- I'm a designer trying to close the gap between the strategic application of design thinking occasionally known as creative direction and the field that would call itself experience design.Perhaps some background will help...In my final year of high school I was strongly advised that computing, mathematics and the humanitarian arts were vastly different streams and that if I hoped to have any kind of career I would have to choose between the two. I ignored that advice until I was forced to choose an undergraduate course and decided to pursue design. Before I could develop a sufficient folio I broke both my arms (this was in 1996, when folios were painted and drawn), so I fell back on my second choice and went off to study computer science.I learned about algorithms, processors and memory, object orientation, reuse and recursion. Although I was taught C, SQL and Java, the larger lesson was that I didn't want to be a commercial developer.In the warez frenzy that is any university student campus, somebody slipped me a copy of Photoshop 3, and I fervently set about learning myself the design gig, taking every creative elective my course would allow, buying books on typography, grid theory, modernism, graphic design, gaping at the media experiments going on in the net at the time.I was fortunate enough to graduate at the peak of the Australian dot com boom, and a college friend who'd secured a network admin position at Sausage Software advised me to "Call them and tell them you want a job." Against my better judgement I did just that, telling them I was a web designer. I faked a folio and bluffed my way through the interview process and into the job. My title read 'Web Designer'. It was official. I bought O'Reilly's definitive reference to HTML4 on the way home and fell head over heels in love with the endless learning process that is the interactive craft.When I joined Lonely Planet in 2002 I was keenly interested in learning to make books and managed to get a couple under my belt before returning full time to the web.After the privilege of working on three failed large-scale redesign efforts I became fascinated with our inability to deliver on the fidelity of the things we'd imagined. We began to work desperately for permission to tinker with "the problem" with business people so that we could get ahead of the cluster fuck cascade of spec documents and half-baked design briefs that had charted the course of our previous failed efforts. And without any official power or authority, we slowly learned how to inspire the trust and enthusiasm that creates the room for good work to blossom.Lonely Planet adopted the agile software methodology with a slow but fervent devotion, and I became convinced that far from being impossible for designers to work within, it was ideal. Agile exposes designers, developers and business owners to each other in ways that make it mandatory to demonstrate competency, to communicate, earn trust and confront failure.Then, a year and a half ago, LP hired a creative director who helped me realise that great creative direction comes from reaching a point of empathy for the end user (consumer/audience/whatever), because that empathy is what leads to an insight. Insight is the spark for the big idea as they like to call it in agencies, and executing faithfully in the spirit of that idea is what makes great stuff.Doing good work isn't hard, provided you can create the space for it to occur. That space is created by earning the trust of the people whose product you're helping to define, by inspiring and working beside the people who are responsible for executing, and by building and maintaining an empathic vision of how doing good and make money are one and the same goal.Creating and working in that "space" is what I like to do, and what I hope very much that I'm good at. It's what I think creative direction and experience design are when they're at their best, and it's a great way to make great stuff.
