It’s sad but true. I’ve never been a design personality, an Instagram celebrity, or even a blogger. Yet, i’ve been practicing design professionally for the better part of the past decade.
My perspective and the nature of my work (and my home, if i’m honest) doesn’t fit the ‘perfectly curated’ and ‘photoshoot ready’ ethos that dominates so much of what we see online. The work I do is messy: I help companies redesign ‘broken’ customer and employee experiences. It’s not exactly photo-perfect portfolio content. Back at home my kitchen is often a mess, the result of pouring my heart into crafting big meals for friends that are a little overly ambitious, or the aftermath of watering and overfilling my collection of houseplants that always seem to be dying or struggling for less light. My home is messy, but it’s also happy and always evolving.
The idea portrayed by celebrities like Joanna Gaines is that of a ‘life that’s just so,’ perfectly curated and always ready for a spur of the moment visitor who might take and tag photos. This idea of having a life that’s ‘just so’ is something i’ve endlessly aspired to. But these days the very thought of it exhausts me. What about you?
The story of entrepreneurship that Joanna and Chip tell publicly often feels fated and fairytale, always saved from dire straits at a moment’s notice, with never a project that truly goes south. But this isn’t Chip and Joanna’s full story. And it certainly isn’t mine.
Design is a messy profession. We have to make endless compromises with clients to meet their expectations while also staying on budget. We have to scale back our grand visions for what’s feasible and achievable and acceptable in the client’s eye. And we sometimes have to sacrifice high quality materials for ones we can get on-time when a job is a rush one. As one example, I once had a client who perpetually didn’t show up to meetings related to planning the future of their business for months on end. I put up with their shenanigans for a long time, but I eventually had to let them go and thus forgo their regular monthly payments right before we got to a finished product. That’s not the stuff I talk about in my case studies.
Building a business is hard, messy work with lots of rough corners. Those rough corners aren’t the stuff you see when you check out my feed or my website. But it’s the true grit and chicken scratch of what makes me a real business owner and design entrepreneur rather than Instafamous.
Last year I did my taxes on a weekend, while sipping coffee at a gorgeous spot in Chapel Hill that I shamelessly instagrammed. Those were fifteen-hour days. Those were painstaking days in Quickbooks, the bane of my existence as a creator and envelope pusher. That’s not the stuff I post about, but maybe it should be?!
In a world of perfectly polished content, I am craving more ‘real stories’ from entrepreneurs and designers. I’m craving some real life blood, sweat and tears design entrepreneurship. Maybe that’s why I love watching documentaries about chefs and reading their books? The kitchen is a messy, cutthroat place and the restaurant industry is grueling. That’s real life business building: hard, messy, but oh so satisfying. (see, for example: http://www.newchefsontheblock.com)
I’m not a Joanna Gaines kinda designer, and if i’m honest I don’t want to pretend to be her. But how can we begin to tell the other kinds of design stories like mine, design stories that are about framing and reframing narratives, cleaning up ‘messy’ organizations by creating structure and boundaries? How can we promote this type of design thinking, thinking that’s not grounded in a beautiful end result but rather in a tidier more efficient operating system, a more grounded and intentional team? It’s hard to capture these kinds of results in a bite-sized quote or testimonial. Even harder in a photoshoot. But it’s possible. And it starts with posts like this one. Join me on this journey here?