Designer Guilt

There’s a new Taylor Swift song. It is called Shake It Off and it is precious. Maybe you have even listened to it. Transposed for you here are some lines from the chorus:

“Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play

And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate

Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake”

In the spirit of Shake It Off, I’m gonna keep this shit fast and loose. Damn, designer have a tough time! If we’re not too busy being a member of a cesspool industry, destroying the Earth, or making $200 computers for people that make <$2.00 a day, you might find us being a guilty hypocrite publicly on the upper-caste version of the Youtube comment system. Come to think of it, being a designer must a little bit like being Taylor Swift. You spend your time and energy producing something that matters to your fans, users, clients, but people on Youtube still call you ‘Stupid old blond’ and to ‘stop becoming Miley Cyrus’.

The cool thing is that Taylor has found a way to ignore these haters. She gets what its all about, man! She’s compelled to do the thing she loves — write songs, perform. Hey, thats a neat idea — that good work is done by people who do it for the pleasure it affords them, and not necessarily for the benefits it affords society. So don’t feel guilty if your work isn’t fixing society, focus on doing work that is important to you. It’s up to everyone else what they want to do with it anyway, so stop worrying about the consequences.

It ain’t about the publicity, the opinions on Medium, the marketing, the $6,000 TED Conference tickets, the pretending you know shit about technology, the disingenuous humanitarianism, your career posturing or your naively conceived Kickstarter. Well, I was gonna say it’s about the d-e-s-i-g-n but it’s really not — because it’s about your life, ya dunce. So next time the haters do what they do, just shake it like my gal Taylor.