Something an Art Professor Told Me That I’ll Never Forget

Leyla Novini
The Creativity Quotient
1 min readOct 24, 2022

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I was inspired by a recent TikTok trend on former art students sharing stories of their positive or negative interactions with their teachers. I immediately remembered a moment I had during my time as a grad student at Parsons School of Design.

In my first semester in the program, I was sitting in my studio professor’s office the day before our final presentations where she explained to me that my prototype was unusable. After many tissues and a bottle of water to soothe me from hysterically crying, she proceeded to tell me this:

“Don’t create dancing bears! So many students just create dancing bears without any purpose or passion behind their work.”

As a UX Designer and Entrepreneur now, I think about this statement as I place attention on who I am designing for and the value within my work. It was the start of my philosophy of “just because the technology is available, doesn’t mean it has to be built.”

A tweet saying Innovation does not equate to usability. #ux #design #uxmemes with images of unusable objects such as the thick fork, engagement mug, the uncomfortable mug, the uncomfortable champagne glass.
From my retweet of dougcollinsux

Link to the TikTok I posted thank you freelancehana for the inspiration.

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Leyla Novini
The Creativity Quotient

Senior Product/UX Designer, Innovation Strategy Leader, and Creative Entrepreneur, AI/ML design, music nerd, new to the world of improv.