There’s No Secret Sauce… Except Sit Down and Do The Work
Creative tech artist and designer Brendan Dawes on life in lockdown
This is the twelfth interview in the Beyond Work series looking at how founders and innovators work from home during the global pandemic of Coronavirus. In this interview, we head from New York back to the UK to catch up with Brendan Dawes.
Brendan Dawes is an artist and designer, working with technology — generative processes involving data, machine learning and algorithms — to create interactive installations, electronic objects, online experiences, data visualisations, motion graphics and imagery for both screen and print. His work has been included in exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Somerset House in London, among others.
Brendan’s work includes on projects for a myriad of clients including Airbnb, Twitter, PWC, Google, Seagate, BBC, The Royal Shakespeare Company et al.
This interview was completed 22nd April 2020. North West England, UK.
What does a “typical” day look like to you now?
If I’m being good, I start the day with a 5k run along the seawall. I only started running last year and to be quite honest it’s hateful at the time, but I always get a sense of achievement after I’ve completed it. I miss my spinning classes, so this is what I do need to do so I don’t become a giant lump of lard when eating Mint Club’s in lockdown.
Back home, shower, breakfast with Lisa (not in the shower), who’s now also at home. Answer emails and then any admin — checking stuff on FreeAgent, cash flow, bank etc. Confession: I actually like a lot of that admin stuff. Makes me feel grown-up. Some days I have a video call with friends — just a coffee and we just chat and talk crap. I was doing this before COVID 19 but it’s even more important now.
Then it’s on with current work, which right now involves setting up long renders for a 4K motion piece, which leaves me free for some of the day. This gives me time to learn a new technique, update my site or do other non-client projects. The garden has been getting a much-needed tidy-up for instance, trying to make good use of the current good weather. Meanwhile, things continue to render. Lunch, then check in on renders, composite ones that have finished and then set new ones running. Back to the garden, weather permitting.
One thing I try to do when I have downtime is push new experiments out there on Instagram, Twitter, my blog etc. These are all things that I may use in a commercial project later down the line, but they also serve as a constant stream of visibility.
Sometimes in the evening I may have a video call with clients in the States. I recently had one with a contact at NASA JPL, which was really exciting, though I always find the juxtaposition interesting. Moments before I was wrestling with an oversized bin bag — complete with escaping bin juice — so I could put the bins out, and now I was talking to a person from NASA. I didn’t mention the bin juice to him. Might have been weird.
We then make dinner together, and so far we’ve not repeated a meal in our fourth week of lockdown. A couple of nights a week we make cocktails. My go to is an Amoretto Sour and my wife — who doesn’t drink — loves a drink called a Black Tea Garden , complete with fluffy egg white served in a coupe glass.
How has Coronavirus impacted your life/work?
Well, I work from home anyway, and have done since 2012, and I would never go back to working for anyone else, or working from an office. Or that bloody hateful commute. God that was crap. So the working from home part is exactly the same, the difference is my wife is now home with me, so we have lunch together which is lovely. Work enquiries seem to have dried up but right now I can’t tell if that’s Coronavirus or just the natural order of things. I only do few projects a year anyway, so it’s fine.
My hair, like everyone else, is getting longer, but it’s prompted me to look at a new hairstyle anyway.
Only a few weeks in, I’m enjoying the silence and the new simplicity of life. I’m also saving a load of money — no coffees, lunches and the like. Plus, because we have a garden we’re lucky that we can at least go outside and breathe fresh air. I can only imagine it’s much more challenging in a flat or apartment. People are talking about going back to normal, but I’m hoping we don’t, or at least not ‘that’ normal. I’m hoping this will see a change in our ideas of consumption and consumerism. Then again I just know when McDonald’s reopen, the queue will be that big it’ll make the news, and I’ll be lusting over some posh new coat or something.
What productivity tips have you found useful whilst working from home?
Firstly, get one of those short-order ‘check-on’ things. You can get them online. I have mine above my desk, and in there I wedge my task list, one per chitty. It’s not digital, or connected in any way, but I love it because it’s tied to a specific space — my studio — and I can only fit so many things on. When I pull down a chitty after a task is done it’s very satisfying.
I don’t use Slack. I used it once on a project and it was beyond awful. To my mind, it amplifies the noise so you can’t get anything done. “Oh here’s an article about how you can 3D print with yoghurt.” “Oh here’s a link that you might find interesting on the history of Hopskotch.” Fuck off and leave me alone. Of course some people love it. I recently worked on a collaborative project and refused to use it. Instead we talked on the phone each day. It worked wonderfully, complete with nuance and subtlety.
A friend recommended Whereby for video calls and it’s really good. It’s free for a maximum of four people and there’s no dodgy privacy things going on. I did try Houseparty for a week and then realised it’s another social network and suddenly I had annoying invites from people telling me they are “in da house.” I couldn’t give a shit if they were in the house, outside the house, in the garage or squatting in someone’s shed. That thing has now been deleted and then thrown in the bin alongside Facebook.
I’m a big Evernote user, with over then years of notes, though I see Notion is the new hotness. I looked into it for a few days, and whilst it’s incredibly feature rich and powerful, I just found it over complicated for my particular needs. All I want is a note taking system, that integrates well with my browser. Evernote does that better than anyone.
Other than that there’s no secret sauce, except “sit down and do the work.”
What five books would you recommend during this time at home?
1. How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Life affirming.
2. In Praise of Shadows by Junichoro Tanizaki. Delightful.
3. Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life by Ceclia Watson. A book about the semicolon. Honestly. So good.
4. Paper Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form by Paul Jackson. These designs are really difficult to master. Should keep you occupied for a while.
5. Too Brief a Treat — The Letters of Truman Capote. Funny, bitchy and simply joyous.
When this is all over, what will the opportunities look like?
It’s almost like this is a kind of reboot for the world. Or is that just some intellectual pondering and it when it comes down to it things will just go back to the way they were because of the power of the 1%? I see Macron is thinking about things and how they can be different. I really hope that we can learn from these things but I’m just not sure. Of course, hairdressers are going to make a fortune.
