Loving something
By: Martina Gobec
Tags: User Experience, Professional Development, Journey Of Life, Design, Designer

Art and creativity have been a big part of my life since I was very little. I’ve been into drawing, painting, making things with my hands, dancing, theatre, music — I was occupied with many creative endeavors. Until high school. And that’s where I got closely familiar with psychology, philosophy, sociology, history of art and I suddenly could see the bigger picture into which my creativity fit — the collective, the community, the hive. (Full disclosure: my mom is a psychologist, so I also had a strong influence from her). At the end of my second year in high school, she took me to see the exhibition of the Visual Communications Department at the Academy of Art and Design in Ljubljana and the other shoe dropped. The exhibition was filled with all sorts of beautiful designs: books, wine labels, posters, photographs, illustrations, industrial design, paintings, sculptures and there was this richness of ideas, materials, approaches, solutions. Another world, full of possibilities, dreams, and beauty opened up and I knew that this was “it” — I wanted to be able to immerse myself in it. I was 16.

So I spent two years preparing for the admittance exams. I still remember that summer day when I got the news. I was outside when the postman came and handed me a stack of envelopes. The one from the Academy was at the bottom. My hands were shaking, my mind racing about whether I get my wish granted and my hard work rewarded. I opened it and there it was, black on white — the points I got from my final school exam, the points I got from the admittance exam and a congratulatory note — I was in! I do now realize how lucky I was to have found the thing I wanted to spend my life with so early on, considering how many people keep searching for it for so long.

I studied visual communications and have done all the projects I’ve seen at the exhibition and designed for a range of formats and media. I’ve also ventured into interaction design, user experience, service design, and later in my working life into leadership, facilitation, and coaching. People, design and (digital) technology are the three pillars that make up my work life foundation. I’m particularly drawn into the intersection between the three, and it has been the strongest red thread in my life and work. So I wanted to write down some thoughts about how I see design and how I see its role in the world, especially because it’s gained a more influential position in the world of business in the past years, but also because it’s still sometimes gravely misunderstood.

For the sake of sharing the frame of reference from which I speak about design, I resort to the wider Wikipedia definition:

A design is a construction or activity specification or plan, or the result of that plan in the form of a prototype, finished product, or process. “Design” as a verb is the process of creating such a design.

The reason I offer this definition is that I still encounter the view of “design = making things pretty” daily and so there is more work to be done to raise awareness and position design in its rightful place so that it can create the impact it can.

For me, the ability to dream up a possible future and execute it into tangible artifacts, may it be a service, a digital product, a building, an object, a process, a website structure or a loveable poster — is the most fascinating thing about design. It bridges thinking and doing with a structured process and method. There is no problem big or small enough for design. And it’s fascinating that design can help think of solutions in almost any industry or topic — it is in its nature generalist. There is a lot of talk about strategic design nowadays, and a lot of confusion as to what this means, so I wanted to offer my view on it and I’d like to quote the Helsinki Design Lab since I couldn’t have put it better myself:

Strategic design redefines how problems are approached, identifies opportunities for action, and helps deliver more complete and resilient solutions. Strategic design is about crafting decision-making.

This is especially critical as digital technology connects ecosystems, services, products, and people, which were once in their silos. It means the complexity is rising, there is no one place of truth, no sole genius with the right answer, no one opportunity to attack, no one way to answer the question and no one right solution.

In this new world of countless unknowns, I think that process, structure, and method are important, but we also need to talk about the emotional part of design. Because we are not just designing the thing itself, we are designing for a desired EXPERIENCE of the thing — be it a brand, a product or a service. We are attempting to elicit an emotional response by the customer as well as solve their problem. And sometimes, this intuitive part of the process is difficult and messy, and therefore sometimes hard to translate into a rational argument.

I believe this difficulty comes from the art element in design, which is the very thing that distinguishes it from science. If science is about logic, evidence, data, analysis — then art is about emotion, experience, introspection, reflection, interpretation. And this, to me, is the wonderful thing about design — it contains both parts! And when the logic and emotion are well balanced in a design process, we can deliver those elusive “magic moments” in an experience that solves the problem as well as creates delight.

This all takes time and a good collaboration, especially when the problem is more complex, or systemic. So when we recently sat down with the design crew at Vertical Strategy, where I currently work, I got excited about the future. Not only because we, of course, want to make products that have a positive impact on the world (like any design or product team out there). But also because we shared a strong view that design needs to play the role of the facilitator so that it can help leverage other people’s creativity and problem-solving skills. Because in essence, creativity is for everyone, and everyone can contribute to great problem solving, even when they can’t drive the process and craft final solutions.

This is why I love design and want to see it be leveraged even more — so it can live up to its full potential. And there is still a lot to be done in the world if we want to create a future that we feel excited about.