November 5, 2021
Read Time:
6 Minutes
Working through the Industrial Design Program at Western Washington University is an arduous journey. You get competition, pettiness, camaraderie and all the amazing things that come for free with a long fought battle. At the end, only 12 available spots stand in the Senior studio. Your job is to make it to 1 of the 12. During the process you’re constantly wondering if you’re good enough and if you’re ready for that senior room. In addition to all this is one more factor of mysticism. You never interact with the senior professor before thr senior year. The lore is powerful and his reputation precedes him.
Del King. He is a very peculiar man. Standing no more than 5’4 while having the composure and confidence of a matador. He commands whatever space he is in and moves with a purpose. Funny, serious, compassionate, cut-throat, inappropriate. He is as dynamic as they come. People have varying experiences with him but the whole time I found all these characteristics authentic and captivating, to say the least, and during senior year they shifted my entire anti-authority attitude. Maybe it was the relatability I felt towards his communication style, or purely the respect I had for him. Something was different. Within this relationship I was compelled to listen, learn from, and admire him. From Del I learned many things, he changed the way I viewed design and furthermore changed the way I viewed education.
One day, during a particularly relaxed critique he said something I’ll never forget. That day, we had a simple sketch model due, it was one of many in the process of developing our senior project. Kids across the room kept changing their design, trying to find the perfect iteration, editing while creating, and ultimately most were struggling. Me included! Del, being very intuitive, saw this in my work. During the critique he and I sat quietly at my desk, talking in a low tone. He had a clever way of slightly whispering during one-to-ones, it made you think you were hearing something special, getting the scoop on a secret “Look Bobby, you’re making this harder than it needs to be. Quit. Changing. Directions. Make a model, find ten things wrong with it, and then… make another.”, then walked away. Boom. Mic Drop. For years I’ve continued to think and practice on this simple piece of advice and I want to share why it's so powerful..
In a weird way a piece of advice like this takes so much of the pressure off. At the time it gave me a new sense of confidence, a sense of energy. But why? For one, It's rare to find something that is actionable right out of the box. Finding 10 things wrong doesn’t require a ton of deciphering or philosophical pondering. In fact, it doesn’t even require that you be that great of a designer. It's all there in front of you. For two, the most beautiful thing about this idea is that it's reliant on you. What do you think is wrong? What will you edit? What you decide to take out or keep in, says a lot about who you are. Your principles reveal themselves in your editing process. You have a key within that no one else has. You have preferences, life circumstances, and culture that all contribute to what your 10 things will be. This advice is like pulling the fog out of the room and being granted clarity.
What I love about Del’s advice is that it can go on forever. It will grow with you and change with you. As you rise in age, taste, and preference you will find new things that would have gone right past you previously. In one piece of feedback my entire understanding was refocused around the most precious thing we all have, our individuality. Thanks Del.
As creatives, especially when we’re starting, we seek something called “perfection”. Ugh. With the way information and inspiration spread we’re able to get feeds of high quality work straight to our phones, a never ending supply, and we assume our starting point is there. If the work we put forth doesn’t match up to that which we see from the hottest Behance project, we get discouraged and judge ourselves. This idea of perfection is built around the idea that we compare our work to the most compelling pieces we can find. The problem is, most of us genuinely want to make good work. If we really want to improve our skills we need to learn to embrace the bad.
When I was in High School I used to love to listen to Bobby Chiu. Bobby, a fantastic artist out of Toronto. had a very therapeutic DVD series that I would play in the background on my computer while I did design work. The video series consisted of him doing very loose and gestural drawings to a certain point of completeness and no further. He had a saying he would constantly reaffirm, almost as self-therapy “You know, don’t be so worried about doing a bad drawing, you can always throw it away, and start a new one”. This simple idea wasn’t something I had really considered before. Getting over yourself and making, regardless of if it's “good” or “bad”, is the key. There is enough comparison coming from the world outside of yourself, internal attacks don’t help.
So what do Del and Bobby (Chiu) have to do with each other? The fact that they understand there is always going to be some perceived “wrong” in the work, that's part of the game baby. The only way to truly engage in this process is to have something to edit. You have to get something on the table. If you stop yourself before you get out of the gate, you never get the feedback from stumbling through the first leg of the race. I can’t tell you how many people I saw delaying this, including myself. It was as if we’d been asked to give birth. In a sense, it is. Having to actually start, take a chance, and show something is filled with resistance. It's scary, it's vulnerable. It’s not just work we’re putting out there it's ourselves. Which is exactly where the perfection excuse comes in “Well, its not perfect yet.”. We mull over sketches, prototypes, half finished models. Anything to avoid putting something forth and saying “Here it is, this is my first one”. What ends up happening is we’ll fester, edit, and the first complete offering we get to show is usually the final.
I want to share a metaphor that may help you think about this process and ease some of the associated pressure. The way I visualize this process is called the marble metaphor.
A creative process is a continual path of building and revising. This is only possible once there is something whole to be able to edit and build on. For me the most natural comparison is marble sculpting. What is interesting and relevant about this naming is that when you’re sculpting, the work exists within the piece of stone at all times. Our job as the creative, the visionary, is to continually take away what isn’t necessary to reveal the purest form of that vision. This is only possible however by getting a slab of stone and getting it to the table. When I say do the worst thing first, I am saying get the most crude form of your idea out of you and onto the table so you can start sculpting it. Best practices for this are as follows:
No editing while you’re making. We’ve all done it, trying to get way too detailed in the beginning stages of a piece of work. Writers don’t refine every paragraph to perfection before moving on to the next one. They’d never get to the end of the piece. Typically they understand that there will be a certain roughness, a crude form of what is to be. If Michelangelo tried to get the exact positioning of David’s arm before getting to any other part of the body it would certainly be detrimental to the workflow.
Work in passes. This is the second part, work through the whole in passes. A sculptor, after having roughed in a crude version of the form, gets each part up to the same level of roughness and then can go back over the entire piece shaping down the stone to the same level of detail region by region. Think of sanding down a beautiful woodworking piece. If you want a baby soft finish, you don’t start with a tree trunk and try to massage it with 4000 grit. No, you start very coarse, 80 grit. Each time you’ve covered the piece you go back again, 120 grit. 200, 400, 800, 1000, 2000. Wetsand. Paper. You get the point.
Creative fields are boosted forward when creatives double down on themselves and their unique point of views. Not every POV is right for every situation but in a world of so much saturation a person willing to share themselves through their work stands out in the crowd. Doing the worst version first is vital because being scared to do something bad is the exact thinking that will keep one from doing any work at all. The real value of what Del and Bobby Chiu have to offer is that their advice goes beyond design. The only refinement process is between you and yourself. That's it. The great journey is always internal. As much as I want to be clinical and strategic, Having the humility and patience to stick through your bad pieces and know they’re the foundation for the stellar ones is a life long process to enjoy. It takes confidence to submit to doing the worst thing first, be proud of it.