Recently, one of my colleagues at work shared a succinct, but fairly accurate, description of the design process that she’d found online. It’s a series of 6 steps, which go as follows
1. This is Awesome
2. This is Tricky
3. This Sucks
4. I Suck
5. This Might be OK
6. This is Awesome
It was instantly recognisable, and all too familiar in my own work life (but possibly with a few extra cycles around the 3-5 mark…)!
Currently, I’ve just emerged from the slough of despond on one of the products I’m working on (hooray, it might be ok!), but I’m pretty firmly on step 2 or 3 with one of my others… Design is hard, which can in turn be pretty disheartening. But when it works, when you make something you’re pleased with, it’s one of the best feelings in the world.
So why is this? Why is Good Design hard, and why do I feel like I suck at it sometimes? If design and creativity is part of what it means to be human, as we’ve seen, then why is it often such a slog?
The Rebellion
One of the things I love about the gospel story is its explanatory power – the way it explains the good and the bad in the world so well. We were created to be God’s imagers (that’s why we have intrinsic worth), in a world that was very good (that’s why there is beauty and joy in life), to co-create with him and represent him to the world (that’s why we are creative and ingenuitive as a species).
But humans chose self-rule and greed over God being our good king – and there were consequences to that choice. Though the world is still good and beautiful, it’s now also shot through with grief and pain, especially in human relationships. That universal feeling, of a world which never quite lives up to what we know it should be, of a peace we long for (and sometimes get glimpses of) but never quite reach – it’s because we were created good but screwed up. The earth is a beautiful building that’s falling apart – you can still see the wonder of the architect’s vision, but it’s decayed, cracked, and at risk of collapse. God let us have our way, he took a step back, but a world without God’s full sustaining power is not the paradise we imagined.
Adam and Eve, the forebears of the human race, lived alongside God in the garden-mountain he had planted for them – the plan being that they would spread out from that point and ‘Eden-ise’ the world with him. The relationship between God and humanity was so good that God would often walk with them of an evening. But there was one rule: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, not to grasp at becoming like God. Enter Satan, with his classic play: “God doesn’t have your best interests at heart – rebel and you’ll become radiant, greater than you ever thought you could be”. Adam and Eve bought the lie, and they ate.
The story goes on that God was searching for them in the garden, but Adam and Eve were hiding out of guilt. God called out, but when Adam answered one of the first things he did was point the blame at his wife. It was too late – the world was already broken.
So, after listening to their excuses, God laid out the consequences. He first cursed Satan (and promised that he would rescue the world, that he wouldn’t let evil win – more on that story in a future post). But then he moves on to what this would all mean for humanity:
To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
Genesis 3:16
God turns first to Eve. Having children, something totally integral to the plan of spreading out and bringing God’s good blessing to the rest of the world – well, now it would be full of pain. The job God gave to humanity had just become far more difficult.
But more than that, look at the second part of the curse. Eve’s desire will be ‘for’ her husband (in the same way a crouching animal’s desire is ‘for’ its prey, look at Genesis 4:7 as a comparison), but he will rule over her. She wants to be in the domineering position of power, but so does he. What was a tight-knit team before the rebellion has been broken, destroyed by in-fighting, battling, blaming one another, power-grabbing. And it’s not just in romantic relationships we see this – as a consequence of the rebellion every human relationship is broken.
God then turns to Adam:
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 3:17-19
The relationship between people was broken by their rebellion, but now God explains that their relationship with the very earth has been broken too. Work, that most fulfilling, most human of tasks, is now a labour, it’s now cursed, it’s now really tough. Work was meant to bless humans, bring them food and satisfaction, but now it will require blood, sweat and tears. The relationship between humans and the earth is forever broken. And that means work is now hard.
So, where there once was harmony with God there is now rebellion – where there once was peace in human relationships there is now blaming and brokenness, and where work was once only good, it is now a struggle against the earth.
Not a great day in the history of humanity, all things considered.
Thorns and Thistles
Human rebellion leads to broken relationships between people and a broken relationship with work in general. How exactly though, does it map on to our experience of design today?
Let’s take Adam’s curse first.
For folk working in landscape architecture, I imagine that mapping Adam’s curse onto their modern day work is pretty straightforward – but for the rest of us there’s a bit of unpacking to do. The key thing, I think, is that the ground, the very earth, opposes the work that humans have to do, and it takes real effort to overcome that opposition.
In other words, work is frustrating – it fights against us and it requires real effort to create something good. The problem you keep banging your head against but just can’t solve, the supply chain issues that make deadlines unreachable, the mistakes you missed months ago when designing which are now causing real headaches, even the CAD program that crashes before you had a chance to save. The fact is, work isn’t just tiring, it’s exhausting – no matter how many hours you have in the day you never seem to have enough.
Now don’t get me wrong – solving puzzles is fun. I think that’s why a lot of us got into design in the first place, because we like to think our way through problems and work out solutions. That’s part of what it means to express our God-given creativity. But what I’m talking about is when work is a slog, when you’re in the doldrums of design and when everything you try fails and frustrates you. It’s that bit of design that makes you think you suck. It would be great if you always had a sense of what the next step in the journey was, but that’s not the way it is. The design process is often a maze of dead-ends and false starts; it’s full of thorns and thistles, and it takes sweat to uproot them and make progress.
So Adam’s curse results in a design process that sometimes feels like you’re battling through the Triwizard Cup maze. But the curse on Eve also has far reaching effects on our work as designers.
Broken Relationships
Design, at the end of the day, is about people. We are designing things for people, and so we need to know what they want and what they need – we need to put ourselves in their position. Good Design is inherently outward-looking as it creates things not for us but for others. And that requires relationship! It requires interaction and human connection. But these, as we’ve read, are broken. Human interaction can still be beautiful but it can also now be very hard.
Perhaps you have a client who just can’t seem to see the potential in your concepts the way you do. As a designer, it’s your job to bring them along with you, but in this case it’s really difficult – you’re having to put so much effort into every presentation just to make an inch of headway. Maybe xxxxxxxx. Or maybe it’s more antagonistic – someone at work has taken a dislike to you, and is making your life tough for seemingly no reason at all.
We’ve got to be careful not to see the problem as only with the other party though, as in reality relationships are hard because we’re all broken. Immediately after the rebellion Adam started blaming Eve. He had gone from loving other-centeredness to inward-looking selfishness in a matter of seconds, and that shift has affected the human condition ever since. Good Design demands we put in the work to see things from the point of view of another. But I’m selfish, and I’d much rather take the easy route.
When we design, we need to be empathetic with the user, the client, the manufacturer, your boss, even, fill in the blank yourself. But that’s very hard to do when the fall has turned us in on ourselves. Instead, relationships are now characterised by self-centredness, power-grabbing, insecurity, gossiping and grumpiness. Relationships are tougher than they were created to be, because of our rebellion, and so Good Design is Hard.
Good Design is Worth It
To recap then: it’s difficult to design well because the creative process is full of thorns and thistles, and because the human interaction so central to every part of design is broken – we’re naturally turned in on ourselves, and so relationships are hard. The rebellion of humanity, all those years ago, means design can really suck today.
And thus ends the article, doom-laden and without hope. Good Design is Hard, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Well, not quite.
Despite the brokenness of the world, Good Design is still a worthwhile pursuit – there is hope. Let’s look at two reasons before we close the article out. Firstly, there is hope because Design is a labour, and secondly because we can have real rest.
Notice that, despite the consequences of the fall regarding childbirth, humans can still have children. And despite the curse on the ground, it will still bear fruit and food and all we need. Human rebellion, whilst disrupting God’s good plan and introducing into it pain and suffering, did not have the power to completely derail it. Work is still good, even if it is now hard.
This is epitomised in the fact work is often called labour, a term shared with childbirth. It’s a term that wonderfully reminds us that something beautiful is born at the end of it. Being in labour is hard (to say the least – as a dad I have endless admiration for my wife after watching her go through it), but it is worth it. My daughter is worth immeasurably more than the pain my wife went through to give birth to her. And (on a much less significant scale!) design is rightly called a labour too: It is hard, but it can give birth to something worth the struggle. Now, the results of our work won’t be perfect and good design cannot be ultimately fulfilling (our next article is called ‘Good Design is not going to save the world’), but hard work can still be immensely satisfying, and it can still bring real blessing to other people too.
And that’s because we were still made for work! We were still made for creativity – we were made to partner with God in his work in the world. Good Design is Human, as we saw, and so it’s not surprising that working out that vocation out in the world can be really satisfying. It’s rewarding to see a product or building we have struggled on for months and years finally be used and enjoyed by real people. It’s satisfying to see any idea be made incarnate in the real world – you can look at your work and feel pleased that you put in the effort.
Work can also be a real blessing to people too – would anyone say the blood, sweat and tears put into a new type of neonatal incubator weren’t worth it if it saved lives? Anything designed for people, though, as an act of love and with their good in mind, can bring real blessing to those who use it (or who make it, or who commissioned it) – be it a pair of shoes, a kid’s toy, an app, a building or a medical device. It’s worth the struggle if through struggling we can love our neighbours better. Design is a labour, then, and though difficult it can still give birth to something of real worth.
Lasting Rest
More than that though, if we are Christians we serve a God who can give us real rest – rest from needing to prove anything to him (he loved us before we ever loved him) and rest from needing to prove anything to anyone else (does the opinion of any human matter more than the opinion of God?). The design world can be very ‘esteem’ based – a lot of people wanting to make a name for themselves, or impress people with their skill as a designer. This can easily result in burnout or imposter-syndrome as we struggle to gain praise or doubt our ability and worth as designers. But just as Jesus heard ‘You are my son, with you I am well pleased’ before he had even started his public work on earth, so we can be confident that our status as children of God is dependant on nothing in ourselves, and is totally non-negotiable. “Come to me”, Jesus says, “all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest”. And he does!
But it’s not just mental or spiritual rest God gives us. He made us, he knows us, and he knows what we need. He knows work is hard, and so he gave humans the gift of the sabbath – a day a week where we could rest from work, take the burden off our shoulders, and enjoy the delights of relationship with him and each other. One writer put it like this:
Before the fall man subdued the earth – after the fall the earth subdues him. Before the fall the sabbath wasn’t needed, work was restful and enjoyable. Now we need the sabbath as a recurring reminder of Eden.
God has given us a day a week where we can remember Eden, experience the rest we had there and dwell in the relationship we have with God. But sabbath rest also looks forward to the day everything will be made new, and the relationships with each other, with the earth and with God will be made right. We can rest knowing that though work is hard it’s not our lot for eternity, and God promises real, lasting rest to those who trust in him.
Good Design is Hard because we live in a world marked by human rebellion, where our relationships with work and with each other are broken. And this is normal: You are not a terrible designer if things are going wrong! Goodness knows I need to remember this when work is difficult.
But Good Design is also worth it, it is satisfying and can bless others, and we trust a God who can give us the real rest we need to struggle on through it. The gospel story is one which can reinvigorate us to use our work to serve God and others, and fill us with hope instead of despair when faced with difficult challenges. Good Design will not be hard forever, but in this brief period when it is we’ve got God with us to give us the strength and motivation to struggle on.
So, if you’re in step 3 or 4 above, if your design sucks and you’re worried you suck too – hang in there. Yes, Good Design is hard, but the task is not hopeless. Good Design is also worth it; the struggle can give birth to something great. So keep on tearing up those thorns, and keep on looking to the one who can give you real rest. You’ll make it to the other side!