Hasta La Ideas

Piet Hein Eek even enjoys doing administrative chores.

Core77 2013 Year in Review: Top Ten Posts · Furniture, Pt. 1 · Furniture, Pt. 2
Digital Fabrication, Pt. 1 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 2 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 3 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 4
Insights from the Core77 Questionnaire · Maker Culture: The Good, the Bad and the Future · Food & Drink

Over the last seven months, I called up 15 successful, respected designers from around the world and asked them each a set of 22 questions about their backgrounds, their current projects, their working habits and their thoughts on design. In the course of conducting these interviews—which we dubbed the Core77 Questionnaire—I noticed a handful of themes begin to emerge. Even though I talked to designers with a wide range of backgrounds and work experience, many of them had remarkably similar answers to several of our questions. So as part of Core77’s year-end review, I wanted to highlight these outstanding themes in the form of the following six insights into the design mind.

Designers Don’t Procrastinate

One of our 22 questions is “How Do You Procrastinate?”—and I was truly surprised by how many designers were incapable of coming up with an answer. As a writer, procrastination is an integral part of my daily routine; successful designers, by contrast, seem to actually want to do their work. Either that, or they just have a lot more self-discipline. As Paul Loebach said: “If I’m going to work, I’m going to work. And if I’m not going to work, I will take a vacation.” Marcel Wanders can’t bear to have work hanging over his head: “For me, procrastinating equals suffering,” he said. Sandy Chilewich said the same thing: “Procrastinating, for me, is extremely painful. I’m really not having a good time if I feel like, ‘Shit, I should really be doing this other thing.'” Ditto Paul Cocksedge, Piet Hein Eek and Sam Hecht. Even those designers who did come up with an answer really had to think about it first—none of my interviewees could imagine indulging in frequent bouts of work avoidance.

Designers Think Most People Don’t Understand What They Do

This was another common theme, and it came up mostly in response to the question “What is the most widespread misunderstanding about design or designers?” Over and over, our interviewees said that the general public basically has no idea what industrial designers do. Here’s Ayse Birsel: “No one knows what we do. Fashion designers they get, but with product design it’s like, ‘What’s that?’ And then people say, ‘Oh, so you style stuff? Or you engineer stuff?’ And I’m like, ‘Neither.’ There’s no easy answer.”

Sam Hecht answered similarly, noting that because “design means so many different things now,” the term designer has become almost useless. (When asked what he does, Hecht prefers to say, “I make things.”) Fellow Londoner Paul Cocksedge agreed, saying, “It would be wonderful if there were another word besides designer, but I don’t know what it would be.” And Adidas’s James Carnes suspected that “people would be absolutely amazed by the depth and breadth of a designer’s daily work.”

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