I ranted the other night about the failed time:productivity ratio and how employers fail to identify and recognise the value that creative employees bring to the organisation beyond a very basic time=productivity=value equation that doesn’t at all apply to designers.
I used “designers” in the very broad sense. Not visual or graphic designers (who can sometimes be no more than process workers who churn out template-based brands), not user experience designers but anyone who applies creative design thinking to their work. That can go for policy writers, strategists, software developers … and even the mail sorter I used as an example in my blog post can be a designer if they take the initiative to improve processes.
Designers need negative space around them in order to design effectively. The traditional “Produce 50 widgets per day” doesn’t quite translate to “Produce 50 innovative ideas per day”. But that’s the model employers continue to try and cram designers in to.
Nat Torkington mentioned a few of the ways some companies are starting to recognise the need for employee “own time” in his blog post Clue is a renewable resource.
But ultimately the responsibility lies with the designer — you — to design your working environment. When I say “negative space” I’m not referring really to physical space but mental space.
There’ll be a default expectation on you to churn out deliverables like a mail sorter and be at your desk from 9-5 like a security guard. You have to alter that expectation, educate your colleagues and management that that’s not how creative processes work. Take charge of how you operate and approach design problems.
Minimise distractions and interruptions by keeping your email client closed until the afternoon each day; make sure you tell your boss that’s what you’re doing otherwise they’ll be tapping on your shoulder mid-morning asking if you’ve read their email yet. Don’t invite people to phone you; redirect your phone to voicemail if you can during your daily allocated thinking time.
Feel free to step outside the box or rather cubicle farm. What’s the worst that can happen if you decide to work out of a meeting room, down at the cafe or even off-site for a couple of hours a day? It’s in everyone’s best interest – just make sure you explain that to your boss.
Don’t feel pressured to work through your lunch break. Remember, inspiration and brilliant ideas can develop in milliseconds … but you can waste entire days banging your head against a problem. Step back, give yourself some room. Take your lunch breaks, get some fresh air, read a book. Don’t give in to peer pressure just because everyone else around you thinks it’s necessary to give 150% in time. As a designer you can give 150% too but not neccessarily through effort and investment of time.
I can honestly and humbly say that I’ve come up with ideas in the shower in the morning that I believe are equivalent in value to months of work. It’s not because I’m smart but because that’s simply what designers offer organisations and their clients. Ideas, not time.
And above all, don’t get roped into Business-as-Usual (BAU) process work. Be clear about what your role is and make sure you don’t get sidetracked.
Now, my next challenge is to convince my employer that I can contribute as effectively as I am now but only working 15 hours a week – without a reduction in salary. Wish me luck!
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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We all need time to think, time to be inspired, time to find that spark.
Creativity and innovation are not like making clone designs. Working as the cog in a large machine will not produce that idea. In a way teamwork destroys creativity, we need to be the rogue designers to be truly creative.
This is why some cultures are great at imitation, but never really innovate; mainly because being an individual and going against the team is just not allowed to happen.
Sadly the industrialised process and work place are not geared towards the creative. It’s geared towards, as you say, the process, the accountant, the factory worker.
Management really does not yet get “work smarter, not harder” they only pay lip service to it.
True true, the “Work smarter, not harder” gets translated to “Keep working your 38 hours a week on the same pay in the same model and organisation structure … but take more responsibility and initiative”.
I find the idea generation part way too easy. What I need is more time sitting at my desk working hard on the mundane steps required to execute those ideas ;)
Great post! I have to have this or my brain literally just comes to a grinding halt. When I am in “create & innovate” mode, I have literally been known to spend days or a week at a time gazing at a piece of paper on a wall in the office. It might appear to a casual observer nothing is going on, but something is going on in my head – most of the time even I am not sure what. As you said though it will all connect and come together when its good an ready – you just need to have that space.
I am lucky I always had a good boss who understood how my brain worked better than I did in those days. Now I DO know how it works, and I know what I need to go to optimise performance from the grey matter!