#beingdesigner

"a designer?! ...are you drawing pictures?"

how i explain my family what i do:

"design is playing and thinking a lot about small things" 

As a designer you have a mind full of "what-if" thoughts. Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you and sometimes you can not even control your imagination. The weirdest pictures are just coming in situations and you can not avoid it. There is the genius sitting in the one corner of your labyrinth head. By looking for a solution you just wander around the labyrinth.... and at the point you think you are lost, you finally and accidently find this genius (he looks like Gollum) sitting in a dark and spooky corner looking at you. Then you say: I´ve got you, bloody bastard!

It makes happy to find this bloody bastard, who is your best friend in the end. But also the game of looking for him, which is actually the design process, has to be in your interest. Without this intuitional and risky game finding is impossible.

After I end this explanation, everybody thinks I´m crazy. And their are right. Being normal is not the designers way to exist. Designers somehow are paranormal feeling machines, who empathize with nearly everyone. (this is my (weird) imagination of it)

  "design meant art for money in the earlier times"

In times of kings and queens, when churches have been powerful as hell, artists worked for them drawing people and nature. This was the only design, which was influenced by art. Making a room "beautiful". Furniture was made by a joiner, cutlery was made by a blacksmith and shoes were made by a cobbler. Everybody was a designer without even knowing it. And there is no difference to today. Every "untalented" human beiing has designed something in his life. Everybody!

A funny thing is, that everybody has a picture of a designer in his head. This feminine guy, well dressed, fully superficial, talking a lot.