Ever since I can remember, people have
asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and regardless of my age, whether
eight or eighteen, they expected me to have a ready answer. “Doctor” was a good
answer, and so was “lawyer.” Answers like “artist” or “inventor” were
tolerable, though often accompanied by laughs which seemed to imply that I was
delightfully naïve. However, there was one answer that was not acceptable. If I
shrugged and said I didn’t know what I wanted to be or what I wanted to do,
whichever relative or family friend had asked the question would gasp in
disbelief: “What! At the age of six, you don’t know what you want to do for a
living?” Last year, these relatives were reincarnated in the form of college
essay prompts, except there was much more than family approval riding on a
correct answer. These essays expected me to define myself, my pursuits, and my
life goals. I found myself torn, frustrated, and a little scared: for the life
of me, I could not pin down any one pursuit or interest that defined who I was
and meant everything to me. Unlike my friends – the cello prodigy, the
hopelessly romantic poet, the devout philosopher – I didn’t feel like I had a
specific calling. In a sense, I enjoyed most everything but wasn’t drawn to any
subject or activity in particular. I was equally intrigued by art and by
biology; I enjoyed my calculus class as much as my government course; and I
could see myself pursuing a number of possible majors. There were simply too
many things I was interested in.
As senior year progressed, I’d finally
had enough of liking everything but loving nothing. In an effort to clarify the
amorphous concept that was my passion, I sat down and literally wrote down all
of the subjects and fields that interested me, why I found them appealing, and
what about them made them meaningful to me. My interests ranged from biology to
music to psychology, but there were so many that I was hesitant to claim that
they were all “passions.” However, the more I studied them, the more my diverse
interests seemed to share one or two underlying reasons they were important to
me. The first was that they helped me understand people, from their genetics to
their emotions. However, the second reason these diverse pursuits were
important to me was a little more elusive. Several of my interests were all
about beautiful things such as music, art,
languages, and
dance. I felt strongly about these in and of themselves, but more importantly,
I had a burning desire to participate in creating their beauty. Yet even when I
had discovered these two undercurrents of understanding people and creating
beauty, I was still unclear about how I could unify a passion that was made up
of such seemingly disparate interests. I decided to examine design, one of my
strongest interests, in the hopes that I could find some way that the two
overlapped in this context. Furthermore, I hoped to use what I discovered about
my passion for design to understand and define my true passion as a whole.
Though we all know it when we see it, can
sense its presence in a building or an object, and generally appreciate it,
design is difficult to explain. To me, design is part of a process and a way of
solving problems cleverly. Like good taste, it is something that can be brought
to the development and execution of a plan. It can be used in the creation of
anything – utensils, graphics, buildings, rooms, cars, household objects, web
pages, and packaging are only a handful of examples. However, no matter to what
design is applied, I appreciate its creativity, its ability to evoke emotion,
and its way of resonating with us, but I am also driven to design myself.
Design’s
creativity is one of its most defining aspects. Essentially, design is about
problem solving, and good design is about going beyond what is normal,
expected, and easy in solving problems. A good designer looks at problems in
new ways, and creates solutions that are fresh, innovative, and unique. A large
component of this originality comes from understanding how people interact with
their world, and finding ways of making that interaction easier, faster, or
more beautiful. Take, for
example, a paper
lantern with an open flame. This presents an obvious problem, as fire and paper
make a dangerous combination. However, a hanging lamp constructed of solar
cells connected to LED bulbs and powered, simply, by light accomplishes the same thing. Or, consider the needs of an individual who
travels frequently. Imu design, a Finnish design team, understood those needs
and met them with an ingenious solution. Their elegant cabinet is much more
than it appears to be. Each drawer is a suitcase, easy to pre-pack and ready to
go at any moment. In
examples like these and others, I found that design’s creativity echoed some of
my desire to understand people, because the effectiveness of design is based
largely on understanding how people think, what they
need, and how
they interact with their environment.
Another aspect of design
that I admire and that requires an understanding of people is its ability to
evoke emotion, intrigue us, and change the way we feel. Personally, I know that
design has a strong influence on my feelings at the time: the powerful presence
of a beautifully designed building can make me sigh, the grace of an
innovatively designed chair can send shivers up my spine, and the perfect
composition of a well-designed poster can make me tear up. We have all been
struck by a particular work of art before, perhaps a painting with bold colors,
a particularly clever advertisement, or even something as simple as an
interesting book cover that made us want to read the book. All of these
responses are examples of how designers understand their audience. Knowing what
color combinations will make us respond to a painting, what visual organization
or verbal quips will make us react to an advertisement, and what sort of image
on the cover will make us reach for a book are all important for a designer to
know.
Because designers have this innate
understanding of people, they are able to spark a feeling of connection between
the object they
design and the viewer.
Architects, for
example, can change the way we feel in a building because they understand how
we experience a space. Their manipulation of the space makes our experience of
the room or building infinitely more meaningful. One place that has evoked
emotions strongly in me was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in
Berlin
. Constructed of 2,711
concrete slabs arranged in a grid, the memorial contains no symbols and no
written dedication. It
is simply a place. Walking among the slabs, which start a few feet tall and
rise to tower several feet high, I found that the sounds of the city faded, the
concrete around me felt cold, and I began to feel uneasy. This was all part of
the architect’s intention of course, but being able to physically experience this memorial made it much more meaningful to
me than a statue or plaque would have been.
What is it about design, and more
generally art, that makes it have such a strong effect on us? It resonates with
us in a way that most other areas of human creation do not and can not. For
example, it would be difficult for many of us to appreciate a mathematical
proof, however elegant it may be, or to be blown away by a new idea in
philosophy. Unlike these two examples, art does not require that the viewer
have a great deal of previous knowledge or experience with the subject in order
to enjoy the piece of artwork. Art and design are both so universal that,
regardless of our age or our knowledge of art history, we can cull some meaning
from the pieces we see. We do not necessarily need an explanation, because we
can see aspects of our own life reflected in the work or we can simply enjoy
the aesthetic beauty of art.
Design’s flexibility of interpretation as
well as its beauty make me sure that it is not only an authentic pursuit, but a
worthwhile one as well. Walter Pater extends this idea of art as a worthy
passion in his conclusion to The
Renaissance. As he explains it, our passions help us to experience the most
in every moment by “yield[ing to us] a quickened, multiplied consciousness.” It is easy to see how art and design do this: by showing us a new perspective
on life or offering a fresh way of thinking about something we take for
granted, art pushes us to reexamine our world. This
new perspective
is invaluable, since – purely as a result of habit – many of us find ourselves
thinking inside a narrowing set of assumptions and beliefs that may not
accurately reflect the actual context we are in. Essentially, it is the
combination of all of these things that I appreciate about design as a whole:
its ability to grab our attention, evoke our emotions, resonate with us in a
powerful way, and prompt us to view the world in new ways.
Though
I enjoy simply appreciating art and design, I find designing things myself to
be even more rewarding. Designing resonates deeply with my underlying passion
for creating the beauty I love. Though I can appreciate all different types of
design, I’ve found that my own, personal calling is graphic and layout design.
Graphic design combines words and images, with the focus on the images, to convey
a message. Its goal is “to give order to information, form to ideas, expression
and feeling to artifacts that document human experience.” As I understand it, layout design normally focuses more closely on the text and
is used when designing books or websites. In layout design, some of the most
important tasks
include
organizing the text in an interesting way, choosing fonts, and integrating
graphics.
What makes me certain that designing is
part of my passion is the way I feel when I do it. I experience a
concentration, energy, and focus when I design that I rarely feel with any
other sort of project. I am largely self-taught, and the process of
experimentation and learning is invigorating. I feel a sense of “flow,” which
psychologist and coiner of the word Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined as “being
completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time
flies…Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the
utmost.” When I design, I become so focused and I enjoy it so much that I am willing to
completely set aside other tasks and to give up sleep to pursue it. I thrive on
the type of problem solving involved in graphic design, and the challenge is
enthralling. I feel immensely, entirely gratified in the process of creating a
graphic or a page. Unlike other tasks that often drain me of energy, graphic
design energizes me. It’s the mental equivalent of a caffeine boost, and I can
bring the energy I get from designing to other tasks. All of the emotions I
experience when I design make it feel like an “authentic” passion to me – I can
honestly say I love doing it.
After examining the way understanding
people and creating beauty played out in design, I realize that the two components
aren’t separate at all, but strongly connected. In the context of design,
understanding people is an important part of a designer’s job. In a general
context, understanding people is a significant component of creating something
beautiful. What makes something -- whether a painting, a building, or a book --
truly beautiful is the artist’s ability to understand and connect with us
through the piece. Something about viewing the painting, standing in the
building, or finishing the book resonates with us, and that connection we
experience feels fundamentally meaningful.
As I thought about it, I realized that
the combination of these two things was much closer to my passion than any one
of the individual pursuits I found interesting. Striving to understand my
fellow human beings and creating meaningful connects, whether in the form of
scientific research or beautiful design, is what my passion is truly about.
Though that passion is hard to explain to my relatives in a satisfactorily
short answer – and they still don’t think it has quite the same ring as
“doctor” – I’ve found that it suits me much better.
Word Count: 2,070
Words Added: 378
Picture Sources
1. http://www.thesmallstakes.com/gallery.php?page=3#
2. “Solar Lamion,” Dwell 6, no. 9 (2006): 78.
3. http://www.imudesign.org/image_bank_large_takeout_1.html
4. http://www.knoll.com/products/product.jsp?prod_id=145
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HolocaustMahnmalLuft.jpg
6. Picture by Lauren Rosales
7. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/60/Saul_bass_goldenarm.jpg/180px-Saul_bass_goldenarm.jpg
8. Picture by the author
