Shagun Singh

Its been precisely a year since my last full time job. I’ve completed a year doing my own thing. The new year has been good for us. Under our art collective umbrella - Artist Build Collaborative, we were named one of the 104 finalists for the prestigious Artplace grants, next to institutions like Creative Time, New Museum and Time Square Alliance. We won the Black Rock Grant this year for an urban intervention project. We were finalists for two interesting opportunities, one for a large scale project for Beam Camp in New Hampshire and the other for a project in the Stewert New Media Center in Orono Maine. None of which we won but it felt good to be a finalist.  We are working with some very exciting new people that include videographers and creative technologists for our upcoming projects. I have been consulting part time for a start up called littleBits whose mission and product I admire and love. Rick and I also completed an 8 week class around Business Plan Development that helped us understand and think financially about things that we love doing. Its helped me think of Urban Matter Inc more as a scalable business and less as I like to call it ‘my own thing’.

We’ve also been extremely busy working on consulting gigs which for now has been paying the bills. We are hoping to grow into a more experiential company where we use storytelling, film, architecture and our technology expertise to make fun and immersive things. There are a couple of projects that we are working on that might fall in this arena. One of them is called Wise Words and it is an interactive storytelling telling installation that revolves around stories of women who immigrated to this country in the earlier 20th century. This project will be displayed as a part of the New Museum Ideas City Festival at the storefront of an amazing architecture office called GTECTS alongside another interesting organization called miLES.

All in all things are moving forward and we are working a lot. We really hope to shift our focus to more experiential work at the intersection of urban design, technology and storytelling. I’ve been reading a lot of Brainpickings and the post about purpose really stands out - ‘How to find your pupose and do what you love‘. Its a great post and some very smart people talk about why you do what you do. We are doing a lot of new things and working with a lot of new technologies and people. Its not perfect, but I want to make sure we do a lot of work and get better. Ira Glass’s video on creativity explains creating good work really well. The top most priority for me is to have fun while working on something so that work doesn’t feel like work but more like creating an artistic experience. I look forward to going to the studio everyday. Its come to feel more like an experimental lab where we work on understanding new technologies and creating new experiences by brainstorming and experimentation. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don’t. The idea is to move in the direction of monetizing the things we love to make. I hope we’ve moved successfully in that direction by the time I get down to writing my next blog post. For now, Rick and I both have to wrap up a number of consulting gigs which might spill into summer time. After that we would seriously need to rethink why we are doing what we are doing, what we enjoy doing most and the million dollar question - how to make money doing what we love without having to do it all the time.

I did it, I left a fairly comfortable full time job at a prestigious design firm to start on my own. This happened in April of this year. Since then I’ve worked on an installation for a conference, organized a fundraiser for another installation, been to Venice to showcase a project at the architecture biennale, created an animation for a bunch of scientists, worked on two websites that are in production, curated speakers for a conference in Mumbai and gotten married. Its been a fairly tough yet exhilarating ride these past few months.

While feeling trapped in a full time job, I often read blog posts and articles about entrepreneurs who were doing their own thing to get inspired. There were stories of hardship, sweat, tears, failure, doubt, triumph and patience. Holding on to every word uttered by these veterans of entrepreneurship I started out on my own and yes, its a unpredictable ride. Since I’m the person who is going the other way into Brooklyn to go to my studio while everyone else heads to more commercial parts of the city to go to their 9 to 5’s, I wonder sometimes if I am going the right way. Doubt comes easy when you are swimming against the tide. But work wise it is easier for me to go against the tide since very few things interest me and I like to do them my way. I hate authority and I certainly hate being told what to do. I like being my own boss but it does suck when that bi-weekly pay check doesn’t come in.

Clearly, the work that doesn’t pay is the one I want to work on since it is more interesting and when one relies on money solely from ones so called business to pay rent and bills, it gets tricky. I think the only time I thought so much about money was when I had just come to the US for my grad school or when I started undergrad school and had never been out of my parents home. The common pattern here being that one is broke when one is starting off. I am hoping that things will even out sooner than later and money won’t matter anymore. Not that it does matter a lot right now, other than the fact we make our own lunches and won’t probably take a decent holiday till end of next year.

So what am I doing right now? I am trying to do business development for our company Urban Matter Inc. It is a multidisciplinary creative studio. Why is it multidisciplinary ? Because doing just one thing bores me. What do I hope to achieve doing this? I hope to create, produce and get better at the craft of self expression through design and art. I believe in Ira Glass’s take on the creative process about creating work and creating a lot of it. I want to put in my 10,000 hours doing work at my own terms and hope that I don’t fail miserably. Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility and I am not known to be responsible so I might be in big trouble but I guess it is worth a shot. I am horrible with full time jobs. I have a problem with my temper. I am grumpy and morose and terrible when I am not happy with my work. I don’t think I would ever succeed outside of this world and then I do not know if I have what it takes to succeed as a business woman.

One thing that I’ve been trying to think about is what we want to sell as a company. What differentiates us, sets up apart. For now, its just the fact that we have some cool participatory, community driven work on our site, most of it is unpaid, some of it was done with non profits, some of it is self initiated. I mean if what sets me apart is my penchant for cool unpaid gigs, then I am in deep trouble. But it would be terrible to do work that doesn’t resonate with people. There is enough technology and connectivity out there to make a whole lot of difference and it would be great to build something worthwhile and gratifying that does pay.

I guess thats why I am where I am at, because I do get to pick and choose what I want to work on and how I want to spend my time. I’ve been told by friends that I look rested. Other than the fact I’ve been sleeping late because I make my own hours, I do get to get up and work on projects or look for projects that would make me happy. Making money off of good work should be a matter of time. Good work comes from time and patience. Hours working on something also make it better and hones it down to its bare basics and your style and voice emerges. Things are not so confusing then. Finding your voice and purpose and making money off of it is probably the best thing in the world and I hope I can get there someday.

I have been reading a lot of articles around creativity and design, passions and interests. This made me think about my job title and my interests. Are my interests aligned with my job title? Am I passionate about being a designer?  All my adult life I have been a design advocate. However, my conclusion after my reads, is how little what we call things matter. At work today, a certain collegue was outlining how many different type of architects there were in the room, starting with content, information and technical, not to talk about the architect who wasn’t in the room - the one who builds buildings.

Design is such a loaded word that I doubt that it means anything. As Jack Schulze says in this very awesome article - “Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists.” Since I have been calling myself a designer for a really long time, this comes as a relief. I don’t want to be a designer anymore, I just want to do my thing. Titles are over-rated, and unfortunately jobs get created around useless titles and vice versa. Is it the naming convention happy society that wants to silo everything and create such demarcations. As we try to create more roles and more titles, the problems around us get diluted. Being a designer doesn’t mean anything, nor does being an architect mean anything. One could have made an argument around being able to sketch or think in an organized manner but that doesn’t hold true any more either. What does hold true when talking about ones creative leanings, I think is personal interests and passion. Darren Aronofsky once said that making a movie was 95% management and 5% creativity. He makes films that people like, he is not necessarily a manager, he is a film maker. His interests lie in making good films and not in managing projects but managing projects are an important part of making good stuff. Which brings me to the point that even though my title has been that of a designer for most of my adult life, I have sketched a lot, outputted a lot of documentation and dealt with a lot bureaucracy and not necessarily produced a lot of design that people have actively used. I have filled titles which necessarily haven’t been my interests.

Also, certain kinds of designs have nothing to do with my motivations and my interests. Craptastic words like design thinking and innovation make it even more difficult to call oneself a designer.  I think all of us need to take a piece of paper and write down the correlation between what they are interested in, what their title is and what they do. If those three things don’t really match up, its time to give yourself a new title, a title that matches up with what you want to do next - Storyteller is a good one and so is Urbanist. Atleast those terms outline your interests and then you can expand your thinking to make them more tactical and build something interesting people would use. Design is a verb now. Calling myself a designer feels misleading even if it comes with a prefix (interaction and such). I might like creating interactions for mobile phones that help people create good habits but might hate to create a financial analytic tool because I don’t care about what people do with their finances. What kind of interaction designer does that make me then? Not a very good one.

Its time to bid adieu to just being called a designer or more precisely an interaction designer. Its time to embrace interests, passions and all the work being done in relation to our creative pursuits.

This is a question I have been trying to answer for over a year. Instead of a rant, I thought it better to do some research on the matter and get to the root of the problem. This is to primarily answer this question - Did I fulfill my role as a designer after I graduated from design school 10 years ago?  The problem with working for design agencies is that you get caught in the design jargon and forget the real thing sometimes. Design process and methodology is as unique to designers as fingerprints to individuals. When everything starts getting standardized, then intuitive processes suffer. On the other hand, projects with no frameworks suffer from a lack of structured approach creating commotion. Which brings me back to the question - What is design? Were you and I meant to do what we are doing.

From Wikipedia

Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system (as in architectural blueprints, engineering drawing, business process, circuit diagramsand sewing patterns) while “to design” (verb) refers to making this plan.^[1] No generally-accepted definition of “design” exists,^[2] and the term has different connotations in different fields (see design disciplines below). However, one can also design by directly constructing an object (as in pottery, engineering, management, cowboy coding and graphic design).

More formally design has been defined as follows.

(noun) a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set ofrequirements, subject to constraints;

(verb, transitive) to create a design, in an environment (where the designer operates)^[3]

Another definition for design is a roadmap or a strategic approach for someone to achieve a unique expectation. It defines the specifications, plans, parameters, costs, activities, processes and how and what to do within legal, political, social, environmental, safety and economic constraints in achieving that objective.

The last paragraph gives the impression that one can design the government, country, finance, healthcare and myriad other things in life. But it also sounds restrictive, where everything from legalese to politics have to be kept in mind. Design seems to feel more managerial. It feels void of intuition and feeling.

Here is another one from the Design Council of UK

Design is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.’The Cox Review

Most of the results of design are visible, and that lends itself to another simple definition: ‘Design is all around you, everything man-made has been designed, whether consciously or not’.

The question therefore isn’t so much ‘what is design and why does it matter?’ but ‘how can I use good design to make the world around me better?’

‘Everything man-made has been designed, whether consciously or not’ pretty much sums it up. Design has been over specified, there are countless fields and types of design, I was trying to come to terms with ‘behavior’ design and someone sprung a ‘persuasive design’ at me the other day. Provocative articles about the death of design thinking and user experience add to the confusion and create a frenzy. Design for social change engaged me for a long long time till designers started to make a mess of it and I realized how little I knew about international development and governance (which doesn’t mean I should not be learning more about it).

I found this other slide as a part of a University of Illinois Chicago.

Design process is this case could be anything that spat out a bunch of specifications based on needs in the end. The rest of the pdf can be downloaded here.

Design is also loving the ideas you have to throw away.  A more emotional response here.

Non-designers can design using design thinking and buying fantastic books on the subject. A nice article on design thinking in design observer - “ One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be.”

Then there is design build, design research, design management, design strategy none of which I am particularly good at.

Here is a one of the nicer definitions of design I found online. More here.

Design is about finding a balance. There’s a Japanese word for the place in between – “ma”. It’s the interval of time between two things. It’s the point in the swing of a pendulum when the object switches from an upswing to a downswing. It’s the pause just between. It’s the moment just before something happens, or changes, or becomes clear, or comes into focus. But not yet. It’s the best part of the rollercoaster, right after the climb, and just before you fall. It’s anticipation. The space between. – Ma

India won the Cricket World Cup a couple of days back, a trophy we haven’t won in over 20 years. Before we won that cup, the feeling in the bar we were watching the match at, was that of dejection or lets say ambivalence. We have been known to give up when good wickets like that of Sachin Tendulkar fall. No one really knows what happened this time. The youngsters, a lot of whose names I didn’t know played a consistent and thorough game. Players like Gautum Gambhir kept the game going slowly and surely eventually winning us the World Cup. It was spectacular. It was …ahem.. very unlike us, the team seemed disciplined, there was strategic thinking behind who came out to bat and bowl, no tempers were flaring and everyone including the fiery Harbhajan Singh was behaving themselves, that too *drumroll* under pressure and stress. What happened here, did we just get sick of bad leadership, was there some introspection?

This brings me back to some personal introspection. The past three months has seen me join a new job at a company called frog design, host a panel discussion for designwala, moderate another one for ARTfarm and push forward a bunch of personal projects. The past few months of madness amongst other things has led to a broader understanding of personal work methods and emotional & physical thresholds. The primary introspection being, if people push themselves a bit harder than their expectations, they can surprise themselves. There were a lot of ‘I cant’ in my vocabulary in the last few years. It happens when you go past the romantic stage in your career, when you start understanding your shortcomings as an employee, co-worker, collaborator and more. The only thing that can be said here is to keep a low profile and to clean up your skill by working hard on it. The only substitute to working hard is perhaps working smarter which brings me to working under stress & pressure, where the example of the Indian Cricket Team comes in handy.

Working under stress means that your adrenalin is pumping but you come across as if you have been relaxing on a beach. The quality is rare, some have it naturally and for wound up people like me, it has to be cultivated with utter discipline. I am the kind of a person who works when the pressure is on. Being able to work smart under stress and pressure has been challenging. It has taken, time and experience to cultivate a consistent work method but has been worth it because I know I won’t screw up the task when the time arrives to deliver the goods. It also means that I have been able to expand my scope and incorporate more work and move up the food chain.

10 healthy work methods that I have learnt by falling in a ditch are as follows :

1. Distribute work, if you have a team, don’t try to be a martyr and do it all

2. Take small breaks to relax your eyes and muscles

3. Don’t blame people when they don’t deliver, just don’t work with them again.

4. Take some time off when a big project finishes

5. If you think the world is coming to an end, zoom out and look at the larger picture

6. If you don’t get everything done on your to-do list, there is always a tomorrow

7. Forgive yourself, shit happens

8. Start early, last minute is not always good and can create unnecessary stress.

9. Push yourself harder, try and be better, be more critical of yourself, design better, read more.

10. Last but not the least, take sick days when you are sick.

The list up top is very forgiving except for number 9. Pushing yourself harder however has a lot of weight. Everything else revolves around it. Doing something that is challenging or makes you uncomfortable also makes you aware of your boundaries and your abilities. It is important to take those risks just to understand what one is capable of. If it works out, awesome, if not, then forgive yourself and move on.

Just elaborating on couple of things listed above, starting early is something which is very new to me but has been helpful in cutting down unnecessary stress, it has also helped me develop better ideas and have time to get feedback. Another interesting aspect of working on creative projects is working with people. It is good to get a good understanding of a person’s skill set and limitations and limit ones expectations to that. There is no point depending on someone to do something they are not capable of delivering. This is not in the above list but stay away from people who do not care about your vision and work. If there is light at the end of the tunnel like work experience, cash in the bank, then go for it, if there is nothing, simply stay away and save yourself the self doubt negative people can instill in you.

I am not trying to write an ‘eat, pray, love’ here. These are simply the ways in which I have been able to create a conducive environment to work in while working a full time gig and numerous side projects. Having a hobby helps as well but I don’t have any and don’t plan on having any. I do want to travel more and get an understanding of the services and design across the globe.

One more thing that has struck me is actually doing the work and designing the product if you want to make it. There is no point in waiting for the right time to make something happen. If you have an idea, atleast sketch it out, send a few emails out, sense its feasibility and your attachment to it. More often than not, you will abandon it, however if you don’t, then it could be a live product. Something that you thought of, designed and created. Even if the product fails, atleast you tried vs being one of those people who are always saying ‘I thought of facebook before Zuckerberg did’. Those people are the worst and you don’t want to be one of those because then you would be a wannabe and no one wants to be wannabe. Amen.

I am starting a new job at a global design agency called Frog Design in Jan and along with the nervousness that comes with starting a new gig, I am reassessing my role as a designer. According to me, the definition of a good designer is someone who can come up with simple solutions to complex problems. I was at work a couple of days back and it dawned on me how instead of understanding how to solve problems, I have always worked around them or chosen to ignore them. I am not really creative when it comes to things in my life, for example, if my machine is choking, I just work slower, I forget to update the OS for my phone since it seems to work fairly okay without the updates till I get locked out of an application that needs me to update, I watched analog TV till the cable company cut me off and then I reluctantly switched to digital, I wear my shoes till the soles come off and wear my sweaters till the elbows are frayed. One would call me a laggard in technology adoption lingo and just sloppy otherwise. I would say that people learn to live with new things when the older technology, sweaters and shoes just wont do. However, if I am the person who has always watched television with commercials all my life and formulated a strategy behind doing something fun, like play with my dog everytime a commercial comes on, then I am probably not the guy who is going to come up with the idea for TIVO. That is because I have decided to work around the problem and not on the problem. How do the lives of designers influence what they design at work ?  How can we solve other peoples problems when we sometimes work around our own. I have often wondered about that.

There are people who are naturally creative and then there are people who are taught to be creative. One of the first exercises I was given at the undergrad design school I went to, was to draw the rear of an elephant. I could always draw well but if someone asked me draw an elephant, I would probably draw a side view. But envisioning an elephants backside was tough. It was about thinking in three dimension, that’s what architects do and my parents had chosen to send me to a school that was to make one out of me. Luckily architecture was not that tough, since I went to a modernist school based off of principals taught in Bauhaus, a bunch of it was about the play of straight lines and planes and there weren’t any more elephants to be drawn. The point here is that you can probably be really good at aping the masters of modernism but suck at drawing the elephants behind. One is a learnt process and the other one needs you to use your imagination. I think people who use their imaginations are better designers which brings me back to my first point about solving problems. To draw an elephants behind, I would have to move my focus from the side of the elephant which is how I saw it in my second grade spelling book and consciously move myself to the back of the big animal. The same thing applies to working on other peoples problems and hence designing. You just have to take your lazy ass out of that couch and imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, someone who is bothered by commercials in their TV shows, someone who doesn’t have a dog to pet, what would you do now in the other person’s shoes? That’s what designers do, look at other peoples problems and try to solve it from the other person’s perspective.

Having started my career in architecture, I now think I should have stuck to it. It is easier to take liberties with architectural spaces and pass off ambiguous spaces in the name of artistic license. Not so much with technology and software, I don’t think any users would appreciate smart ass art projects swimming around in their software when they are trying to organize their finances or buy plane tickets. Being a user experience designer and working in technology is a bigger pain in the ass than I thought. Technology is ingrained in our life and we use it to do practically everything, from paying bills to looking for restaurants to writing blogs like this since a lot of us don’t have hobbies anymore. The point is, being a late adopter incase of technology and trying to design for an increasingly advanced technologically savvy crew of users is tough. If it was up-to me, we would still be wearing a bunch of atrocious looking augmented reality helmets fighting imaginary predators and fancying ourselves to be the future of cyberspace. Cyberspace however looks very different now, it does involve total immersion and interaction but through social networks and mobile technology. Design has humanized technology contrary to my revolutionary futuristic cyborg predictions. The interesting thing about humanizing technology is that you can give people the power to not only interact with it but give them a whole system to work within. So designing technology actually is about solving a problem. For example, book your Zipcar over the internet, put in your location, find a parking lot close to your house, use your magnetic key card to open the car, use your mobile phone app to increase or decrease the number of hours of use and look for security numbers to open parking lots to return the car. The user uses multiple technologies here to solve a problem, which was to get from place A to B. By the end of it technology was used as a means to an end and not the other way round.

This brings me back to my point of people adapting to anything if it serves the purpose. Before the phones has the capacity to store numbers, people memorized phone numbers, calling someone meant knowing their phone number, watching TV meant, dealing with commercials, using a computer meant being tethered to a physical space. My concerns about being a good user experience designer with a track record of late adoptions in technology have been laid to rest. If I need to buy the latest and the greatest, I will buy it, till then I will make do with technology that works for me since being a designer shouldn’t involve changing my life, like being an actor shouldn’t mean living a role when the actor goes to bed or eats dinner with his family. My creative memories as a child are not about playing video games or the Wii, they are about drawing endless imaginary scenes with chalk on the cement floors of our house in Madras. They are about watching my brothers build stuff out of random containers, boxes, bottles, that my mother used to keep for us to play with after she had used up whatever was inside the bottle or the containers. Chalk, cement floors and random lids and containers kept us pretty involved and entertained, they were a means to an end. We learned to draw and build without using a computer, without any real toys and without any real fuss. I would like to think that designing for people is like that as well, its not about using the latest and the greatest, it about using the most appropriate, if you are given a project to design a toy that can teach a child to draw well, remember chalks and cement floors have their magic too. Technology does come first but only to the technologist, not to the designer and certainly not to the user.

I have been thinking a lot about idealism these past few months. Just checked on the definition for the same. It means the opposite of materialism and realism. Earlier in the year I was offered a job with a big ad agency in the city which I had turned down to work with a smaller firm doing cutting edge work. Turning down big money was easier than it sounds. I didn’t have to think twice. It is not tough to keep a decent standard of living in a small sum if one doesn’t have a lot of material needs. As time progresses, the need to create a practice that focuses on creating some kind of social change becomes more and more urgent. Is it charity I talk about? No. It is a realization that there needs to be shift in the type of thinking we are accustomed to. Why are academic institutions full of idealism and the real world is totally devoid of it ? Both the grad and undergrad schools I went to were very idealistic and liberal. My undergraduate school in Ahmedabad was particularly idealistic. It followed the open campus thinking where one doesn’t lock the campus and the general public and other forms of living creatures like dogs and birds and an occasional monkey is allowed into the studio. The environment is open, ripe for new ideas and change. Leaving an academic institution entails going back to where you started from. It is upto the student who is now a designer in this competitive world to figure out what they want to build and how they want to progress. As life takes over, so does material living. Idealism diminishes and realism takes over. Savings for a news house, college for kids, a new car, a new home theater console. Then life takes over, friends, family, society, standard of living.

The Essential Gandhi, a book by Louis Fischer lies on my bedside. I usually just open it once in a while and read a page or two. It doesn’t make sense to read that book in a sequence. That book is all about ‘I am feeling lucky today’ syndrome. Open a page, it may make your break your day. Gandhi didn’t really believe in possessing anything. He felt the need to treat his family, like he treated his employees or like his followers. He talks about his estrangement with his brother and how that mattered less to him that loosing sight of his cause. Gandhi was an extremist in a way. His idealism knew no bounds. He believed in non possession, non violence and celibacy. He was a practical and a strategic man though. He lived in an era of no social networking tools and yet he managed to mobilize and organize huge masses of people using tools like transistors, prayer meetings and total devotion to his cause. The point in question here is purpose. A human without a purpose is probably not much of a human at all.

I am somehow fascinated with the religion I was born in - Sikhism. It is an extremely practical religion and talks about living in Grahastha ashram ie living with a family, living with ones duty towards society but having a bigger purpose in life. It strikes a balance between Gandhi’s extreme idealism and the regular persons obligation to his family and society. So convert to Sikhism - No, but think hard about your purpose in the world.

Are you here to make sure people drink more Coca Cola because you created an exciting punchline for a campaign, get into more debt because you were onboard a credit card strategy team, buy more clothes because you created a fashionline, consume more because you want to sell more ? Stop working in advertising or stop doing business - No, but do your bit, give back, not as charity but as something which betters the existence of mankind - Create a system.

You like cricket, then figure out how kids playing cricket in the gullies of India can get broader opportunities to test out for a team. You like shoes, then see if you can develop a strategy that can shod children in poor nations when someone buys a pair of shoes. You like to travel, cook, eat, draw, try widening the scope, adding a system, a community and create a network of creative thinking. Think big, small, think about things you like and see if you can create a ecosystem of giving back. You might create successful businesses, you may fail - Who cares, till the time you did something you enjoyed and tied more lives to it and developed something. Stop being grown up all the time, stop charging money for everything, stop trying to suck up to your boss, stop being comfortable. Then turning down jobs with fat pay checks wont be very difficult, feeling secure all the time won’t be tough too. You will have shed some of your possessions, gained some happiness, developed a vision and above all a purpose and might even lose some weight in the process. That would be something to write home about right ? So do it already.

My weekly call with my mother entails talking about family gossip amongst other things of lesser consequence.  During one such call, my mum brought up the topic of certain pictures that I had apparently posted on my facebook profile a long time back. Since I don’t really use facebook as anything other than a broadcasting tool for design and activism, I wasn’t sure about what my mother was getting at.

“What pictures?” I asked, confused.

She blurted out with some frustration, “People have been telling me how you have little sense about what needs to go up online and what doesn’t”.

“Do you mean Flickr? That’s where all my pictures are”.

“Can everyone see them?” she said.

“Yes”, I said.

“Whats on there?” she said.

I explained to her how I had uploaded pictures of my trip to India and Singapore and some other hikes and outings I had gone for, maybe a dinner party or two. She asked me about a certain picture with a beer in my hand. “Maybe”, I said. Having grown up in a military household with a full bar, my mum knows about my fondness for certain type of alcoholic drinks. She asked me to remove any picture from a dinner party or a gathering involving alcohol. “Why?” I asked. She said, people and family around her and abroad with access to the internet were telling her about my “frivolous” lifestyle and my stupidity regarding what should go online and what shouldn’t.

For the people who know me, the fact that my work is my life is no secret. I work 9 to 6 at a day job and come back home and work again on my personal projects. The Gujarati woman who threads my eyebrows once in a while, tells me about how I need to work a lot on looking better. Probably a facial would help, some earrings and conditioner for my hair. She pleads looking as me, as I walk in giving all the men in the parlor a complex about their body hair.

Am I an anti-clubbing, anti-boozing, anti-mini skirt wearing conservative freak that I feel offended being labeled one?  No I am not but I do mind being perceived as someone I am not. I am a donut eating couch potato not a homecoming queen. I would love to party, look sexy and drink sweet intoxicating drinks all day long. But the truth of the matter is, that I am lazy as hell when it comes to things like this. I prefer bad TV to a night out at a club. I prefer jeans to a short skirt even on a sweltering day, I prefer not having a hobby and staying home to work on a brainwave. Yes, I am a nerd. My digital sexiness is doing me no good.  The times I was slogging at building a community garden in the Bronx, conservative factions of my family were formulating ideas about my life in the US. By the end of it, it was all about the projected image. My digital life seems to have developed into my alter ego. Along with a picture or two of my times when I let my hair down, I have tonnes of pictures of my work up there. I haven’t seen a single person call my mum and say - that IPhone application that lets people use it as a remote control looks pretty cool. You do indeed have a clever daughter instead of - your daughter is a dimwit putting all those pictures up with that beer can in her hand with that white boy standing next to her.

This labor day weekend, I have no travel plans. The plan is to lock up a big section of my Flickr account with no access to family members and friends who are not in my immediate circle or don’t belong to the grad school I went to. But as everything else, sharing my life has its limits to a point where I start getting perceived as someone I am not. People share their lives not because they are stupid or immature but because they are trusting and have nothing to hide. Its disappointing that some people perceive honesty and transparency as immaturity. I guess bothering my mother about my so called frivolous life in the US seemed pretty mature.

Recent introspection have made me look at my journey as a designer in a more objective fashion. I interned exactly 10 years ago at a small furniture design firm in Bangalore, worked as an exhibition designer at NID and and an interactive exhibition firm in Delhi thereafter. Did my masters at a trans-disciplinary, artist meets scientist school in New York. Worked at a 500 people architecture firm, followed by a 35 people graphic design firm followed by a 4 people Industrial design firm. What does that say about me as a person and a designer ? Probably that, I could be anything but bored. As if, having covered almost all design disciplines offered at any decent design school were not enough, I recently got a reassuringly positive call from a design strategy firm.

My mom, referring to me recently, said - a rolling stone gathers no moss. I always thought that this was a positive reference since moss is not a nice thing to have on oneself anyways. She doesn’t agree with my interpretation of the saying. Since calling myself a jack of all design trades was becoming cumbersome, I decided to name myself after one of my favorite shows -The Mentalist’. I am calling myself -  The Generalist.

I had started to feel a bit of despair recently regarding my situation as a generalist since it just didnt seem to be doing me any good. Its difficult to be good at photoshop, solidworks, flash, autocad, xhtml, etc all the time. The jobs that involve annoying meetings and ditsy project managers are even worse. Overall, I am dispensable everywhere I work because there is always a specialist who can do my job better, clean up the pixels, get the right curve, come up with better functionality or sometimes just show up on time to a meeting. The anxiety had been slowly increasing leading to sleepless nights dispelled by shots of vodka (no kidding).

This morning Simrit Brar, who I interviewed for my design blog - designwala, recently sent me a link on an article about Parsons School of Design opening the first transdisciplinary design program in the US. The ridiculous sounding program actually lifted my spirits. Here is a reputed design school starting this program because it believes that people can be more than just mere web designers, or architects or some other form of idiotic designer. They can be (drumroll), you guessed it - Generalists. I am yet to do a project that explores all facets of being a kind of designer who has a foot into everything but I am curious to see what could come out of it. Designwala is a step closer to understanding what that could be. For now the dispair has ebbed and has been replaced by a small glimmer of hope. Hope of being able to atleast think about making a dent through design, in what seems like a hopeless infrastructure and workings of an old clunky machine called India. Still in the phase of thinking of what these next steps could be. More on this soon.

The AFHny Studio team won the NYCDOT competition we applied for. It is a cash price of $5000 that goes into building our installation. The whole submission application can be seen here.  I have never really won a competition so the next steps will surely be interesting to watch. Other than that Designwala, my blog on design thinking in India will sport a three to five part series on designers as changemakers. Hopefully the blog will pick up as the viewers see where it is headed and what it communicates.

The past month has seen me struggle in order to to find my next creative home. The days are packed with interviews, sometimes two in a day. Talking with Rick today made me realise, how I have always gone after what I wanted with very few exceptions, coming to NYC, working at places I have worked at, everything came about because I wanted to be a part of it. Now I struggle with the next steps. I thought it was going to be communications for non profits. Now I am not so sure. Going to all the offices, I have started to distinguish spaces, I like design shops that look like they are in the process of creation, lots of drawings, models, tools everywhere seems to inspire confidence in me. Overly designed clean spaces, quiet offices make me wary.

Ultimately it comes down to the creative process. If I can travel, brainstorm, create spaces, design interfaces, edit video, take pictures, sketch a lot, drink a bunch of coffee, sit in sunny cafes and have a team of people who challenge me without pissing me off, I would be happy. I like work in process. Thats also the title of Ricks latest film. I want to steal it for my company name.

Interviewing Shweta for Designwala made me realize where I stood. She talked about how architects (in India) are not into socially responsible projects but would rather be involved in art and fashion. I beleive it is not because they are selfish, its because an artist or designer will do anything that gives him/her enough freedom to play around with and the government controlled bureaucratic urban development schemes are as mundane and slow as lazy siesta afternoons in a the heat of India. That is making me reassess my priorities and what I want to do with my life.

Other than the lessons in patience and resilience I have learnt from the process of job hunting, I hope that thanksgiving time brings with it some good news - a creative place to be for the next year. Till then - Maula yeh bata, yeh zindagi hai kya.