Start As You Mean To Go On — Chris Do
Last night, we were very (very) fortunate to have Chris Do come to talk to us in Edinburgh, all the way from California.
If you’re unfamiliar with Mr Do, I’m going to shamelessly steal from his bio; Chris Do is an Emmy award winning director, designer, strategist and educator. He’s the Chief Strategist and CEO of Blind, executive producer of The Skool, and the Founder of The Futur — an online education platform that teaches the business of design to creative thinkers.
He also has a cracking YouTube channel.
How did that happen?
Couple months back, Chris was tweeting about coming to Europe, and my good friend, and now partner in crime in this endeavour, Iain, jumped in with the suggestion of coming north of the wall.
Shy bairns get nout, as I attempted to teach our American guests.
So we took a punt; a risk, which ended up being one of the key points of Chris’ talk last night. We creatives have already taken a risk, by choosing the creative industries for our careers, so why stop taking risks now? What’s the worst that can happen?
Despite the snow’s best efforts (and a last minute, semi panicked purchase of plane tickets to make up for the increasingly sketchy chances of the East Coast Mainline being open), nothing bad happened at all! We managed to get 130 odd people crammed into Whitespace to experience an amazing evening.
As for the talk itself, I’m still processing it. It will end up on Youtube in its entirety, and I would absolutely recommend watching it. I will.
Myself and Iain kind of wandered around in a daze afterwards, a mixture of ‘How the hell did we pull this off?’ to semi nervous laughter when asked who we were going to be getting next.
But, I’ve changed my mind about that.
Being humble, downplaying things, feeling like an imposter… Pretty standard feelings, right? Even sometimes admired?
They shouldn’t be.
It was part of Chris’ talk, at one end of the scale you’ve got the humble, imposter syndrome feeling; people who don’t value what they do, effectively. At the other extreme, you’ve got what can be perceived as arrogance, but isn’t that just having some faith in what you’ve done?
So yeah, let’s own it. We got Chris Do to come to Edinburgh, for the first Design Talk we’ve ever attempted to put on. How awesome is that?! (I say we, but Iain did the hard part, so all credit to him!) And we’re gonna do more, which may or may not involve more pestering awesome people on Twitter.
Shy bairns get nout.
