Safe Spaces for Taking Risks

8th March, 2010

In most visual communications companies, graphic design firms, branding consultancies-call them what you will-much emphasis is placed on making connections with the values of the client. While understanding the values of a client and working hard to convey them is a necessary (and obvious) task for a communicator for commerce, I want to suggest that another responsibility also applies: you need to connect to your own values as well.

This post started as an idea to give a few new UTS graduates some presence on our industry website. I saw their major project work in two stages of development, listened to what they said about it, liked it, then decided to show it with some brief notes attached. It wasn't only that the results of their work were worth showing; something else in the way they tackled projects in a personal way-sometimes building around a seemingly arbitrary framework, sometimes working through an obsession, discovering correspondences or simply beginning with something that felt right-made me think about how easy it is in an industry environment to pass by the rich sources for designing that already exist in our heads, our memories and within the intimate realm of our senses.

It's a pity that the spaces made in design colleges for healthy experimentation are not always found in companies that design communications. In my own experience, my personal take on the world, and in particular the experiments, including a long, long list of false starts and dead ends and some pretty dumb but never-the-less transporting (they took me to somewhere better) notions have been the unanticipated origins of works that-I think-really did work because people recognised something of themselves in something in me. In essence, design as a social connection. More