People have a misconception about the life of the designer. I’m here to dispel that myth. (Oh, and yes, I’m fully aware that Edward Tufte and many other info graphic designers disparage pie charts, but I’m too busy sending emails and deleting serial commas to come up with a better chart.)
“I am a rock! I am an i-i-island,” sang Simon and Garfunkel. My mom told me she had a lame boyfriend once who played that song for her and told her it perfectly expressed who he was. She broke up with him. Lately I’ve been ruminating about being alone. I like being alone. I enjoy padding around my house by myself. I like working for myself. I don’t have to make small talk with people I don’t like and I don’t have to answer to people I don’t respect. I get to manage my own time and projects. I think I also have a greater appreciation for being alone since I had a child. When he’s home, there is no being alone.
But there are drawbacks to working alone. When you work with other people in an office, you benefit from socialization. For designers you have other colleagues to share your ideas and collaborate. I really miss that, but I miss something else more: work friends. Work friends go to lunch together and complain about everything work-related. They send each other furtive emails and texts about clients and colleagues. They go to bars and bitch about their jobs. I work alone. I have no work friends. So when I want to complain about my job, I wait until my husband comes home and then I pretend he’s my colleague and start complaining. As you might imagine, he hates it. He already has work friends and a job that he gets to complain about and listen to other work friends complain about. He doesn’t need another one.
I try to keep the complaining to a minimum, but it’s important to have this sounding board. When you complain about something you deem egregious to a work friend, she will calm you down, agree with you that the situation is totally unreasonable, and maybe, if you’re lucky, give you strategies for how to deal with it. This is important, because chatting about the problem quashes the instinct to immediately hit REPLY to an email and write, “Look d-bag, f you and your project. Go to hell.” Your work friend will tell you not to do this. And your work friend is right.
Since I’ve forced my husband to be my work friend, he has to act as my filter. I send him draft emails and he writes back things like, “Don’t send this” or “See edits below,” and then the 4-paragraph whiny draft message is whittled down to “Thanks! I’ll get back to you on this soon.”
But I think he’s reached his limit being my stand-in work friend: Last night when I started complaining about something, he looked at me with exasperation and said, “Can’t you talk to Sookie about this?”
Um, Sookie is my cat. Clearly I need an assistant.
About 15 years ago my husband and I got into a fight at the Ikea in Elizabeth, NJ. We were not mad at each other really, but the place brought out the worst in us. The physical store was the antithesis of its touted Swedish simple design. It was crowded, difficult to navigate, and didn’t have the products we had picked out in the catalog. We had rented a Zip car, the trip took hours longer than we expected and we spent a chunk of the time frantically trying to communicate to the powers that be at Zip car that we would not have the car back in time. On the way home we made a pact, we would never go to Ikea again. Ever. No matter how much we needed a Boksel or a Billy. As the years passed we told ourselves we didn’t want anything from Ikea. The stuff was cheaply made. When we would get tempted, I would remind myself of the time my husband busted a hole in the back of a particleboard dresser during assembly.
But then an Ikea opened in Brooklyn. And we thought it can’t be so bad, it’s closer! And it was better. We bought some Grundtals. And some Bjarnam. The designer in me fell back in love. So what if the stuff was totally prefab and cheaply manufactured? Not all of it is composed of particleboard. Ikea has taste and it’s affordable!
Now we live in a house in NJ. You know what happens when you move from an apartment to a house? You realize that you need stuff. Like Laks, and Ivars, and Expedits. So we braved the Ikea in Elizabeth again this past Sunday. Only this time, for added torture, we brought a 2-year old. It was even worse than our last visit to the Elizabeth Ikea. In our haste to quell a screaming toddler, we ran out without arranging the delivery of our big purchase assuming we could arrange it over the phone. We couldn’t. I had to go back again to do it in person.
I went on a Tuesday. Alone. Ikea on a Tuesday is nothing like Ikea on a Sunday. It was amazing. I lingered. I threw some Godis in my cart. I bought the awesome poster pictured here (the Olunda). I fell back in love. Hand me an allen wrench please. I have to assemble a plant stand.
So it’s finally happened: robots are taking over the world.
Remember when there was a collective excitement that robots would start doing the boring jobs of humans? We had visions of humanoid metallic creatures like Rosie from the Jetsons cooking our dinner and cleaning our house (awesome!). The reality is much more banal – extremely un-humanlike robotic arms moving widgets on assembly lines, the proliferation of ATMs and self check-outs at the grocery store, and of course, the pathetic attempt at a cleaning robot, the Roomba. Our robots don’t really look like the robots of science fiction, which is pretty disappointing, but for most of us, these robots make life a little easier. After all, who wants to actually go in a bank and get money?
Robots are just computers, which complete robotic taks in very uninteresting shells. (Think about how much cooler it would be if an ATM looked like a humanoid robot and when you stuck your card in its torso its eyes would light up and then money would shoot out of its hand!) Anyhow, if you were in the service industry (say a checker at the grocery store, a teller at a bank, a cleaning woman – ok the Roomba did not replace any maids!), robots are a different story: they are job stealers. But for those of us in the creative field, we never feared robots. Computers just made our lives better (does anyone want to go back to paste ups? No!). We could take comfort that our artistic vision and voice would be something that could not be replicated by technology. Well recently I found out that we are not so unique and armed with just enough data, robots (ok computers) can now write “unique” stories, and in very human individualistic language.
Yikes, I’m glad I’m not a reporter! Here’s the deal: this company, Narrative Science, figured out that if given enough data in a data set, it could set up an algoritihm to write a variety of stories with the same information but from different perspectives. So, for example, let’s say you gave this robot (computer) a bunch of stats from a baseball game, runs, bats, pitches, blah blah, the computer could generate different stories about the game for different news environments, e.g., a quick blurb as if it was a wire story, or a story that focuses on the home team as if it’s in a local newspaper, or an analysis of the game play-by-play. The computer then stores the stories it writes and makes sure it never duplicates itself thereby creating a more human approach.
So as I heard this, I felt scared. How long will it be before a client can go to a website, type in “brochure,” and blam, there’s the perfect brochure? Turns out stuff like this already exists for logo designs (see logomaker.com, yuck).
To be fair, I haven’t read any of the articles from this computer-generated source, and I can only hope that they lack the depth and dimension of a real human authored piece. But for now, I remain scared: the robot revolution is finally happening, and it doesn’t look cool at all! They aren’t cooking our dinners or cleaning our houses. They’re taking over the world.
