Episode Links

Abridged Transcript

Gary
I appreciate you taking the time, being a fellow podcast runner, whatever the term is! So, before I get started on my questions, could you talk a little more about your podcast, Revision Path? My listeners would greatly benefit from listening to your interviews and I think just talking about it a little bit will help set up the table for my line of questioning.
Maurice
Sure, absolutely. So, Revision Path is an award-winning design podcast and platform where I interview Black designers, developers and creatives from all over the world. We’ve been doing it now for a little over five years; we’ve talked with designers, of course, here in the United States but also throughout the Caribbean, throughout Europe, and throughout Africa, really just across the Diaspora, so when people think of Black designers they might have a concept that is maybe more monolithic in tone, or at least in I guess as a physical thing, they might think of one certain thing but I mean, we’ve had all kinds of Black designers, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Asian, mixed race, bi-racial, etcetera and of course also through different nationalities we’ve had African designers, Caribbean designers, British designers, Caribbean-British, Canadian, African, blah-blah-blah, etcetera, so we’ve managed to really I think in the five years that we’ve done this, get a pretty good sense of what the design landscape is as it relates to Black designers; we’ve kind of helped really bring I think a lot of knowledge about Black designers to the forefront in many different industries and it’s going strong, it’s going great.
Gary
Yeah, great. And again, I want to tell my listeners to definitely listen to the podcast because I’ve started listening to is and you, I mean you take a very…your interview approach, you kind of get to like the nuts and bolts of some process as well as, you know, design processes as well as like the broader scope of diversity in design and everything in it, so from a nuts and bolts level, it’s been really helpful just to listen to some of the episodes.
So, now, just in our emails back and forth, just setting this thing up, there’s a thousand different questions that came to mind that I wanted to ask you, so I’m going to start off with first I just want to say, we have a guest in common: Edwina Moss, and she’s the one who introduced me to you and to your podcast so I want to thank her for that and so once I started digging into your work and digging into the podcast, the one thing that kept coming out to my mind is that you’ve done at least two hundred and forty episodes. What have you learned? What is the biggest set of take-aways that you’ve got, if you could kinda like look back on that?
Maurice
Wow! Oh…there’s I think three things. The first thing is that mentorship is still something which is sorely needed in the design industry. I have talked with designers that have come through into the design industry from many different entry points. They’ve either went through a traditional design school, they’ve picked it up as a hobby, they’ve changed their career into design, etcetera, and the one thing that I think links most of the guests is them not really, or I would say not really having but them needing some kind of mentorship into what the industry entails. The industry has grown and changed so much, even in the five years that I’ve done the show: I think it would help anyone once they get into the, or if they’re interested in this industry, to know what it is that they can do because the concept and the, honestly even the jobs that you can do with design are so, so varied. When I started doing design in the nineties…Jesus! Like the late nineties, early two thousands, you were a web designer, you were a graphic designer, you were a web-master and that was it.
And eventually it sort of broadened with web animation etcetera but now you can be a service designer, an experience designer, a production designer; you can be all these different types that don’t explicitly fit into just working in Photoshop or just banging out code or something like that, or even fine art application, illustration, etcetera, things like that, so having that kind of mentorship I think to steer people towards what type of design is best for them, based on their strengths, is something that is really sorely, sorely needed. What I see from a lot of the sort of current design community is that lack of mentorship and I think some people will try to get it through organizations like AIGA or they’ll try to get it through their job or something like that. And so there’s some successes and some failures with doing it those ways but general mentorship I think is a big thread, that’s one.
The second thing I think is just being privy to a lot of opportunities. You know, and I don’t know if this is something that is unique to Black designers or even to Black people in general, but what can tend to happen is that the fields of art and design are not necessarily looked at as lucrative fields, particularly when we’re looking at them as potential majors for college or something like that. I can speak to my own story. When I initially wanted to go to college I wanted to major in English and after a talk with my mother I think the thing was, I should probably go and do something more practical that could make some money like computer science or math or something. Started out computer science; didn’t take, switched over to Math. Design was never really on the horizon for me, like I knew it was sort of a possibility, I mean I sort of came up again in the mid to late nineties in terms of getting into this, so there were really no…actually there were no, I think, design curriculum pro…well I won’t say not design curriculum. At least, not the kind of design I wanted to do. I wanted to web design.
Gary
Yeah. There wasn’t!
Maurice
There wasn’t really any sort of…yeah, there weren’t any web design programs that you could take at colleges or things like that. You had to do like a Fine Arts sort of thing, you had to come up through illustration or painting or something like that and my older brother is really like the artist in the family: he paints, he sculpts, he does a whole bunch of stuff: I’m just kinda the nerd, so I didn’t really know how I could come into design at that age, you know, and part of it again, like I said, I don’t know if my mother is unique in this but certainly from talking with other folks on the show, I don’t think that’s the case, where parents don’t necessarily look at art and design as lucrative sort of fields for people to go into and maybe that’s because there’s a lack of examples to see that this is something that you can make money from and make a living from, which I guess sort of feeds, again, back into that whole thing about mentorship.
So, not even really knowing or having those opportunities is really key. I’m finding a lot of the younger designers I speak to, that’s not really an issue and maybe that’s because now, programs are more varied and things like that, where if there’s a certain type of…certain type of course you want to take, you can do that and it’s not a big deal. But certainly I think for, when I say older, I’m thinking like thirty plus, perhaps something like that. It wasn’t really an option that we knew about, that we were really that well informed about, so just knowing that design is an option that you can take and that it’s a lucrative option, I think, would also help out a lot more.
…I think I can say, I think it’s more just like professional opportunities, and this is sort of where Revision Path was born out of; it’s sort of one thing for us to be these working designers and getting to the field but is this our career or is this our job? And I think for many people sometimes it can just be a job because they’re not privy to the professional opportunities that can help them turn design into a career, so they may be, for example, a production designer at a…auto shop or something like that, but they don’t know that they could possibly do speaking opportunities or meet-ups or things like that where they can network and meet other designers or get privy to other opportunities; it sort of gets trapped in a bit of a bubble. And I’m not saying that those professional opportunities are not open to everyone but they certainly are walled off in terms of who gets notified about them.
I know now that I’ve done the show, certain companies and things like that will reach out to me to say, oh well we’re doing this, can you let your audience know, which is great, but that didn’t exist five years ago. So if there was a conference, for example, that was looking for speakers, they may not put their call to speakers out in public, or they may not put it out in a way where a lot of people can find out about it. They may just go through their Rolodex and see who’s available, or they may look at another conference and talk to that organizer and just sort of do like a buddy-swap sort of thing for speakers, so being privy to those professional opportunities to really grow from being just a rank and file designer into having design as a career is something else that I think it missing, so yeah, that’s the third thing.
Gary
Yeah, and I had a conversation with a student who’s going to be graduating this semester in the hallway the other day, and that was his like, well, how do I find a job? And I think design educators, and I can only speak for myself because I teach full time, that is my job, I don’t…I’m not out freelancing or working for a firm and teaching one class a semester: I help with administration, you know, building curriculum, I got committees on campus so I don’t know what…where the jobs are. I mean, I know where the academic jobs are, if you want to, if you’re looking for a teaching job, I can tell you where to go look. And so the advice I gave my student is that, you literally just got to find out where are designers, where are they having their conversations? They have their conversations on Twitter, they have their conversations on Slack channels; you just need to go find out where they’re having those conversations and stick your hand up. That was the only advice that I could give, so that’s why I think the external mentorship from people in the industry is so important for students because there’s this thing: I can’t, as an educator, I don’t know myself. So, going on to the next question, in your emails you also have talked a lot about design education and this podcast, mine, is about what graphic design educators should be teaching at the root level to prepare students. So, when you mentioned design education, can you talk like what context you were talking about design education in, as in?
Maurice
Sure. So, I should probably let the guests know, I’ve been kind of a design educator at some point in my career as well. I’ve taught web design for two years as an Adjunct, so I kind of have a little bit of a…I mean a tiny bit, I think, of insight into speaking with students and stuff like that but particularly through the show, I’ve talked with design educators as well as design students and I’m finding kind of a bit of a disconnect. So, from students, and even from some graduates, I’ve heard that they don’t feel supported in their program when it comes to, I guess, design education because they’re not learning about designers who look like them or, for example, the design styles and types that they’re looking at or learning from are maybe strictly European and not from really any other cultures, you know. Or they’re feeling like even speakers and things that are brought in are not people of color. Maybe they’re not people that are indicative of what the make-up of that particular school’s class is for their major or something like that, so students often tell me that they’ll feel alone, like they don’t really feel like they get support from the Faculty, they don’t see themselves reflected in the work that they’re doing.
They have a passion for the work, clearly, because they’re in school for it, but they often just have to go strictly off of their passion, there’s not a way that they are connecting culturally to what it is that they’re doing. Now, for design educators, I’m finding kind of a different thing because they’re like, look, in design Higher Education, there’s really not that many people of color: black people specifically, so it’s harder for them to sort of get points across to other Faculty members about maybe what should be taught or say, for example, in February for Black History Month, should they talk about Black designers then? Are there Black designers they can talk about then? Just ways for them to kind of imbue more culture into the design work they’re doing because once these students go out into the world, they’re designing for more than just white people. They’re designing for a multi-cultural world that’s out there; they need to be able to empathize with different cultures to make solutions that can benefit them, so you’d think that it would sort of make sense on that kind of curriculum level at some point to learn about that, so sort of like I said, these different things between students and educators.
Students don’t feel like they get the support and Faculty, I guess they don’t feel like they get the support but then they also don’t really know where to begin to try to sort of make that happen. There’s a few folks I’ve had on the show that have kind of went above and beyond sort of seeking sort of outside help, do kind of fill the void which I think is really useful but I don’t know if that’s scalable throughout the design industry. Well I’d say even through design educators, design curriculum; I don’t know if that’s a scalable thing. Isn’t there like an accreditation agency for design educators, like the National…I forget what the acronym is.
Gary
NASAD. National…
Maurice
NASAD, yeah, that’s it.
Gary
I can’t spit it out right now. Yes, and actually UMBC where I’m teaching we’re just now starting that process of we’re going to seek NASAD accreditation so I’ll have to let you know if diversity is a part of it. I don’t know. I have no idea but the problem is the onus should not be on people of color; it should not be on…to point out to Faculty, here’s…to point out who we should be looking to because there are, as Revision Path has clearly demonstrated as Timothy Hykes, his 28 Days, clearly demonstrates there’s plenty of Black designers.
Maurice
We also have 28 Days of the Web, that’s something that Revision Path did back in 2014 and we’ve continued that every year as well.
Gary
Yeah, but that was a tremendous resource for me as an educator that I could just…instead of, I always want to show examples, so instead of looking for the simple white canon that I already know exists, I know I can hit Revision Path; I know I could hit these other places and I can find the exact example I need done by somebody, you know, person of color, so it makes a lot easier. So anyway, thank you for doing the double-duty of curating for stuff that we should already be doing ourselves.
Maurice
Well thank you, and you’re right, it shouldn’t be necessarily up to people of color because what I think can sometimes get mis-construed about Revision Path is that it’s being done as a resource which is not why I’m doing it. If you’re using it as a resource: that’s great, but that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it more so to showcase the people in the design industry that are not getting any level…I won’t say any level, but they’re not getting the recognition for their work that I think that they should get. They don’t have…they’re not being approached by another design media entity to talk about their work or do an interview or something like that, so I will speak to them and at least try to get the ball rolling but I feel like it’s just important to show that we’re out here and if other people look at Revision Path as a directory or as a resource or as a hiring tool of some sort, that’s great.
Run me my money if you want to, but that’s great that they’re able to sort of use it in that way but I want to be clear that my initial intent of doing Revision Path is not really for that; it’s really more to showcase the Black designers that are out there and what we’re doing and give us a place to kind of shine and thrive because regular design media has been around for dozens of years and hasn’t done that.
Gary
No, and that’s one thing why I think that the audience for my podcast should be listening to Revision Path because you do hit on the nuts and bolts so I’ve been able to learn some things about design that I was struggling with in the classroom and that I learned from listening to your interviews because you’re interviewing their expertise: that’s what you’re highlighting. Inadvertently it became a resource for the lazy people! But in the nuts and…the fundamental, you’re discussing the value of design with people who are really good at what they do.
So, you said that you wanted Revision Path to be more involved in design education. So, what are some of the design education initiatives that you are currently thinking about?
Maurice
That’s a really good question. I’ve been having conversations with a few institutions, one that I can name and it’s really only just been a cursory conversation is with the Francis Loeb Library at Harvard Graduate School of Design, about a way to maybe have a collection or archive of some of the Revision Path podcast episodes in their library. I know that the Francis Loeb Library is a world-renowned kind of design research institution, and so if there’s a way for Revision Path to be a part of that, I think that would be great.
I mean, I go to a lot of, I won’t say a lot of design events: I go to a fair amount of design events and especially ones that are here in Atlanta for example. We have a Museum of Design Atlanta for example, I think we’re the only design museum in the South East, I believe: I might have to double-check that, but when I go there and I’ll look at the exhibits or look through the book store and things like that, I notice there is nothing there from or about Black designers. There’s very little from people of color in general and so it sort of has be thinking about, well, how is it that people are finding out that Black designers are out there if there’s no books, there’s no kind of other method for people to find out about us?
Now, granted there’s this podcast. Podcasting is great, podcasting is in right now. We don’t really know if podcasting’s going to be in five years from now: is this a fad? Is this just a trend right now? and so especially now that I’ve reached the five year mark, I’m looking at it almost in a…anthropological way where, how do I sort of take these chronicles of these designers and have them in a form where future generations can discover who they are and what they’re about and reach out to them and learn about their work and things like that. So, in terms of sort of, I guess, you know, I guess you could call that a design education initiative. I would love to have Revision Path in some sort of way be part of Design Schools, maybe it’s having a college tour or having some of the guests come and give interviews or even find a way to take some of the episodes and turn them in some way into curriculum because granted, the designers that we feature are across all types of design.
We’ve got web design, graphic, we’ve got UX, we have traditional illustrators, we’ve got animators, we’ve got presentation specialists, we’ve got fashion designers, furniture designers. It goes across a very wide berth of design; we’ve got National Design Award winners, we’ve got a lot of people, so with that in mind, how do you take that and then turn it into a resource, I guess sort of transmogrifying it that way, into a resource that future generations can find when they’re looking for Black designers. I don’t want ten, twenty years from now for people to say, oh well, what happened to Black designers? Where are the Black designers? I did a presentation about that in 2015 called "Where Are The Black Designers?" and they’re out there, we’ve always been there. I don’t think we should still be asking that question in ten years because we’re out here and we’ve got to find a way to hopefully get that out to students and to educators in a way where it can sort of disseminate throughout design education as a whole.
Gary
OK, and so the reason I ask that in general is because I hear the…there’s organizations out there that they have somebody who’s like at the education and education outreach and the term education is used so loosely that it’s sometimes, because I think of it very much as I’m designing a project, I’m teaching you the best practices and we’re going to have an outcome. So, that’s why I wanted to ask, see kind of where you were thinking about the education.
Maurice
Well I mean, sort of like you said, the nuts and bolts parts of design, I think that’s being taught. Students are being taught about light and shadow and about different application tools and things like that. Learning about that stuff is fine but when they look at, you know, people who are design, I won’t even say necessarily design luminaries. When they look at other working designers that are out there in the field, I think it would help for them to have just a more multi-cultural view of what a designer looks like. There are several people I’ve talked to on the show, again these have been mostly older designers but when they came into this industry, they didn’t know anyone that looked like them. They were sort of blazing the trail, in a way. And I don’t think we still need to be blazing that trail this far into the twenty-first century.
Gary
No. And again, I’m going to put it back onto Faculty, at this day and age there’s enough resources out there that simply just making people aware that there are…it’s a diverse…it’s just not the White European canon! It’s easy enough for us to do.
Maurice
Right, and also that we don’t just exist in February! I mean, I did a recent interview with Design Observer, titled very much the same thing that we’re not just around during that time. Revision Path tends to be very popular during February. It’s our anniversary month because that’s when we started but also it’s because now, people are suddenly like, oh, there’s Black people because it’s Black History Month and now we should talk to Black Designers. You should be talking to Black designers every month. I’ve often turned down stuff in February because I’m like, we’re here all the time. Come talk to us in March or May or July or something…like it’s great that you have this sort of interest that you want to fit on your editorial calendar but we’re here all the time doing great stuff. I mean, a Black designer, Virgil Abloh was just named to be the Head of Menswear at Louis Vuitton; that’s amazing. And I mean there’s so many other people that are doing great, wonderful things at all different parts of the design industry, whether it’s Silicon Valley, whether it’s in rural areas, whether it’s internationally, so just having I think a knowledge of that, that generally goes through design education, is what I’d like to have Revision Path become, sort of in the future.
Gary
So, you’re a practicing designer: correct?
Maurice
Um…yeah, we’ll say that!
Gary
You’re unique in that like you said, in the nineties you were a print designer, a web designer and that was about it and that web design that you did back then was really still just print because you had the fixed screen; you didn’t have this responsive design that you had to…
Maurice
You had tables…yeah.
Gary
Yeah, and so, just from your experience alone or you can draw on the experience of you’ve heard from some of your interviews; the industry has rapidly changed. What are some of the things that you struggle to keep up with or things that…yeah, just kind of your experience in it or just channel your Revision Path interviewees.
Maurice
What I think for me I’m finding that I have to…excuse me…I have to find new ways to take my design knowledge and spread them across different media, so when you asked me if I was a practicing design, I kind of had to pause there for a little bit because for the past nine years I did have my own design studio called Lunch where I did web design and graphic design and experiential design and all this sort of stuff for clients, but I stopped doing that in December of 2017 when I took a marketing position with a software company out of New York called Fog Creek, but I still do design I that position; like, I’m now learning how to edit and create videos and I’m making print documents in InDesign and I’m putting together decks and stuff like that so I guess I’m sort of still designing, we’re still kind of I guess going back and forth of what my new title is going to be because it should at this point encompass design.
I’m sort of a practicing designer in that way. What I’m finding now that I have to do, like I said, is apply my design knowledge across different media so of course I’m learning video now and struggling through Premier and trying to figure that out, but even with the podcast, what I’m designing is sort of an experience here through sound; the way that the show sounds, the way that it’s put together, the people who I talk to, even how I talk to them, all of this is a designed experience.
I would like to…I don’t know, I guess I don’t want to give myself too much credit here, but I would like to say that when I go into most of these interviews, I tend to be pretty laid back and I just let the conversation go where it goes and people will often ask me what my process is and I generally don’t have a process. I just try to be intellectually curious about who the person is, because I don’t know who they are: most of these people, this is my first time talking to them! I have no idea who they are so it’s like, let’s talk about what you do and let’s get it out there, so it’s kind of a very designed experience in that way.
Gary
Yeah, that’s interesting that you mention that because, and I’m going to bring up video, because when I’m talking to my students, I talk to them like, you know, if you look at KickStarter, those videos are designed. You could tell when a short video has been created by a designer, whereas you can tell the difference between that and somebody, like a cinematographer and design is applicable to more than just screen-based web designs or, like you said, experiences and things like that, that I think it becomes kind of, it’s really hard for me as a designer; I want to do it all but it’s really kinda hard for me to pick on. So, do you have a favorite or something that piques your interest more than the other or do you love it all?
Maurice
I mean, I’m always really big into branding and typography. If there’s one thing that I wish I did more through my studio it would be those kinds of projects. At one point in time I was, and I guess we’re kind of still working together, and I guess we’re kinda will working together, but I was working with a typographer to put together a series of custom fonts based around a movie: I’m not going to name it because somebody’s going to take the idea and we’re already working on it, but to do some typography things with them, I’m huge font nerd; always have been and so I’ve always been really interested in that whole thing of creating letters and glyphs because you get so much meaning and feeling out of typography.
These are just twenty six basic glyphs but how they look and their width and their height and all this sort of stuff can have these very subtle connotations to people and I think that is something that is really just dope, you know, I think that’s just really cool that you can get such interesting feelings from just type, so I’ve always been interested in that. I would love to kind of do more stuff around type and even branding to that effect. I’ve worked with companies before, we’ve put together brands and logos and style guides to sort of take these very intangible things like colors and sounds and shapes, but to use those to denote a certain tone or a feeling that a business or an organization wants to put forth to the public, to their customers, etcetera. I just really, that’s the part about design that I really love and I feel like those things it can span across…it can span across different media, especially with video you can do that…
So I think that’s what I’m really kind of the most excited about. With the way that technology sort of spreads everything, I think we’re starting to see a…in some times we’re starting to see like a confluence of tech and design, where oftentimes, people will think they’re the same thing. I know I get that especially with Revision Path; people will say that we’re a tech podcast and I’m like…nah, not really; we’re in the design category but kind of trying to separate the tools from the methods in some sort of way, I think is something I’m also kind of interested in. I’ve had people ask me, should I learn design or should I learn Photoshop? and it’s like well, one’s a tool and it can help you with design but do you want to know the concepts behind it? But because tech and design tend to be linked in that way, people think that they’re synonymous and they’re not.
Gary
So, when somebody asks you that question, should they learn Photoshop or should they learn Design, do they see them as two separate things after you kind of like flush out the conversation, or is Photoshop their word for design because they just haven’t…they don’t have the vocabulary?
Maurice
Yeah, I think it’s their word for design. Certainly as Photoshopping has entered I think the general lexicon, people are certainly using it as a verb, just like they would use Google or Xerox or something, so it’s in the thick of it in that same sort of way. They’re thinking that it’s kind of the same thing.
Gary
OK. Because I just wondered, that’s something…I get a lot of…so, when students, freshmen, potential freshmen come in for like the career day, come to like to visit the campuses, they’re always like yeah, I did this in Photoshop and they’re talking about Photoshop, Photoshop, but they’re really doing design but they just don’t have a formal vocabulary for it and so again, that boils all the way back down to this first part of the conversation is that if they knew that that was design and not just Photoshop, they’d be more…they could see that as a career option.
Maurice
Right, absolutely.
Gary
In High School, when they’re playing around in Photoshop, it’s really more than just playing: they don’t realize it, and nobody’s told them that that…the skillsets that you’re developing there could lead to a job.
Maurice
Yeah. I mean, I think certainly because I mean as kids, we all kind of start off with, in kindergarten and such, we’re painting, we’re drawing. Certainly in our early formula education years, art and design and at least the tangible applications of that are a big part of early education but then you start getting into secondary education with middle school and high school and those tend to kind of fade away; you see arts programs, leaving schools, music programs, etcetera, da-da-da-dah, but that’s why I say, when you get to those years where it’s like, OK, what do I want to do as a career, the problem ends up that people think that design or art or drawing or something like that is just a hobby and it’s not a thing that you can actually do as profession, as a career.
Gary
Can you talk a little bit about, you said you also do experiential design; can you talk a little bit about, first kinda like frame what are you doing that you consider experiential and compare and contrast it to visual graphic design?
Maurice
Sure so like, experiential design, at least in the ways that we’ve kind of done it or I’ve done it before in the past through my studio is kind of just designing an experience. Now that’s…maybe it’s called something different. Maybe it’s like experience design or something like that, but it’s kind of sort of putting more logic into design, so it’s a lot of user research, it’s a lot of testing; it’s designing something that will give an overall experience, if that makes any sense?
Maurice
It’s sort of like branding in a way but to the next level because it’s less about kind of the touch-feely and more about sort of what does the data tell us? I mean, my background is also in Math and stuff like that so that is always going to be a part, I think, of my process is how do we lay things out logically so they make sense and things like that, so yeah.
Gary
All right, so the reason I ask that is because there is a need for UX, user experience, whatever the term that you want to use, I think it’s all…they’re all inter-related, all the names, I understand the justifications for the different names but to me it’s the same. But it is, I think user experience, experiential design is different enough from graphic design that there is a need for user experience design being taught at traditional two and four year institutions and right now, that education is being supplied mostly, formal education anyway, is from places like General Assembly and other places and so I guess I’m just like as an educator, I’m struggling with, do I need to…do we need two separate programs for those two different fields? Can we do both in one? And so I’m just trying to educate myself and just kind of come to terms with what I think we should be doing.
Maurice
Right. I think they are, you know, I think they are separate enough where they could be…I think they’re separate enough where they could be two separate things that are taught because I think with user experience design, there’s a lot of psychology that has to go into that. Many of the UX designers that I’ve spoken to on the show at least have some sort of a background in psychology or sociology that helps inform them and aid them through the UX research process of something like that. That may not be something that a traditional graphic or web designer needs to know in full but it may help to inform a few things that they do, if that makes any sense, so…I can’t think of a good example, but there are certainly ways that UX designers and web and graphic designers can work together because their skills kind of complement each other for the overall end goal for whatever the project is.
Gary
And you’re preaching to the choir in this one because I tell my students: take in your Gen-Eds, make sure you take anything sociology, anthropology, psychology, anything that studies people will be…
Maurice
Because you’re designing for people.
Gary
Exactly. It would be immensely beneficial to them. Some research that came out of UMBC where I taught, there’s this study, it had to do with addiction but there’s like the six stages and first is unaware, the last stage is aware and fixed the bad behavior, but you cannot move from unawareness all the way to solving bad behavior; you have to go through each step, and so trying to design something that takes somebody from a state of unawareness into a state of action is not physiologically possible. So, understanding that, you could then tailor your design to take somebody from unawareness to awareness; from awareness to research; from research to action; from action to sustaining behavior and if you design to those different things, you’re going to be more successful. So, and anyway, I tell my students all the time: if you undergo, learn that kind of stuff, because then it’s just going to make you more powerful designers.
Maurice
I agree with that, absolutely.
Gary
So, you mentioned a little bit also…so I did my homework! So, first I’m always fascinated with the tie between Mathematics and English.
There’s such a…people who are involved in one always end up being involved in the other and it’s usually the mathematicians always end up…there’s something, I don’t know how they’re related but they are.
Maurice
I can tell you how they’re related!
Gary
How?
Maurice
So, when I was studying, and I would imagine this is probably the same across a lot of Math curricula across the country, perhaps across the world. There’s a lot of structure and logic that goes into Math. I think people look at Math like Geometry and Trigonometry and they’re like, oh, it’s just so many numbers and stuff. There’s like a…like an imaginary line, like a marginal line where you cross over from numbers to letters and stuff real quick, usually around advanced calc or something like that, where you’re writing a lot of proofs. I remember specifically we had to take a class called Set Theory which was basically a class that taught you how to think logically, that taught you how to construct logical proofs so you could prove a certain point, so for example, if you had to prove that one plus one equals two. Now, granted, that sounds very elementary. It’s actually a pretty complicated mathematical proof, to prove that, because you have to define what the number one is; you have to define what addition…the operation of addition is.
You have to define equality, and you have to sort of put all this stuff together to structure it so you can reach your end point. There’s so many QEDs that I’ve written at the end of proofs and things like that, where if you’ve gone through I think your basic four year college Mathematical education, you can write an essay like that, like it’s nothing to put together an essay, because structuring to prove a certain point is just, that’s just how it works. You’ve got your lemmas and your corollaries and you’ve got things that you’ve got to prove and it all factors into making something that makes sense. Math really teaches you how to think and so it really helps out with English because when you’re writing like you hopefully are writing something that makes sense.
When you get to the end of it, it all sounds good, it’s not just a big jumble of words. And I can apply this also to Revision Path; aside from just the audio editing with the interviews, we also have a blog where I serve as Editor-in-Chief, and so when I’m talking with my writers, and I’m going through their pieces and editing, sometimes they’re very surprised that I know how to edit and I’m like look: I’ve got, aside from years of work as a freelance writer, Math has taught me how to make a proof, how to make a point. If you’re jumping from Point A to Point B, there’s got to be a through-put there so it makes sense: you can’t just jump to this next thing, lead into it in some way. What are you proving? How do you prove that? How are you coming to this conclusion? So it all really factors in pretty simply.
Gary
Yeah, and so that kind of like naturally segues into my next question is, I was going to ask you: how has Math helped you as a designer?
Maurice
Hmm, how has Math helped me as a designer? That’s a good question. I mean, there’s there practical, just arithmetic way of course that helps out in terms of, like if you’re doing responsive design or…CSS grid or break-points or stuff like that it sorta makes sense. I mean, I guess in a way this is sort of what the experiential design does for me in terms of it scratches that logical, math-y part of my brain when you’re creating an experience, you’re creating something that makes sense, you’re creating something that hopefully will evoke an emotion, so there’s some logic, I think, that goes into that. How does Math help with design? There’s actually a lot of drawing in Math; there’s lots of 3D modeling programs like Mathematica, etcetera.
I know when I was in High School, we were hand-drawing all kinds of conic solids and 3D graphs, if they give you an equation you’ve got to draw the graph and you have to justify why you drew it in this certain way because it’s got to all plot out specifically and I try to think about design in that very same way: I look at design for a particular project as an equation that I have to solve, because that’s what it is; you have a specific in-deliverable that you’re providing to a client, hopefully, that will solve a problem of theirs, that will help them to attain some sort of goal, and so the things that you do to lead up to that should all kind of add up in a way so it makes sense that you’ve reached this end conclusion. You don’t want to get to the end of the project and then you don’t realize how you got there. You kind of have to use the old Math adage, you gotta show your work, you gotta show how you’ve done that, how you’ve gotten to that particular end-point.
Gary
Yeah, and so when you first started describing just now the…how Math and English are related, that’s when I saw the connection with Math and Design is just I think a lot of students when they come in, they’re missing that Math logic of this plus this equals this; they immediately jump to this, but how did they get to that point? They don’t really think, document and they need to be able to justify the end solution when they’re talking to the client, when they’re talking to the Art Director by, this is how we got to this. And just from…the people that I’ve interviewed for this podcast, that is one of the biggest common problems is, students just don’t know how to talk about their work to a client, they don’t know how to show it as a, how does it solve their problem, and I think that’s something I just saw, the way you described Math and English, that’s a perfect…that’s exactly what they’re missing.
Maurice
Yeah, and I mean, there’s also like the…I want to call them old-school ways, because they’ve been around for ever, but you know mathematical things like the Golden Ratio or fractals or Fibonacci design or the Mandelbrot set or something like that. There’s a lot of really designer-y sorts of things that come out of Math, so the fact that they’re related in that way is not really a stretch.
Gary
Yeah. No, I totally get it. So, kinda just noticing where we’re at in time, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, so just a couple more general questions.
So, this one I ask everybody now and it is, what’s one piece of advice you would like to give design educators to better prepare students for life post graduation?
Maurice
I think that educators really need to be honest with their students about what it’s going to be like when they graduate. I think they need to be honest with them, and I’ll tell you why that’s the case. So, here in Atlanta, I’ve done some, I guess you could call it consulting, for certain Design Schools here; I’m not going to name any names although there’s only a handful here so people could probably figure it out, but I’ve done some design consulting with different Schools where what they’ll do is they’ll bring in designers from the community to talk to them about what are the things that they kind of need to teach students. And often I will be the only Black person that is in the room, even though the students may be majority Black. And I’m granted, it’s Atlanta, so that’s not a stretch, but it sort of becomes interesting to me how I hear the educators talk about the students and it’s never in a positive way.
It’s always like, oh, they’re gonna go out, they’re gonna do whatever, they’re not that good and this, that and the other and I’m like: but you’re teaching them so if they’re not that good, then what is that saying about your teaching methods? But I mean when I say to be honest with them, let them know that there’s a wealth of things that they can do with design: just because they have a design education doesn’t necessarily mean they have to go right into agency work. They could go into something in-house, they could start their own thing. There is a great need for the skill that you provide as a designer. Now granted, it’s going to be the students’ job to try to figure out how that will apply but I think they just need to be honest with them about what is out there. You may not find a great job. The jobs may be low paying. You may have to move, depending on where you’re located.
The design industry where you’re at may not be the best. You may end up getting roped into something. But just be honest with them about what the possibilities are that they’re going to have once they graduate. It certainly doesn’t help to lie to the students to tell them, oh, you’re going to be great, you’re going to do this: help them out. Also what they can do to sort of help better prepare students for a life post-graduation I think it is to just be an advocate for them. When you’re starting out in this industry, particularly I think now because there’s so much competition for entry-level positions because again, you don’t have to go to Design School to be a designer somewhere, that’s kind of one of the unique things about this industry. But to be their advocate.
Starting designers, beginning designers, juniors etcetera: probably don’t have anyone that’s advocating for them, advocating for their work. They have to go out there and pay their dues in a way which I think all designers should do anyway, but if you’ve got students that you think are exceptional, be an advocate for them, be an ally for them; talk them up to meet-ups or to conferences or to other people to let them know, hey, this person that I’ve taught is really great, you should totally talk to them. Actually, someone who I had on the show just recently, Alex Binder, came to me by way of one of his Professors, Jenn Visocky O’Grady, yeah.
Gary
My former Professor!
Maurice
Look at that! She told me about him and was like, you should totally talk to him, he’s really great, he’s super-smart. Had him on the show, it was a great interview. I never would have known about him any other way, I think. So be an advocate for your students that you think are really going to go out there and do well but also just be honest with them about what their chances are because it’s going to be up to them eventually to figure it out but the best thing that you can do, I think, as an educator is to just, again, be honest and be an advocate for them.
Gary
I just need to be more like Jenn. It’s funny, but I’m still close with her and keep in touch with her.
Maurice
Be like Jenn, that’s what educators should do. Be like Jenn!
Gary
Yeah. So, there was one thing I wanted to…and I think that’s where Jenn was fantastic is that she’s rooted in the community and so she knows what’s out there but I think that’s where a lot of educators fail. And is that they are stuck in the academic bubble; they don’t know what’s going on in the industry; they go, they teach their classes and they go home and they do their design work, their art work and they don’t do that extra step of going and being involved in the community so they don’t know that…they just don’t know what opportunities are out there to share with people.
Maurice
No, that’s true, that’s very true.
Gary
So again, so that comes back onto design educators: get out there and network. And I think part of it too and part of it for me is, I have to suck up my ego because I don’t design every day any more. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a designer every day and there are so many designers out there who are better than me; it’s kind of intimidating to talk to those people but you have to kind of put it into context that yes, of course they’re better designers than me. They design every day. Are they a better educator? Do they teach every day? No! So you just kinda gotta suck that ego up, so I think that’s also part of it a little bit too.
Maurice
And I think especially if educators are in the mindset to learn, I think it just always helps to be curious about that, to get out there and try to learn what you can.
Gary
So, OK, so then, before I let you go, is there anything that you’re personally working on, is there more that we didn’t talk about with Revision Path that you want to talk about, basically open mic?
Maurice
Hmm, let’s see, what’s going on right now? Well, we’re going to be approaching our 250th episode in July.
Gary
Woo-hoo!
Maurice
So that’s really exciting, yeah! I feel like that’s kind of the only big thing that’s on the horizon right. There’s some other stuff that is still kind of in the planning stages that I can’t really discuss right now but I know coming up in July, that’s going to be our 250th episode, it’s going to come out on July the ninth, so make sure you tune in for that.