Year 2003: risk and persistence after failure
Story #2 of 16-part chronicle: ‘The evolution of my social design craft’
It’s the year 2003. I’m starting my very last term on a BA graphic design course at Notre Dame University in Lebanon. That term marked the start of a sequence of risk-taking/failure/persistence cycles over the following few years, that have everything to do with how and why I ended up doing what I do today. I want to share these cycles because I recognise that people at the forefront of their careers often go up on stage and only share all that is grand about what they do and how they got there (and I am guilty of the same). The problem with that is that it creates a false sense of optimism for those listening in and setting out on their own career path, as they feel that all stars need to line up for them too to stand a chance. Here is why failure is not often talked about. Firstly, success is easier to talk about than failure when you are advocating for your practice. Secondly, it takes perspective and retrospective to see the value in failure, and in this fast-paced world we often lack the opportunity to pause, look back and reflect. I’ll talk more about pace in another story, but for now, let’s come back to failure. It is crystal clear to me now that I owe it as much (if not more) to failure as I do to success to have been able to pave my career journey towards social design. So here is an honest account of failures and persistence that have never made it into my bio. It is worth noting here that what is considered failure is a matter of personal perception. The following account shares moments and events where at the time, I personally felt I failed and I felt troubled by that, however others may not see this in the same light.
2003 — Childhood career dream comes tumbling down: I come from two generations of designers on both sides of the family. Growing up, my school teachers told me I was creative. As a kid, my second favourite time of the year (after Christmas) was advertising awards night. I would sit mesmerised in front of the TV watching witty adverts being screened, and black-suited Creative and Account Directors (men pretty much exclusively) collecting flashy awards. Saatchi & Saatchi were definitely up there quite a lot and their adverts were pretty awesome. So it was decided. I was going to do a degree in Graphic Design — on trend at the time — and then work with Saatchi & Saatchi. This all seems naive now, but I wonder how different the thought process (rather than outcome) is to many other 16 and 17 year olds carving out a career path with the limited guidance out there on what it’s like and what’s required to do different types of jobs. So in that last term on the BA course when we were asked to choose an agency to intern with, Saatchi & Saatchi was top pick for me. I asked my course lead for the agency address in Beirut (in those days preceding Google Maps) and got a couple of buses down to the office to hand in a cover letter and CV that I had spent weeks drafting, designing and polishing. I walked in and asked to speak to Elie Khouri, the Creative Director. I was asked if he was expecting me. I lied and said yes. Someone went into his office, and came back with a promise that Elie will have a look at my CV and come back to me (I suspect he’d seen that trick before). One week later, Elie didn’t get in touch. So I called to follow-up. I continued to call-up persistently every single day for two weeks until one day, the art director phoned me back, instructed me to stop calling the office, and to start my internship the following week. I was thrilled. But then this was when the dream started tumbling down. I interned for three months for a few days a week. My days consisted pretty much of a single task: scrolling through image libraries for hours on end to source images against tight briefs. When there wasn’t anything to do, I would cheekily go and sit next to one of the designers to watch them work, dig into their massive library of advertising books, or observe and sketch out how their creative process worked from brief to evaluation. Over the days and weeks, it became more and more apparent to me that this was not how I saw myself spending my days. The culture of hierarchy, stress, internal competitiveness and presumptuousness was enough to set me off on a search for plan B. But I had no idea where to start. The internship had failed me, but I also strongly felt that I had failed myself by committing so much into a career direction that I hadn’t investigated enough.
2004 —Last minute career dream comes tumbling down too: I remember my lecturers at university speaking highly of the Royal College of Art. I also remember them commenting a few times on how my analytical mind lends itself well to postgraduate education. One day, my mentor Linda Selwood Choueiri told me that the British Council were offering full Chevening scholarships for Lebanese students who wanted to pursue a masters degree in the UK. In my urgent pursuit for a last minute plan B, this piece of news sealed the deal. I spent the winter after graduation working on my portfolio for the RCA, studying for my IELTS test, filling in application forms, and writing letters of intent. Needless to say, I didn’t get into the course nor get the scholarship with feedback from the latter’s committee that my letter of intent was not convincing as to how an MA in Communication Design would support the socio-economic development of Lebanon upon my return. At the time, I did not know enough about the potential for design to convince them otherwise. So amidst my devastation, I concluded that they were probably right. Many years later, the Design Council would publish a report giving tangible evidence of the significant contribution of the design industry to the economy. As I was trying to come to terms with the rejection and planning my next move, I receive a call from Indevco Group, a global industrial design and development company with headquarters in Lebanon. They had a vacancy for a graphic designer and I had been recommended by my university for the role. Not knowing what other options I had, I interviewed and got offered the job. I LOVED the culture. Over the four years I spent there, I was given the time and space to learn, experiment and explore, I received formal training, I was given extended leave to tour Europe by train alone, and I met and worked with colleagues that I still call family (somewhat literally as that’s also where I met my now husband!). So life after failure wasn’t that bad after all.
2006 — Starting back from nothing: Over my years at Indevco Group, a few serendipitous things happened that in combination, started sharpening my interest for a particular role that I believed design could play, and that made the case for me to leave it all and start back from nothing:
- I realised that the work I enjoyed the most at Indevco Group was socially-focused; raising awareness of the impact of emigration on the economic brain drain of the country, improving the wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, and the development of social values for the company brand. This work was scarce though. Most of the time I was designing brands, packaging and promotional campaigns for sanitary products.
- I came across Adbusters and became hooked — perhaps as a way to dissent in response to my newly gained awareness of the advertising industry’s vices.
- I found Graphic Agitation in the NDU library and it became by favourite book about how design can drive political and social activism.
- I read the First Things First Manifesto written by Ken Garland in 1963, which affirms that design is not a neutral and value-free process, and that designers should make conscious decisions to invest their skills and talent in worthwhile purposes.
- I came across the work of Jonathan Barnbrook and attended his keynote at the American University of Beirut. We had a chat afterwards and when I complained about my job he joked: “Well someone’s got to do it [designing toilet paper packaging].”
- The July War broke out. Having grown up during the Lebanese civil war which ended in 1990, this was a stark reminder of the country’s instability.
These events came together to help crystallise my new-found ambition to use my design skills to affect social and political change. I knew that I had to start where the movement started — London. So I took the risk. I pulled together my savings, convinced my dad to lend me some of his retirement pay (with a pay-back promise through funding my younger sisters’ education), packed my life into one bag, and left everything and everyone behind. Over the following year, I found myself in a box room sharing a flat with 6 others in Waterloo, whilst doing an MA in Graphic Design at the London College of Communication. I was under the supervision of the wonderful Tony Credland, who was very much at the heart of the UK’s visual activism movement in the 90s. Through the course, I explored how design activism can help shift public opinion — in the Lebanese context as a starting point. This lead to me publishing Visual Politics alongside artist and curator Naji Zahar.
2007 —79 applications for jobs I didn’t want: As soon as I handed in my final major project, I got job hunting. I felt a number of pressures. Firstly I was running out of cash quick. Secondly I had heard horror stories about how competitive the London job market was and how people looked for months on end with no success. Thirdly I needed to demonstrate to family back home that there was a career future for a social designer (although I wasn’t too certain myself) to justify the investment and relocation. Fourthly I had 12 months to earn enough income in order to collect enough points to qualify for a highly-skilled migrant work visa, so I could stay and work legally in the UK. I got lucky on that front. In fact only two generations of international postgraduates got lucky ever. During Labour government, international students who completed their courses between 2008 and 2010 could apply for a one or two-year post-study work visa, so they could work legally, try and earn points, and prove themselves to then qualify to switch to the highly-skilled migrant visa. Both of these schemes have now been discontinued. So prior to and following these schemes, international students had only one option when they finished their degree —to return to their home country as soon as possible. So retrospectively, failure to get onto that RCA course back in 2004 coincidentally played to my advantage. Back to job hunting, all these pressures drove me to focus on tenacity and persistence. Between December and February, I had applied to over 80 design jobs, interviewed for about 20, been rejected for about 15, and said no to about 5. Of the 80 jobs though, there was only one job I really wanted to do, and that was the only social design job I had come across. A few weeks after I had applied for that job, I had lost hope of hearing word, until Mary Cook dropped me a line inviting me to interview. I was thrilled. I interviewed, got the job, and started work the very next day; a Saturday. On that day, I had £14 left in my bank account and some dog walking lined up. The thing is, Mary Cook and her business partner Zoe Stanton had set up Uscreates about a year earlier through funding from Nesta’s Creative Pioneers programme. It was one of the first agencies in the UK with the purpose to use design to affect social change. It was just the two of them back in the day, and that weekend in February when I started, they had a tight deadline on a Well London project so we really needed to get cracking. Persistence paid off. 10 years down the line, I feel so proud of how we’ve grown and all that we have achieved, without ever steering away from our core mission — designing a better society. This is the sort of stuff I moved to London to do.
2008–Investing in my discipline and passion: a year into starting work at Uscreates, I decided to apply for a PhD at the London College of Communication. My MA research left an unresolved issue that I really wanted to explore further. It uncovered the deep and divisive lines in Lebanon’s society nearly 20 years after the end of the civil war. I was passionate to investigate whether there was anything that a design approach could do to promote social integration. It was an uncharted and ambitious territory, and I knew that one way to give me the rigour, support and discipline to get on top of it was a PhD course. I applied and was accepted, but I could not find any scholarships that would fully or partly fund a Lebanese student at PhD level. So after a year of looking, applying and getting one disqualification after another, I needed to make a hard call. I loved work at Uscreates. I also felt committed to getting to the bottom of my design research question. So I decided to do both of these things at the same time. I worked at Uscreates four days a week, worked on my part-time PhD the remaining 3 days, and used my income from Uscreates to fund the PhD. Each experience was reciprocally fuelling the other in different ways. It was the best decision I ever made. Six gruelling years later, I had completed my PhD research with a design-led pilot demonstrating significant impact on social integration (more on this in another story), and I had the priviledge of becoming a member of the senior management team that saw Uscreates grow to become the lead service design agency for health and wellbeing. I feel I would have missed out on so much had I accepted failure in funding applications, and not persisted with the PhD. I also feel I would have missed out on so much had I received a scholarship, and left work at Uscreates to pursue a full-time PhD.
In this story, I shared five accounts of pivotal moments in my career when failure, risk-taking and persistence shaped my direction of travel. I recognise now, many years later that if any of these failures had been a success, I would have gone down numerous paths that I now find might have been much less rewarding and enriching (arguably). Over the years, I have also learned to become more comfortable with and accepting of failure, seeing it as a stepping stone into a better future, whether at a micro level on a project I am designing and testing, or at a macro level when going through major life transitions.
Other stories:
Read story #1 — Year 2000: deconstructing and reconstructing
Read story #3 — Year 2007: curiosity and questioning
Read story #4 — Year 2009: reframing and solving problems
