Three Memos for the Near Future
We are in 2015, barely fifteen years since the launch of a new millennium. Dates come and go and sometimes we pay attention to them, make resolutions even — but we are more or less marking time when we look to the future and for signs that we will have a significant role in its formation. This is an outside-in process, a desire for external validation of our success and for this reason should be avoided.
The future itself is an illusion. It has always not happened yet and that is the beauty of it because anything is possible in our imagination. I’m a real fan of the imagination but I am an even bigger fan of the everyday here and now. The world begins and ends with you and you have an obligation to respect that reality. Reality is what is always happening now.
Nevertheless, things have changed. The future isn’t what it used to be. Our lives are a series of interactions with our environment — which is made up of the people, places, things that inhabit it. With digital technologies increasingly mediating our everyday experiences, design must not only positively shape our experiences but should do so based on insight that leverages technology to improve the human experience. Design’s overall role is to make technology more human. User-centered design demands that we think and act from the inside out.
BDW is an ongoing experiment in design-driven innovations for learning. Our product is talent for the new digital age — a world where everyone is connected and the future will be exponentially different from the past. BDW graduates are the result of a unique immersive learning environment that integrates design, technology, and entrepreneurism.
The current BDW cohort asked for my opinion on what they need to be thinking about as they prepare to graduate. Graduation is actually five months into that future — mid-August of 2015 — and there are practical matters to which they need to attend to now. I offer these three memos to keep them focused.
1. On Skillsets
BDW graduates are currently working as designers, developers, producers, and product managers in agencies, design firms and design-driven companies, and also in startups as well as established companies with mature brands. Our alums are valued because they are excellent at collaboration, have the skillsets that allow them to actually do their jobs, and are also able to communicate well with the diverse variety of people who populate the 21st-century globally connected economy.
Know-how matters more than ever, so as you are winding your way toward graduation find out what is expected of you in the jobs that you would like to have. BDW throws a lot at you and all of it is relevant — from the guest speakers, to the design sprints, to every single class that you take. Always be mindful that the professionals who you come into contact with and who form the BDW network all have one trait in common: they are currently making a living doing something that you need to learn how to do. Find out what that is and get good enough at it to be paid, too.
2. On Mindsets
How do you approach problems and how do you know when you have reached a solution? At the end of the day, you are being paid to solve problems. BDW arms you with processes that will guide you in the solving of problems but you also need to cultivate a mindset that will not be satisfied until it has solved the real problem to be solved. A common error among professionals is that they redefine a problem until it is one that they already know how to solve — and this habit of mind is lazy, defensive, and strikingly irrelevant.
To avoid becoming just another capable person doing the obvious and expected, you need to cultivate your imagination and remain curious, interested, and tireless in your mindset. Or put another way, cultivate qualities or characteristics that make you dissatisfied with being satisfied and that you would be happy to hear other people describe you as having.
3. On Origins
Where you start from and where you end up may often seem circuitous in process but once the journey is finished and you can pause and look back, the ending — like a well-made plot — seems inevitable. Wherever you land after graduation in August 2015, you will see that the winding path that you have taken was inevitable given your individual interests, motivations, and efforts. You are what you pretend to be, so be very mindful about what you pretend to be. You will have to deal with it either way.
