Tag Archives: designer

on Purpose

defining-the-teams-purpose

we all live relatively short lives

with that in mind — there is not all that much time to really make a difference in peoples’ lives over the course of one life

i am a designer

i am actually both an artist and a designer

its taken me 45 years or so to re-find and refine my personal purpose in life

i am an extremely late bloomer, i guess { as if you couldn’t tell }

but that 45 is just on the art side of who i am as a person — and although i tend to purposely blur the lines between Art and Design, after about 20 years of practicing experience design and related areas within the industry i think i’ve also begun to re-find and refine my personal and professional purpose in life as a designer

i believe its vitally important, too, for designers to find a higher purpose for themselves

it took me a while to actually give myself permission to take this more personal, purpose-driven approach to the work i do, but let me tellya, it makes a world of difference when you look at your life and what you do on a daily basis with the right pair of glasses on — know what i’m sayin’?

the goals you set for yourself while under the influence of your higher design purpose can help put your entire career and your entire life in much better perspective

you start to understand not just what you should do and which fights to fight, but you also start to build a far better understanding behind why we design — there’s a far better precedent put to the work and you can just really sell that shit with a brighter, more meaningful confidence in your heart and in your soul

this purpose that i blog about here, for it to truly help you out { and to truly help out the organizations you work for } — your purpose needs to be bigger than any company, perhaps even bigger than the industry you are designing for

most of the time the truly innovative, speculative design ideas you come up with will be ignored, overlooked, undervalued and perhaps even ridiculed or dismissed — and this is okay, its actually what’s to be expected, as unfortunate as that may sound

your purpose goes with you, though, from place to place to place — and the ideas and the experiences you collect as an employee, which is another way of saying an inside primary user of the company brand experience, gives us all new business dynamics to learn from and to ultimately grow as a business person { and as a designer }

my own personal { and professional } experience design practice advocates for a human feel — the technology needs to serve the people that use it as best as humanly possible, otherwise i feel that we’ve missed the mark as a design and development team, and ultimately { at the overarching level } as a company

stories — real, human-told stories — give us all some guidance for the human-centered design process and help us as designers and developers understand what human considerations need to be made for the systems, interactions and flows we build together

because ultimately — at the end of the day — as interaction and experience design professionals we’re pretty much designing this wonderfully strange, dynamic madlib story for people that need to use our software and we’re asking them to be our characters — we give them props, tasks and ways to accomplish what they might need to get done from using our online { or off } experience, we put them up on the stage, write them into the page, and then they step in and live out the stories that hopefully meet and exceed all of their needs and expectations

we then need to re-read the story and devotedly follow the characters to observe where the story feels broken or less than human enough for the world — observe, analyze, refine, repeat

little by little the hope to improve our human experience in life glows

we bring some light

that lightness then hopefully maps back up to our personal higher design purpose

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