When Your Design Inspirations aren’t “Designers”
Back in the fall Dan Turner asked the UX Slack group “What designers inspire you?” And it’s a weird question for me, because the designers that inspire me… well, they’re not “designers.”
The architects Jeanne Gang and Le Corbusier.
Fashion instructor Tim Gunn.
The artist Piet Mondrian.
Chefs Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz.
None of the people I mention are the “usual suspects.” To be honest, I hate this question when it comes up in an interview. I mean, it feels like I’m being challenged by some Comic Book Guy on whether I’m a “real fan.” If I’m not even naming people in the “greater UX and design metroplex,” what right do I have to dare call myself a UX designer?
Well, I come by it honest.
My father was an architect, was influenced by Bruce Goff and Frank Lloyd Wright… and designed buildings made from precast concrete. For someone whose heroes were wild and whimsical in form-following-function, he sure created a lot of utilitarian designs.
Here’s a building he designed:
Here’s a building Bruce Goff designed:
About the only thing going for my father is his building hasn’t been demolished yet, where the Bavinger House was levelled in the spring of 2016.
Thing was, I didn’t want to be an architect. I watched the hell my father went through as the head of a firm. The stress made him a pack a day smoker and a workaholic. When he dropped dead at 47, he looked like he’d lived multiple lifetimes.
But… I still loved buildings. And architecture is still a motivating force for me.
I interviewed at a startup which was in one of the few Art Deco buildings in town. “It’s beautiful,” I remarked. “Yeah, but the power grid is from the 1920s!” a dev retorted. (But who cares when the ceiling is copper, right?)
I fell into the web because I liked the idea of organizing information. So it made sense that Mondrian and Le Corbusier, lovers of the rectangle, would be influences. Le Corbusier, despite being a raging fascist, made brutalism human. Mondrian’s grids and boxes fit with the HTML 2.0/3.0 world I learned to build the web in. When I saw Khoi Vinh at SXSW 2007 talking about The Grid, it just cemented those ideas together.
Along the way, I learned from Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, Dan Cederholm. I improved my craft, relentlessly, even if I couldn’t tell an affordance apart from a call-to-action.
Web design turned into UX. It all made sense, really — I was climbing higher and higher above the code as I realized the most elegant CSS couldn’t solve the problems of bad interaction design and bad content.
I read about Jeanne Gang and her desire to design things that can be built. And that last paragraph has stuck with me ever since:
Gang has no interest in establishing a look that marks her buildings as hers. Her instincts are modern, but style alone doesn’t shape her work; materials, technology, and an ongoing attempt to see from the perspective of the people who will use the buildings mean much more to her. “You know, a lot of architects get into fetishized objects,” she said to me. “But when you can design anything you want without actually having to make it, you do wild things that can’t work. And that’s not what I want to do.”
Here was an architect saying what I’d always believed: That design requires an understanding of the materials deep enough to know what you can and cannot do with them. I’d worked with too many designers who’d pushed the envelope in impossible ways, asking for the web to do things it was incapable of doing. Form over function meant neither form nor function. HTML and JavaScript are forgiving in the ways concrete and steel can be.
So that’s who really influences me: People who aren’t in UX.
Well, mostly.
I got to work with Dave Malouf in our short tenure at HPE. Now, let’s be clear: Dave and I were not the bestest of friends in our time there. Both our annual reviews contained the line “Stop fighting with each other; you’re scaring the junior designers.”
But I didn’t come into my relationship thinking “I am working with a god.” I came into thinking about what Dave could teach me. And Dave taught me a ton on how to think big, how to set the bar high, how to take my systems thinking to another level.
Influences are nice — they’re people you can aim to be. But they’re aspirational. They’re the Michael Jordan poster on the wall in your room. But the people who teach you, who push you, who motivate you… they’re far more important than the aspirational.
So, do I have any influences? Yes. But none of them are “designers.” They’re artists, architects, fashion professors, and the natural world.
But the people I’ve learned from, from CEOs to creative directors to the greenest junior designer, they are really what influence me the most. They’re the ones who push me to be better, who help me grow.
The UX space is fairly small. You could probably cram all the UX designers in the world into the Rose Bowl (and have plenty of good seats available). In such a small space, we have to learn to work together and learn from one another, to push and urge each other not as gods and goddesses of design, but as people who make mistakes and try to better next time.
Don’t look to “influences.” Look to people who can teach you how to be better at being you.
