers do to encourage this to happen?" The quote below is his answer to the latter half of this question, abridged in several places where the lack of context rendered it unintelligible.

Designers need to start making changes ourselves, with or without a mandate, in the things we make. We can choose to not talk about materials substitutions or other improvements in impacts if our managers don't want to hear about them and, instead, we can highlight the improvements they do want to hear about -- like improvements in efficiency. We can learn to speak "their" language authoritatively and speak to risk mitigation and gains in owner's equity.

We need to talk about this to our peers, managers, and clients with an encouraging, quiet, and strong imperative that isn't sensationalized. If they turn-off at the mention of climate change, switch to cute, fluffy polar bears drowning. If they don't respond to that, explain that the market for their goods tanks when customers are out of work, afraid of the food they eat, or their homes are flooded.

Probably worth a read.
(Photo credit: Core 77)

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Sometimes in the history of this blog, design ethics has bled into business ethics. It's easy for this to happen, because design and business are so closely tied. Almost all design is undertaken for commercial purposes, and this means that business requirements are inherent in almost any design project. Because of the unfortunate character of business, though, these requirements are often unethical. Therefore, it has seemed natural for us in the past to suggest that ethical design meant either taking on only clients with highly ethical businesses (call this the Tibor Kalman approach) or else advocating for more ethical business practices with the clients we do have.

The big problem is that neither of these approaches is feasible for most working designers. The first case is untenable because (as of now) there just aren't enough ethical businesses to go around, and so most designers wouldn't have the option to practice ethically. This would mean that for most of us, the choice would be between an unethical practice or no practice at all.

In the second case, designers overstep their roles in their engagements. Our clients aren't paying us to audit their business practices, and overwhelmingly often, they're not interested in getting that service from us pro bono, either.

Detail from Rembrandt's The Abduction of Proserpina (c. 1630).

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Sold Out (1929), cartoon by Rollin Kirby depicting the repercussions of the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

In an America whose economy is ravaged by the twin budgetary disasters of the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailout, money's scarcer than it used to be. Coupled with the success of the Democrats in Washington this week, and thus the looming possibility of near-term financial regulatory tightening, the conventional wisdom says that clients are going to tighten their grip on their money, and thus, designers are going to have to tighten their belts.

Schematically, a more challenging climate for business tends to mean a more challenging climate for design. But does this have to be the case?

This question is one that DLB ponders all the time. We think that a big part of the problem is the function that both clients and designers alike understand design to serve. Specifically, back in the old America, money was cheap. This meant design could be used in the service of long shots for maximizing profits: just-maybe type social networking strategies, fancy textures on every element of the webpage, the list goes on. Basically, design didn't have to be accountable for its ends, because companies could afford to bet on both red and black.

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I read a nice article today over at the Customer Experience Design blog, which traced over a fairly well-drawn distinction between two schools of customer experience.

The two schools, given by example in this case are:

The "Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

and

The "IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company's products and services.

Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it's easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client's web-designing nephew. He's cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer's percieved value is high.

But, of course, that's not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it's broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it's contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.

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Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
Their lives a mimicry,
Their passions a quotation.
— Oscar Wilde

We all want our clients to be happy. The engagement I was talking about Monday sticks out in my mind because it's the only one in my life where the client wasn't happy.

I have reflected, and I know I had a few things to learn about professionalism (and salesmanship, obviously). But what I felt then, and I still feel now, is that what's going to make everyone really happy is great results.

Now, great isn't easy. It isn't guaranteed. And we all need to eat, so that means we've got to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. But nobody ever got great by playing it safe. Trying to implement new ideas is risky business.

Every time we try to do something great, we gamble our reputations. Sometimes we get fired, and sometimes we have to resign. Maybe someday, somebody will shake their fist and yell, "You'll never work in this town again!" But listen: If we just wanted money, we'd have jobs writing code for Oracle or re-touching photos for Teen People, or as sub-bosses in a 1920s crime syndicate.

"Money, okay, everybody likes money. But somehow it don't seem like him."

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— "Slammin'" Sam Beckett

This sounds all Zen and profound, but it really depends on how you define success.

Here is an actual situation that happend to us:

Some time back, we were designing some things for a client in a design area that was pretty much totally virgin territory for everyone involved. It was exciting for this reason.

The client and ourselves had a handful of meetings, after which we came up with some proposals, pitched them, and they were accepted. A plan of action was outlined and agreed upon. Talk around the table indicated that since we were in new territory, the best course was to just start pushing through the first couple of passes, and then re-evaluate.

About halfway through the project, Nick and I were up very late drinking bourbon, (attentive readers will notice this is somewhat of a motif) and we had the vaunted "Eureka!" moment. All of a sudden, the project made sense, and we had an actual, real solution right there in our hands.

First, the good news: It was still a real solution the next morning. We spent that day creating a presentation detailing the ways that our new proposal addressed all the concerns that the client had voiced, and flat-out solved the problem from a conceptual standpoint. We pitched it that same afternoon.

Now the bad news: The client felt it was best to continue building the original idea.

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Adaptive Path wrote a nice post a while ago answering a question they had been asked by a client. The client, showing uncommon wisdom, asked them "how they might make the most of [their - the client and AP's] design engagement."

This is a sort narcotic story for designers (or at least myself), who, qua Shirky's arrogant designer, fantasize about a world where clients ask us how they could make the most of our time. Unfortunately, it's a rare occasion when a client is going to ask you a question like that, much less be capable of hearing and internalizing the answer.

In the remainder of situations, unfortunately, our interactions with clients are going to be influenced by, if not symptomatic of, internal disorganization, a lack of project clarity, monetary shenanigans, or any combination of the three. This means more often than not, being a design professional means putting our ability to be humble to the test.

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