Designer as Method Actor and Translator
I recently learned about Pentagram partner Michael Bierut’s “method acting” approach to design in a FastCoDesign interview (via 99U). I can relate to this approach in my own practice.
The initial research and discovery phases of a design project often involve deep immersion into a context different from one’s own. For me, the design process can be transformative as an act of “becoming” and of radical empathy with my clients and users.
Bierut shares an example of this method acting approach with FastCoDesign’s Diana Budd:
[S]omeone says you want to do the signs for the New York Times?… [T]o do the work properly, I have to talk to editors, I have to sit in on the page-one meeting where they decide how page one is going to be laid out…
If you just have a request for proposal where the client says we need X, Y, and Z, that really just gives you the shopping list… It’s sort of like saying, I need a pair of pants and a shirt. But then, where are you going to wear it, how much are you going to spend? I’ll stand you in front of a mirror and you have to feel like you’re the kind of person who can wear those clothes.
So going to all those meetings, if all I cared about were typefaces or colors, I’d be sitting, fidgeting, thinking, “Why am I here? This is boring.” Instead, I was thinking “I can’t believe I’m here, I can’t believe that without ever taking a journalism class I’m actually sitting with the top editors at the New York Times and I’ll know before any other civilian does what’s going to be the story that appears in the first column on the left of tomorrow’s paper.” I had that momentary thrill.
This method acting approach can be useful for designers to find motivation and inspiration for our work. It allows us to enter the context of our clients and users and helps us to get into their heads.
I have had the privilege of doing design work in contexts very different from my own, in places like India, Brazil, and Rwanda. In these contexts, in addition to being a method actor of sorts, I also served a kind of translator.
I can never really become Indian or Brazilian or Rwandan. I can never fully understand what it is like to live in a slum in the outskirts of New Delhi or a favela in the hills of Rio de Janeiro. Nor can I fully grasp the experience of narrowly surviving a genocide in Rwanda while watching as my family members get murdered before my eyes. But I can interpret and translate what I do understand from those experiences to inform the design of products, services, and communications that serve the needs those communities.
In Brazil, I worked as a designer with Meu Rio (“My Rio” in Portuguese), a civil society organization that designs new interfaces for civic participation by creating online tools that connect citizens with government and each other and help ensure that people have a voice in the decisions that are transforming their city.
As part of the method acting design process, I worked to improve my Portuguese language skills to more directly engage with my users. I immersed myself in a cultural context different from my own. But I also found value in my outsider status as a foreigner. Writing about my experience in a paper presented at the 2012 AIGA Geographics conference in Honolulu, I explain:
I found that my “foreignness” was appreciated and valued for bringing outside ideas and a more distant critical eye to the Carioca and Brazilian culture in which we were operating and trying to create social innovation. I saw part of my role as a designer to be that of “translator,” as I helped to adapt tools and concepts that had been proven in other places and repackage them for the Brazilian context.
In an interview with Andrew Benedict-Nelson of the Insight Labs (now known as GreenHouse), I share about the work I did in India and talk about my take on the method actor/translator design approach through the lens of mental habits.
It’s an act of courage to step outside of your world and into somebody else’s, especially if you don’t know how everything works there. Good designers model that behavior for others.
Design is not just a methodology or an approach, but also a mindset. It is a way of doing, as well as a way of being. As Rhea Alexander, professor at Parsons the New School of Design puts it:
How do you think about and apply the method actor and translator approaches to your own design practice?
