CCA DR Blog Post #9

Q: Reaction to Tim Brown's challenge to designers.

When Tim Brown started to talk about his first few jobs as a designer (which I loved by the way...I think it's great to hear about successful people's kind of blah or not very successful moments in life) I thought of my own path towards becoming interested in design, and my first initial interest was created by a love of personal expression through fashion and fashion design.

A lot of my high school experience was pretty boring and I often found myself taking classes that I thought would get me into a good college and not usually the ones that really interested me. I entered college thinking I was going to be an International Relations major, so as you can imagine, my high school class choices had not been particularly exciting. To fuel my creative sensibilities in high school, my outlet became the outfits that I created for school each day.

Luckily, my undergrad experience in New York allowed me a variety of opportunities to be involved in the fashion world. My first was interning at Vogue magazine in the accessories department, which I hated. Then I did a summer program at Parsons in fashion design and I hated that too. I was a bit disheartened because I love textures, fabrics, textiles, the drama of fashion, even the manufacturing of clothes...but I think Tim Brown puts it best with his concept of "small design". I always felt like I was participating in something incredibly trivial. Yes, I love the aesthetics of fashion but when I had the opportunity to work in it, I was always bored and afraid that I would spend my life designing t-shirts. For some people this probably sounds like the greatest job in the world, for me it sounds like creative purgatory.

In the fall of my senior year of college, I interned at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. While there, I had the opportunity to write the press release for an exhibit called, Design for the Other 90%, which explored designs that were being made in and for developing countries. It was a very small task in the scheme of bringing this particular exhibit to fruition, but it felt far more important that anything I had done at Vogue. I really did feel part of something greater than myself. Maybe if the exhibit had been one on lighting or chairs, I wouldn't have felt this way, but this exhibit peaked my interest in how design could fit into a larger picture and create solutions.

I'm not yet sure of how I'll reconcile my love of textiles and fashion with creating systems and solutions as a designer, but my reaction to Tim Brown's challenge is this:

Bring it on.