Good(ish) Omens: The Varied and (in)Accurate Career of Stephen Collins, Designer
A version of this essay was presented in late 2017 as a part of my work in the Future Design Contexts unit in the Master of Design Futures program at RMIT University.
CAVEAT
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous.
Do not attempt it in your own home.
In the beginning
“It was a nice day.
All of the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.”
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
While it would be fabulous to submit Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s masterful text, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch as a direct allegory for my career, that would be rather a long bow to draw (and unlikely to be considered legitimate). There will, however, be a number of increasingly tenuous call-outs to it throughout this analysis.
Let’s just say I’ve never been what would be described as a “model employee”. At various times I’ve been described as difficult, opinionated, non-compliant, belligerent, unwilling to collaborate, and having an overly high opinion of myself. There have been more, but those are the most easily recalled.
To be frank, none of those are wrong.
I’m a person who has needed to learn emotional intelligence. Doing so has been a hard road (and it continues), and it’s only been through the help of my partner, Alli, and the guidance of a handful of important people in my life — both personally and professionally, and usually blurring that boundary — that I’ve been able to grow into a kind of EI that is highly constructed, learned rather than natural, and at times difficult to maintain.
The first notions of starting something resembling my current practice began in early 2006. A very wise manager of mine held a regular review meeting with me, and said (I’m paraphrasing here):
“Stephen, you’re a smart guy, you have good ideas, you think about problems deeply and want to solve them. But you scare or upset people. You don’t fit here, and you need to figure out whether you want to or not.”
In his wisdom, Drew (the abovementioned manager) sent me on an expensive public sector middle management development course. In reality, the course was designed to weed out those not suited to being public servants, or so we were told on Day 1 of a three-day offsite intensive, in a move akin to the first lecture one attends in first-year undergraduate law: “look left and right. One of those people won’t be here in three months.” Sure enough, I was gone in three months. Though not quite to where I was meant to be.
Eleven years ago
“Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn’t just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and half thousand million years old.
These dates are incorrect.”
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
As it turns out, buying sheepskin slippers with built-in massage vibration soles from Harvey Norman for your wife on Mother’s Day isn’t the shockingly bad idea it appears to be at first blush. As it turns out, doing so can result in you winning a luxury retreat and you and said wife spending a delightful three days in Byron Bay at a resort where, with the help of some long beach walks, the right number of drinks with umbrellas, and a poolside lounge, you can come up with the mad idea of starting your own business.
Bootstrapping a business is terrifying. And there have been times where I’ve not done it well because of the lack of management skill I had. I’m more than lucky I have an understanding and tolerant partner in Alli, who has kept us afloat more than once since 2006 while I’ve looked for work in a dry market.
For the first eight years or so of the life of acidlabs Pty Ltd, the business was not really much more than a way to get recruiting agents (the way freelance contract work into government agencies is brokered in our nation’s capital) to give me more of the hourly rate they charge to the client I was contracted to at the time (they take their cut, you can do things to make that cut smaller). It’s efficient and effective, but hardly satisfying (if we’re to make a call-out to ISO 9241).
In any honest assessment of the way the business was run at the time, nobody would consider my management to be anything more than half-hearted at best. In terms of the work done, much of it was mundane, though reflective of the nature and maturity of the market at the time — telcos expanding into proper mobile platforms, banks having a first pass at making ATMs and online banking something marginally above mind-numbing, and government agencies trying, and often not really succeeding, at creating usable, useful, and accessible online services.
That said, I spent those years honing my craft, learning some EI, getting to understand people and how they collaborate, and forming some pretty firm views on how the best kinds of businesses were run. I even earned a little fame, speaking regularly at conferences in Australia, NZ, and the US on collaboration, 21st Century business, open and citizen-centric government, and their intersection with design. Of course, none of that helped my business; my maturity as a business owner and understanding how to run my own business and leverage those other influences for it was not yet ready.
Wednesday — the past
“It was a hot, fume-filled August day in Central London.
Warlock’s eleventh birthday was very well attended.”
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
In 2012, I started thinking about what acidlabs might look like as a business of more than one. This was largely driven by attending TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar and significantly expanding the network of people I had begun meeting when attending my first TED in Palm Springs in 2009.
Just as Good Omens’ key group of characters is referred to as “Them”, so I have a “Them” in my professional life. Between 2009 and 2013, I met five people in particular, who subsequently became significant influences in my career and life: Ash Donaldson, who is now one of the principals of successful design studio, Tobias, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and a regular annoyance in my email and ear agitating for me to grow up and run my business “like a proper studio”; Jodi Womack who with her husband, Jason W. Womack MEd, MA, are now two key mentors and close friends; Kara DeFrias, who not long after our time in Doha became the Head of Design for Joe Biden at the White House and led design on the Cancer Moonshot; and Matt Gorbet, a Toronto-based multidisciplinary designer who runs a successful studio with his partner, Susan LK Gorbet, and who scored me my first international gig: three months flying the globe teaching design thinking skills to staff at SAP on four continents.
The friendships I formed with Ash, the Womacks, and with Kara remain key relationships in my life; these are people who “get” me. They understand where I’ve come from, accept my eccentricities, and will call me on my bullshit.
Beyond these five, my first staff member, Nathanael Coyne, hired mid-2016 though we’ve been trying to work together since 2010 or so, my partner, Alli, and my friend and former colleague, Pete Terwee, are key influencers both personally and professionally, and are probably more likely than anyone else to call me out on my excuse-making and nonsense, and direct me toward solid thinking and decisions.
In the years before and since 2009, there are a number of other key people that have been critical pieces of context in my growth as a person and as a business owner. They’ve all got their own stories, though there’s inadequate room for them here, so those stories are for another time…
Friday — the present
“Raven Sable, slim and bearded and dressed all in black, sat in the back of his slimline black limousine, talking on his slimline black telephone to his West Coast base.”
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
The growth I experienced thanks to meeting those people, both professionally and as a person, has helped me manage the nagging imposter syndrome many of us face daily, gain confidence in my own voice and style as a designer, and helped me build a worldview and mental model of ethics, design, and business that drives acidlabs as I seek to grow it into a functioning, functional studio that employs great people, treats them humanely, and lets them do more great work.
Part of that growth prompted in no small part by Ash has been to take me and my work more seriously. It’s been incredibly beneficial from a business perspective, and in no small way, at least as beneficial from a design practice perspective. I feel now that I’m in a place where I can eventually become a design leader, expressing cogent views on the things about design that excite me: service design as a practice that benefits across business and not just in strict services, design ethics, design leadership, and the growing — but still immature — inclusion of design-led work in government and the public sector, and its potential to improve decision making, policy formation, and service delivery.
While many of us would probably like to populate our heartrendingly cool design studios with Eames furniture, Poulsen light fittings, beautiful rolling whiteboards, and the designer equivalents of Raven Sable, for the moment, we’re moving in a different direction.
The nature of the market in Canberra means that many designers belong notionally to studios, but are for all intents and purposes an outposted, embedded resource, on-site with a client.
If you’re lucky and have the scale, you get to work with colleagues from your home base though this doesn’t happen all that much. There are really only a half-handful of studios that get to do predominantly studio-based work. Even the big agencies: Fjord, Oakton, PwC, Capgemini, and similar, largely outpost their designers on site.
And so it is with acidlabs.
Since the beginning of 2016, my intention has been to hire 4–6 design staff and do predominantly studio work, relying on outposting only when necessary. We’re at the beginning of that journey: there are two of us — me, and my colleague and friend, Nathanael — and we’re both embedded with clients. With any luck, and if things as described in the various canvases used to help frame this analysis (attached) come to pass, we’ll get there in the next few years.
So, what am I interested in as a designer? As a leader? Where do I want to go?
As noted above, there are several aspects of our industry and business that get me out of bed in the morning:
- service design as a practice — I absolutely believe service design is a part of the answer to a great many more things than it’s presently being used for. I’m firmly of the view that service design can help organisations at any scale improve their approach to work, to business design, to the development of policy, and as a part of an approach to complexity scale (and tiny problems). I want to be a part of that and to help bring service design to the fore in this country and elsewhere.
- design leadership — as an emerging topic of conversation, I’m excited by the work people like Steve 'Doc' Baty and Janna DeVylder and their team at Meld, Richard Banfield, Mike Monteiro and Erika Hall, Dave Gray, Jared M. Spool, Ash Donaldson, Kara DeFrias, Melis Senova, Daniel Szuc, Dan Hill, Ashlea McKay, Dana Chisnell, Jason Fried and DHH at Basecamp and others are doing, the way they’re sharing their knowledge, and the direction they drive us through their own modeling of good design and business leadership. I believe I can at some point play a part in that leadership, but to do so I need to extend my voice and write more to more solidly frame my thinking.
- design ethics — the conversation around ethics is, to quote Zoolander, “so hot right now”. Mike Monteiro’s talk How to fight fascism has been seen as a keynote at several conferences, including UX Australia, and his A Designer’s Code of Ethics are both worthy additions to the conversation, and places like the Slack community How Might We Do Good? where a growing, active, and nuanced conversation about what design ethics is, what it means, and how we practice and deliver on ethical design takes place are keenly needed.
It’s these things, and their meaning to us as designers, that excite me.
Sunday (the first day of the rest of their lives) — the future
“At around half past ten, the paper boy brought the Sunday papers to the front door of Jasmine Cottage. He had to make three trips.”
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
It would be easy as a designer and business owner to be like the paperboy, and try to cover so much that it took many trips around reading, analysis, information, knowledge, and working with others in order to get anything done. However, the reality of the matter is that to work a healthy number of hours in my practice each week, while running a business, being a husband, sharing duties in a house, and trying to keep at least a little fit and healthy, requires a degree of pragmatism.
As a business owner and employer I want to create a place where people want to work and can do their best work in an environment that celebrates that work, but that also celebrates them as humans, and makes sure that their humanity is protected more than a little.
To that end, and as a way to anticipate how we want to continue by beginning the right way, Nathanael and I have written our Employee Handbook and published it into the public domain via GitHub. It speaks to the way I want the studio to grow, the way we intend to treat people, and particularly to the kind of self-motivated leadership I want to exhibit and see in the people I work with. It embodies the things I’m interested in in business and design and is probably the best example of eating my own dog food I’ve ever been a part of producing.
That conversation with Drew all those years ago is now a thing of the past. But the job isn’t finished. I’m still a very long way as a designer, business person, and just plain human from where I want to be, but I think I’m getting there. With good planning, a lot of talking to people and building strong relationships, the doing of good to great work, and a little luck, perhaps I’ll get there before it’s time to retire to a cabin by a mountain lake.
References
acidlabs. (2017). Employee Handbook. [online] Available at: https://github.com/acidlabsdesign/EmployeeHandbook.
Banfield, R. (2016). Design Leadership: How Top Design Leaders Build and Grow Successful Organizations. 1st ed. O’Reilly Media.
Burkeman, O. (2013). This column will change your life: do you feel a fraud?. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/09/impostor-syndrome-oliver-burkeman.
Clark, T., Osterwalder, A. and Pigneur, Y. (2012). Business model you. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs) — Part 9: Requirements for non-keyboard input devices. (2000). Toronto: International Standards Organisation.
Gray, D. (2017). What is Culture Mapping and why should you care?. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/what-is-culture-mapping-and-why-should-you-care-912f99c4de98.
Monteiro, M. (2016). How To Fight Fascism. Medium. Available at: https://deardesignstudent.com/how-to-fight-fascism-dabdfeab1830.
Monteiro, M. (2017). A Designer’s Code of Ethics. [online] Medium. Available at: https://deardesignstudent.com/a-designers-code-of-ethics-f4a88aca9e95.
Monteiro, M. (2017). How to Fight Fascism. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW2moFk074Q.
Osterwalder, A. (2017). The Culture Map: A Systematic & Intentional Tool For Designing Great Company Culture. [online] Strategyzer. Available at: http://blog.strategyzer.com/posts/2015/10/13/the-culture-map-a-systematic-intentional-tool-for-designing-great-company-culture.
Osterwalder, A. and Pigneur, Y. (2013). Business model generation. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G. and Smith, A. (2015). Value Proposition Design. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Pratchett, T. and Gaiman, N. (1990). Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. London: Corgi Books.
Senova, M. (2017). This human: How to be the person designing for other people. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Stanier, M. (2010). Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters. New York: Workman Publishing Company.
Warrell, M. (2014). Afraid Of Being ‘Found Out?’ How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2014/04/03/impostor-syndrome/#1e5a5fac48a9.
