Posted by:
Tate Linden

In a brief exchange I had with @kwheaton and @Bryan_El_Parker over on Twitter, both raised concerns about the way large companies hire their employees. They were responding to our blanket rejection notice posted previously on our blog. Bryan pointed out that the traditional system strips applicants of their individuality by making them check boxes, to which we said that “unless you’re a checkbox you shouldn’t work for large employers.” Kristan reasoned that not working with big employers may be easier said than done.

And so we slept on it. For a week. And here’s what came of it:

The issue isn’t that big companies can’t work with highly creative or visionary types, it’s that the best path to big company employment for people with these qualities is probably not a system that rigidly dictates and automatically enforces the form and content of their applications. If you’re genuinely creative or visionary then you’re better served by either finding another way in that allows you to show your skills, or by breaking or manipulating the ineffective process to show why they need what you bring to the table. Your goal shouldn’t be to do the best you can within the system, but to prove that the system is set up to solve the wrong problem or deliver the wrong result.

Daniel Pink explains part of the problem in his book (which is excellent, by the way,)  To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others:

…a few years ago, the Conference Board, the well-regarded U.S. business group, gave 155 public school superintendents and eighty-nine private employers a list of cognitive capacities and asked their respondents to rate these capacities according to which are most important in today’s workforce. The superintendents ranked “problem solving” number one. But the employers ranked it number eight. Their top-ranked ability: “Problem Identification.”

Checkboxes seem best suited to addressing a presupposed problem for which the right answer is at least intuited, if not outright known. And that’s why big companies use them. They believe that they know what they’re looking for and how to find it. If you don’t have a better way to see things, or a different problem identified, then checkboxes are probably not doing you a disservice. But if you do see a different problem that needs solving than the company does, each box you check will make your unique value less visible.

If you want (or have) to work for a big checkboxy organization and aren’t a checkboxy type you can, of course, just suck it up, check the boxes and hope for a job and role you can’t stand so you can change things from within before you have the life sapped from you. Or you can show them from the start that the problem that needs solving and the person they need aren’t a part of their checkbox system.

If you’re good, the considerable effort and insight this approach requires will be nothing compared to the pain and frustration you’ll avoid by having a job that encourages you to think, say, and do exactly as you wish rather than forcing you to be someone you hate to see in the mirror every Monday through Friday, holidays excepted.

If you’re not quite good enough, or the organization doesn’t appreciate your obvious talents? That’s a conversation for another day, I think.

Many thanks to Kristan and Bryan for their help in identifying this particular problem.

Posted by:
Tate Linden

Back in 2011, while railing against the tendency to settle for ‘non-objectionable’ over ‘highly effective’ brands, I cited a portion of this quote from the (then living) Prime Minister:

To me consensus seems to be —the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects. —the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.

What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner “I stand for consensus”?

Those are some exceptionally important words to me, and to the organization I’ve built. I reference them at nearly every speaking engagement and each new client briefing because they’re equally applicable to the fields of branding and design.

And today they seem even more relevant and true. Today there’s a new lack of consensus. Thatcher’s passing earlier this week has been simultaneously marked by loyal praise and passionate derision from those impacted by her efforts. She is now either loved or reviled by the masses for the things she held most dear and the controversial steps she took to effectively defend those things.

I can’t imagine that she would find this particularly upsetting. Thatcher didn’t stand for consensus; she stood for her convictions. And the United Kingdom as a whole and the world at large are stronger for it.

The lesson? As goes politics, so goes branding. Address the issues, don’t avoid them. Or do. After all, it’s only the wellbeing of your organization and its people at stake.

In our eight year history we’ve never brought on a single intern nor employee who started their cover letter with “Dear Sirs” or “To Whom it May Concern,” and then perhaps followed it with body copy that could just as well introduce someone trying to break into the laundromat business, or maybe rocket science.

The unofficial policy doesn’t hit home for you? Consider what it would be like if a purportedly reputable organization was staffed by people so lazy that instead of taking the time to understand and address each applicant individually, they just posted a blanket rejection statement on their blog and left it at that.

You’re probably wondering – what happened to the weekly happenings? Well here’s the simple answer – we’re busy, VERY busy. We know – the economy sucks, so what could we possibly be so busy with? Well I can’t exactly tell you (it’s a secret), but I can tell you that we’ve been having a blast making messes, taking photos (we may have even seen a ghost or two), and smashing things with a hammer – all for a client project. Oh and our boss Tate Linden has been writing blogs like crazy, he’s a fan of Gandhi if you haven’t noticed *wink*.

We’ve also been photographing more of our work – if you didn’t see our last website update we launched all of our client work, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. We are continuing to update our pictures and results from all of our projects. There has been a lot of media going around too – we won an award for our work on the Think Harder. Concrete brand for PCA. (If you look close, you can see Tate sporting the brand above!)

Video mark-ups #3, 4, and 5 are all in the works, so you’ll be able to see them coming out very soon. We already completed our mark-up video on the Stokefire logo (#1) and the Think Harder. Concrete brand (#2), so we’re pretty darn excited to have more on the way.

We of course can’t forget about our client work either. We’re working on advertisements, logos and a whole lot of strategy. Tate has also been off on a few speaking gigs, getting people all psyched-up about brand alignment. With all this stuff going on, we’ll be putting out the Stokefire Bellows (our newsletter) very shortly, so keep your eyes peeled.

Get More:
Posts involving Gandhi
Tate Linden: Speaker Extraordinaire
Stokefire’s Classic Rants

Design is an Opportunity to Continue Telling the Story, Not Just To Sum Everything Up.

Seems that these words are at least as meaningful to others as they are to me.

This picture just came across twitter:

Via @LordLeonMachi

Whoa.

I wish I’d had that on my bucket list because “say something tattoo-worthy” would be a really cool one to cross off.

Thank You for everything Lena, We’ll miss you!

This week brings my 6 month stint with Stokefire to an end…and what a 6 months it has been…My goal when I first took this internship, was to further improve on my existing skills, gain new experiences, and see how my topic of interest - Design Ethnography - can benefit a small Branding and Strategy firm like Stokefire. All this was to happen within a limited time frame since I would be in Washington DC for 6 months before my husband and I move to Scotland. I am about to attend the University of Dundee to pursue my Masters in Design Ethnography.

I think I have been given a tremendous amount of opportunity and insight here at Stokefire during the past 6 months, but more so, as things “never come as planned” (read below why this has much personal meaning to me) I have been given the opportunity to get a unique insight into the workings of an evolving and changing agency.

When I first started with Stokefire it was a growing company with about 10 staff members – they had just hired their first ever Creative Director, and everyone was working hard to move the company into new territories. Within a few weeks of starting here, it became more clear to the leadership that they needed to return Stokefire to its “strategic roots” – so within a couple of months and some re-structuring and re-focusing, the staff has now returned to three core team members (+me), and the focus of the work has shifted back to strategic branding.

I knew that in order to maintain my focus on the “Design Ethnography approach” during this time of change, I had to adjust and quickly shift my focus to match the situation. So I went from predominantly studying the relationship of Stokefire to its clients and partners, to observing and investigating the relationships and structures within the company and among its now very intimate (and extremely dedicated) core team members.

While I don’t think I need to share pages upon pages of field notes, I do think it is of value to share these key points I took away from this 6-months experience:

- Nothing comes as planned: Those who know me, know that this is a valuable lesson my “hippie-dad” taught me when I was very young and one idea that I live my life by. I am an extreme type-A personality, an uber-punctual German planner with multiple to-do notes and lists going at all times, so this is a hugely important lesson for me to remember, no matter how frustrating. Sometimes I shake my head at how my life has progressed in the past 10 years – I would have called anyone mentally-unstable had they tried to convince me 10 years ago that at age 19 I would immigrate to the U.S. by myself, live in South Dakota for 5 years to study Journalism, just to find my path at 27 and, after living in the deep South and now the East Coast, would return to Europe to study Design Ethnography in Scotland. But here I am. Every time I have a moment of “How the hell did I get here?” I look back at the last time I thought that and realize that yet again, every single event, whether it was great or devastating at the time, has led me to another pausing point for reflecting. And these moments of reflection make me see that even though nothing comes as planned, everything comes the way it should.

- In any given situation, for any amount of time – try to be as creatively and purposefully engaged as you can. Coming into this internship I knew that I would be here for 6 months, and no longer than that. Throughout the changes of the company and additional undulations that come with life I saw moments of my creative drive dwindling and looking back it would have been easy to slip and miss out on opportunities to be fully engaged. It is hard and exhausting and frustrating sometimes, but the process has once more reminded me that it is HUGELY important to yank yourself back into the present moment and engage with as many people as you can. And learn from them. Any second that you possibly can.

- Learn from the people you are surrounded by – directly and indirectly. This goes hand in hand with the previous point, but especially for someone like me, who is used to working independently (and fairly efficiently, if I may say so myself), it is important to take advantage of the many knowledgable people around you. Even if it is just 15-30 minutes here and there to learn something new. Everyone is a specialist in something and even if at first glance it looks like they don’t have anything specific to teach you of relevance to a current situation or project…they do. It is up to us individually to gather that knowledge from those who surround us and to make use of it. Learn as many things about as many different topics from as many people as possible.

- Be flexible – take evolving situations for what they are and learn from them. Again, when things are evolving, it is often easy to get lost in the flow and process of transitions and change. If you have the ability to step back and see the whole picture, it makes it a whole lot easier to make sure you are placed in the right position to deal with, and hopefully, guide change.

- Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I feel extremely lucky to have found this internship, but I think more than anything the greatly positive experience I have had here (and I hope the rest of the team has had with me here) was merely a combination of preparation and opportunity. I prepared for this step for months in advance and applied for an internship with a company that at the time, didn’t even have any openings and Stokefire saw the opportunity to explore a new field like Design Ethnography within Branding and Strategy and offered me this internship.

My last blog post was focused on the philosophy behind Ray and Charles Eameses’ design (AND life) and I need to borrow Charles’ words once more to make better sense of this experience. This is an excerpt from a speech Charles gave at the end of one of the famous Norton Lectures that Charles delivered at Harvard.

 ”I can never think that our pleasures, our rewards from the things around us, could ever possibly be diminished by additional knowledge about it. And the contrary is true. I heard Richard Feynman describe waves on the beach. He’s a particle physicist and he was describing the waves in terms of insights that he felt and knew about the reactions of the particles within the wave, the relationship between the molecules of water, what happened as the light came into it, the forces of gravity and the inertia [that] was taking place – and it was a description of a breaking wave because he had a tremendous appreciation of the exquisite beauty of what was going on, not only on the surface of the wave, but what was going on inside the surface of the wave and what had gone beyond to make that wave possible. It was a delightful thing and no better pleasure or experience could I wish you all.”

I am thankful for the experience given, the insights shared, the knowledge gathered, and the connections made. I feel that my attempt to focus on learning valuable workplace skills has led me back yet again to the very basics – observing and understanding human interactions and relationships.

This is my fifth post inspired by one of the essays in the book “Design Anthropology – Object Culture in the 21st Century” by Alison J. Clarke. This chapter “The anthropological object in design: from Victor Papanek to Superstudio” is written by Alison J. Clarke (the mastermind herself).

I, like many, many others, have always found the designs by the iconic Charles and Ray Eames to be inspiring (to say the least).

The older I got and the more involved in the design community I became, the more I understood and appreciated the beauty of form and function in sync. I developed a lasting fascination with innovative and functional household and kitchen products and a love for simplistic, modern furniture and architecture. I think this appreciation came about mostly through my habit of what I would call “obsessive observing and analyzing” of my surroundings (and with that, it’s objects) and by exploring what the great designers who came before have accomplished.

So very fittingly, this chapter by Alison J. Clarke “explores the historical relation of design to anthropology, its objects and methodologies” and she points out that the tools and objects we use in our lives are much more meaningful once understood in the context of the user and society. Clarke explains that “objects and tools represent a particular field of investigation; they lend themselves much better to being used as keys in the interpretation of complex relationships. Objects are the direct witness of the creative drive.”

It is well known that the Eames’ had a very anthropological approach to their design and Clarke refers to design historian Pat Kirmham, who knew that they were influenced by the mixing of objects of authentic origin and popular culture. “The Eames’ changed the way people thought about objects, largely by presenting them in new ways and by encouraging different ways of perceiving, grouping, and displaying them [...] they used toys and everyday objects to illustrate design principles [...] and they emphasized the need to understand the contexts in which material culture was produced and used.”

In another happy coincidence, I am currently reading “An Eames Primer” by Eames Demetrios, who is Charles and Ray’s grandson. In this book, he “offers an in-depth look at the couple’s prolific legacy – one that has placed them among the most important American designers of the twentieth century.”

My husband and I both share an immense respect and admiration for what Charles and Ray Eames accomplished and for the life they led. I love the Eames’ belief that “design is a process, rather than a single outcome – a process that’s never really over.” The Eames’, in my eyes, were real Design Ethnographers. They believed that you learn by doing and that through the process of one project a new project is often born (“each iteration offered another opportunity to hone the material tighter and tighter”). They understood that photography was an integral part of the design process as it was a way of discovering and exploring. And even when a task required new skills, the Eames office would “rather learn how to do it themselves than send it out.”

The author of this chapter suggests that “there has been a seismic shift in design culture of the last decades, whereby ‘users’ and methods of anthropological inquiry have emerged as the key means of deciphering the nuances of object/subject relations. But the anthropological object (…) has long been the critical designer’s favorite muse.”

Eames Demetrios has a unique perspective on Charles and Ray’s work and life; he truly understands their slogan ‘innovate as a last resort’. Nowadays, many people throw around the word ‘innovation’ and call on companies to strive for innovation above all else. But I think today’s understanding of the term ‘innovation’ doesn’t take into account the things to be learned from the Eames’ approach. To them, “the danger of innovation was the chance of losing the wisdom that had gone into the development of the idea to that point.”

A critical designer therefore understands that our everyday objects can only be truly understood within the context of the user and he gains wisdom from the process of developing an idea or product.

We’ve had some conversations in the office lately about vision.  Lots of aspects of vision – the forward-looking kind that gives us goals and motivation, but also the physical kind – the kind you enjoy when your eyes and all their related parts – nerves, brain cells, etcetera – are doing their job well.  (Pretty amazing stuff!)

I’m fairly sure that vision is my favorite sense of the physical ones we are blessed with.  Thinking about it reminded me of a story – a small experience I had long ago, but one that felt significant to me.  I thought I’d share it here:

It was a sunny day in Boston.  Lunchtime.  I was walking down the street in the shopping district near my office, past cute little shops, eateries, and utilitarian places like CVS and the local bank.  Then I reached the monolithic pair – Jordan Marsh on the left, Filene’s on the right.  So similar, yet so competitive.  Like the difference between all natural vanilla ice cream and vanilla bean ice cream.

I was on the Jordan’s side, walking at my usual brisk pace.  But of course I managed a look at their huge window displays as I went past.  In just a few paces there it was – a window arrayed in exceptional beauty.  Mannequin’s wearing the latest, loveliest, gorgeous fashions; other elements of the display providing context in harmonious and beautiful color schemes.  It was delicious.  Lovely.  Though the scene was utterly still I felt drawn in, as though grasped by the colorful tendrils around the faux trees, as though invited in by the sirens’ graceful arms.  I wanted those things!  The beauty of it all left me with a warm and happy feeling.  Well, that mixed with a sense of temptation… yes, I liked those things, but did I really need to spend my money to own them?  A small mental battle ensued.

In just a few steps I turned my gaze forward to my path again.  Coming towards me was an older man with a cane.  The kind that blind people use.  His gaze was directed straight ahead and slightly down as he moved the cane in a rhythmic pattern – left tap, right tap, left tap, right tap – helping him navigate his way.  He was walking past the very same window that had me entranced.  But he didn’t see any of it.  He didn’t know the sirens were calling silently to him.  He didn’t see that the colors and patterns were delicious.  He did not have to face the temptations that were running through my mind.  He just kept walking.

It left me wondering… how does that man experience the various aspects of his world?  What temptations enter his consciousness, and how do they grasp him?  Clearly the kinds of things that were starting to feel important to me did not even enter his mind.

Those few seconds of experience and awareness created a quick reality check for me.  Yes, visual beauty is beautiful, and worthy of appreciation.  But it’s not everything.  Certainly owning it is not everything.  The memory of beauty can be enjoyed long after experiencing it.  For me, it is most often my eyes that afford me that privileged experience.

Images via Hovering Art Directors

So I’m sure you’ve all seen this before. The dreaded hovering art director. Our fabulous Lena Blackstock sent this around the office about a month ago, and I started thinking about it again.

I have a thing about people behind me. I don’t like to sit with my back facing the room, and when I do, you can find me turning around every 5 minutes. So what happens when I have hovering “art directors?” I cringe, I fidget, I turn to my side, and I can’t look straight at the screen. It doesn’t help that I like to look at the people talking to me (which I don’t think is actually a bad thing). I can handle one, maybe two, but any more than two is like having an audience. Plain and simple, I get creeped out.

So what do I do now?

Stokefire‘s Chief Creative Tate Linden, has named me the Art Director here at Stokefire. Will I become the dreaded “hovering art director?” There is a fine line between directing and telling. Will I be that one person that every designer dreads, the person that says “click there,” “do this,” “do that.” I can tell you one thing, I’d rather direct, but I suppose only time will tell.