Abstract: The disciplines of design

I just wrapped up watching Season One of Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a series about designers seemingly geared towards designers. Designer is the keyword here, not design. The eight episodes jump from one designer to the next disparately, focusing on one discipline of design at a time. It does a fantastic job at highlighting the different types of designers out there and the diversity of approaches they take in their craft. If you’ve ever found yourself under the impression that designers just exist to make things visually appealing, this is the series to dispel that notion once and for all.

My favorite episodes were #3 and #4, featuring the exemplary stage design work of Es Devlin and the captivating architecture of Bjarke Ingels. I think I enjoyed these the most because these were the fields of design I knew the least about. I always knew there was a team of designers involved behind the set design of some insane stadium concerts I’ve been to, but I had no idea where the inspiration for them came from. Devlin’s process involves tapping into the core instinct of humans that we’ve been evolutionarily wired to enjoy, like listening to the sound of rain in complete darkness or worshipping larger than life objects. Temporarily allowing us to experience these feelings in a theater or auditorium allows us to feel human, something that every designer tries to inspire in their audience.

Similarly, I’ve admired and stepped into buildings that totally arrested my senses, but I had no idea what about them made them special. Ingels takes architecture to an extreme by merging paradoxical concepts, such as putting a ski slope on top of a power plant or creating negative shapes in a building’s facade that really stand out in a city’s skyline. He challenges the very notion of buildings existing just to house populations and, by design, encourages its residents to see the world differently. Again, I had no appreciation for how difficult the process of going from a whimsical fantasy idea to making it a reality can actually end up being. This is a process that takes years.

I love that all the episodes devoted enough screentime to explain every designer’s upbringing and what their childhood was like. So much of their influence comes from things they experienced and did in their youth. Even simple things like what their personal lives and relationships are like matter so much in their daily work. Almost all the featured designers cite taking inspiration from places they visited or neighborhoods they lived in back when they were much younger. Time works in a funny way where the older we get, the more we reminisce about the simpler times.

The passage of time in a designer’s life is actually one of the most fascinating things that I took from this series. Most of the designers showcased had spent years of their career doing some other work not directly related (but still relevant) to the main focus of their current work. Paula Scher spent years making record covers before switching to typographic posters. Ilse Crawford wrote about for a magazine for eight years before switching to interior design full time. The lingering feeeling that I’m left with is that I still don’t truly know what their life was like back then.

Did these people enjoy the work they were doing then? Where did they see their career going? What if that one lucky “big break” didn’t pan out the way it did? Would they have kept going? Would they have given it up to try something else? I ask these questions because it’s something I’m currently struggling with in my own life. Sure, I’m loving designing UI’s for mobile devices right now, but I’m only 25. Am I going to be doing the same thing at 35? 45? If not this, then what? And what steps do I take now to get there then? The deep-seeded insecurity here is midlife career stagnation and the constant anxiety around how to prevent it. It’s living in fear that I’m not realizing the small steps I need to take now to make that kind of career leapfrog a decade from now.

At the age of 45, it’s very easy to look back at the past twenty years and talk about your life as if everything was planned and you had a path in mind all along. There’s even a word for this: hindsight bias. You even end up referring to a set of years of your life as a “phase” that happened, but this only makes sense relative to other later “phases” of life. I could be working in a print shop right now and hating every minute of it, but thirty years from now, I could be quoting these very years of my life as being instrumental in developing a strong understanding of print materials and the workshop process, which would then prove to be invaluable in that thing I’d be doing fifteen years from now. See the conundrum?

While Abstract doesn’t provide those sort of long-term insights that can be only be gained, I imagine — from some sort of lifetime longitudinal study of a designer’s career — it does provide valuable exposure into the extremely varied disciplines of design. Abstract doesn’t focus on tools and trends. The entire episode about photography rarely even mentions cameras. Instead, it talks about Platon’s obsession with developing a bond so strong with his subjects that the raw emotion naturally pours out through their expression. The episode about interior design doesn’t mention furniture brands or hipster table lamps. Crawford spends almost the entirety of it talking about materials and how humans relate to it, where she was even quoted saying “Design is a tool to enhance our humanity.” Abstract succeeds in framing design as a thought process and a mindset that, if cultivated over time, has the potential for far-reaching impacts on society and culture.

One final observation I have to talk about is the fact that almost all of these people were interviewed for this documentary at a time in their lives when they happen to be in leadership roles within design. They are either leading teams of designers themselves or have vast creative control over the products within their organizations. This in turn paints a biased picture to the viewers where they see experienced designers crank out their finest work with a team of like-minded peers. There’s plenty of other designers doing equally deserving work out there, but their exposure is limited by their lack of experience or by them trying to optimize too many constraints at the same time. Every young designer wants more creative liberty because they know they can make amazing stuff when they have the final say, but in most companies this is often hampered by financial or organizational incentives vying for the same level of control to achieve their own objectives. I don’t mean to undermine how hard the designers featured in Abstract worked to get to where they are, but I’m just pointing out that the interviews would have looked very different if they were asked to talk about their craft when they didn’t have as much creative freedom as they do now.

Paula Scher even acknowledged this issue by saying: “They want proof. They want proof that this is really going to work. The problem is there isn’t really any proof. It’s how people see and perceive and accept things.” She’s talking about selling a client on a somewhat ambitious and risky design concept. As expected, there’s hesitation on the client’s side about going for it because of the risk involved. So they want numbers. They want some guarantee that what you’re proposing will actually do well, that it’ll dazzle the audiences and get people to line up around the block to buy your stuff. And as a designer, you can’t guarantee this. You can only do your best and put it out there into the world. The client either trusts you based on your proven track record or just pulls the plug on the entire thing based on nothing but a gut feeling. This is what makes it both exciting and terrifying at the same time. It’s easier to get people to believe in you when you’ve got more successful stuff, and unsurprisingly enough, this happens later in your career.

If there’s one thing that Abstract did for me, it’s that it gave me an overwhelming sense of appreciation for how every man-made thing in the world is imbued with intent. Everything that I own was made the way it was made due to some underlying reason. The white stripes on my sweater aren’t purely aesthetic, they also serve to reflect heat from radiant sunshine and improve airflow in a textile prone to heating up on close contact with the skin. The choice of glossy silver as the color for my TV remote control was intentional so that it’s easier to see and feel the remote in the dark with nothing but the ambient light of the television. The Nintendo 3DS I own was sized perfectly to fit in the pockets of children’s garments and its internal components were designed to withstand extended tossing and turning in luggage. To quote Crawford once again: “When people use your product, they don’t know why they feel the way they feel, but it’s all been orchestrated by design.” This feeling can be positive or negative. If it’s well-designed, that positive feeling will be invisible. If it’s not, that’s when people notice, and that’s when you know there’s room for improvement.

I have to applaud Netflix for creating a series with such incredible storytelling and cinematography. It’s quite inspiring to look at these human beings and see some version of yourself within them some two decades from now. Most of them referred to design as being akin to having a superpower that allows you to see the world with a different lens. And it’s true. It does feel that way. You pick up on things that others don’t. When people get frustrated, you’re able to pinpoint the cause of their frustrations easier than they themselves often can, and suggest improvements. It’s this magic lens combined with a keen sense of observation and empathy that allows designers to run wild with their ideas, which in a lifetime can lead to some miraculous creations. This first season of Abstract did a fantastic job at portraying some of them, and I can’t wait to see what Morgan Neville has in store for the second one.