Fall is a magical time of the year. The light is golden. The farmers’ fields are golden. The leaves change colors, to warmer and richer and even golden hues. There is something going on within us that cause us to adjust our rhythms and outlook.

We might slow down a bit and probably become a bit more reflective, anticipating the greater changes that are on their way.

If we are farmers though, we get busier. It’s harvest time. All of our efforts for the previous many months are about to be paid off. It might be a good return or perhaps not. But we will likely get something and for that we are thankful. We want to be secured against the cold and fruitless months ahead and to be rewarded for the work we have put in. We acknowledge this in what used to be called Harvest Thanksgiving. Now, the urbanites that we are will have mostly lost our connection to where this holiday originated.

I grew up on a farm and loved the harvest Thanksgiving celebration. I loved how the church would be decorated with sheaves of grain and baskets of vegetables. Coloured leaves would grace the interior as well.

What was typically an austere and almost penitent environment would be transformed into a festive display of the bounty of the fields and gardens. It was wonderful.

I sometimes ask my design students what their crop would be, if we were to compare their work to that of farmers. What will they bring to market?

What they produce is ideas. The analogy to farming isn’t actually so farfetched. Both are based on a process with many incremental steps. Designers prepare themselves in many ways for their eventual harvest.

One may be the formal training they get in school. They learn how to use their minds in flexible and innovative ways. They learn the importance of preparation. They learn how to be analytical and reasonable when they need to be, and to be unreasonable and creative when they should be that as well. They learn how, like farmers, to direct their efforts at an eventual outcome.

Beyond or instead of school, experience will also show them the way and reinforce their lessons.

 

So what is the harvest Thanksgiving festival for designers?

I can’t speak for many of my colleagues, but in the world of furniture design, there are trade shows that typically act as the catalyst and schedule for new design work to be committed to and finally presented. They are a big deal, in a lot of ways and the excitement that they generate is palpable. They are a chance to see and be seen, to feel proud and accomplished. They celebrate the health of an industry and the many players in it. Sometimes, I’ve wondered if they make as much financial sense as the huge budgets suggest, and I know I’m not alone in that curiosity. But we seem to do them regardless. It may be because the needs they service go beyond the strictly mercantile. Celebrations remain important to us.

Other ways we celebrate our design ‘harvest’ is through media exposure and awards programs. The media features may be very ephemeral and the awards don’t usually translate into tangible increases in business, but they are a validation just the same.

Producing something marketable, and taking it to market is a huge part of our professional, productive and economic lives. Our culture runs on this, despite the claims that we are now post-industrial, post-agricultural or in a new world altogether. We can’t just have services. We need goods as well and we always will. They need to be produced and taken to market. We can even say that collectively, our lives depend on it. Whereas agriculture was once the most important and vital activity that we engaged in, now we have others of major importance as well.

I find it to be very gratifying that we, as designers, produce something. If we are the kind of designer that I am, our produce is products. These are based on the ideas we have generated, grown from those seeds, so to speak. They have been selected, nurtured, cultivated, weeded, fertilized and eventually harvested. While we may, within our various industries, celebrate our achievements, we lack a broader, public celebration of those accomplishments. Maybe, when we sit down to our turkey dinner, we ought to give thanks for all of the design efforts as well, along with our gratitude for the cranberries and mashed potatoes.

 

Paul Epp is an adjunct professor at OCAD University, Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design department.

I used to ask a fresh group of first year students to raise their hand if they considered themselves to be an outsider. Everyone would. Then I would suggest that they look around and realize that they were no longer outsiders, at least not within the environment of the classroom. If everyone is an outsider, then the new normal is ‘outsider’ and the description is no longer applicable. I also asked them to self-identify if they thought they were above average. Many (most) did, and I encouraged them to think that, but that’s another topic, however similar and problematic the math.

It’s usually not so comfortable to be an outsider. We all are social creatures, birds of a feather and all that. But the forces that foster inclusion often also foster exclusion. If you are different enough, you may end up on the outside, whether you want to be or not. This is natural and seems true of all animals.

Designers are a minority sub-species. They are odd enough to be often seen as not quite fitting in. They know that they don’t fully belong and then come to see themselves as outsiders. Of course, many others claim a similar status: the too tall and the too short, the extra-large and the diminutive, the shy and the manic and so on. It’s not that hard to feel either special or disadvantaged. In fact, the normal family (person) has been described as the one that you don’t know very well.

But studies support the student’s intuition. Creative people (like designers) usually have a high intelligence but that distinction doesn’t come without a cost. There is often a higher correlation to a variety of disorders as well, of which depression and anxiety are just two. Attention deficiency is common as well. Introversion, a common designer state, is not a disorder, but it can seem like one in our extroverted culture. And intelligence often comes as a mixed package: high distinction is some areas means a diminishment in others.

 

Amy Chua, the infamous author of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, went on to define the traits that characterise an orientation to accomplishment, defined by her as the Triple Package (and I paraphrase): arrogance, insecurity and discipline. That certainly fits designers. To be one at all requires a strong sense of superiority. We claim that our way of doing things is the best and we want our vision to prevail. And we actually believe that. If we didn’t we couldn’t keep doing what we do. And this is, ironically, coupled with a deep sense of insecurity. Designers are outsiders and that is, by definition, an anxious state. And then comes the discipline to keep working, even when others don’t believe in the value of what you are doing.

And a popular belief in the value of design is less than certain. Many non-designers will voice their appreciation of the creative efforts of others, but actually have only a nominal regard for the accomplishments of designers. This is often experienced as a reluctance to pay for design. However valuable it is, it’s not that valuable to them.

 

Perhaps there is an erroneous sense that what designers do is easy for them and therefore may be slightly unfair. And it can seem easy. A good designer’s mind will generate a seemingly effortless abundance of ideas: wheeling, twisting and performing a dizzying array of mental and creative gymnastics. But like all forms of accomplishment, these are only achieved once the time has been put in, the hours of hard work and frustration and self-doubt.

Designers typically don’t choose to be designers. Design chooses them. They design because it’s what they can do. They are typically not that well suited to other jobs. They don’t fit in elsewhere. Design was once described to me as a social offering, an expression of a desire by these outsiders to make friends.

Another question I used to ask my first-year students was why they had chosen to come to collegs. The typical answer was that they just wanted to make things. In some readings of Greek mythology, Prometheus is a god whose tragic efforts to improve human existence through technology are relentlessly punished. This makes it sound like the story of designers as outsiders is a very old one.

 

Paul Epp is a professor emeritus at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design department.

 

Every picture tells a story. So does every object. And we know that some have a more important or interesting story to tell than others do.

A lot of these stories are very personal. The objects we use take on a meaning that is a story that only we will know. I have a knife I use when I’m camping, that I’ve sharpened many times. I feel as though I’ve made an investment in it and I kind of treasure it. To someone else, it will only be knife, not so different than others. To me, it’s a reminder of many nights of cooking over a campfire. My marks are on it, the polish of use and care, and they carry a sentimental story for me.

Our homes are usually filled with things that are weighted with memories and which we are reluctant to part with. The toys our children played with, for instance. Or things we bought when we were first married and money was tight. Things we made in school. Trophies that we won. The candlesticks that helped us celebrate the important holidays.

Objects can gain a patina through use, like my often-sharpened knife. Handles become shiny, from the oil in our skin and the polish of many handlings. These sometimes represent an improvement and antique stores confirm the value of things that have been used and valued.

Most things will not take that path though. Garage sales testify to the fact that values can be very ephemeral. The stories of those objects tend to be very quiet. Thrift stores are even more poignant, especially those that are near where people tend to retire. The often-used things are merely old and worn, not now treasured and valuable as they evidently once were to someone else.

For many of the objects, the story is only personal. It doesn’t reach a broader audience, it doesn’t speak to others. For those objects in antique stores and especially those that are in museums, the story is much more accessible. These objects become representatives of cultural histories and values. They speak too and for all of us.

For designers, this is an interesting topic to reflect on. What makes something valuable? There are many routes to that objective, some of which are deliberate and some of which are happenstance and luck.

 

Brands do this, at their best. They tell us a broader message, often about what things cost and also about how well made they are, or how coveted they are, or if they are signifiers of leading edge knowledge.

Beauty can do this too. When objects are intrinsically lovely, we like them better.

When our objects serve us well, we value them more as well. The knife that is balanced and fits our hand well, for instance. That is also true of pens and cell phones. When our inanimate servants serve us well, we like them better.

But there is a whole other category of story telling that we don’t seem to have so much of but of which we can identify examples. For instance, Native Americans, and particularly those on the West Coast, had a material culture that was unusually rich in story-telling. This may have been, in part, because there wasn’t a written language to record stories. It may also have been an expression of deep skill and sensitivity. As a designer, it’s hard not to envy it. Many of those artefacts depicted or represented animals and those animals, in turn, represented values and stories. And these messages are widely known. Over time, these animals became highly stylized in their representations. It’s like a type of ‘short-hand’ was developed, and this became a tool for designers to use, which, in turn, bestowed value on what they made. The stories that are told go beyond the personal to the general – they are understood by everyone and become everyone’s stories. The overwhelming success of this approach is that other cultures (Western, European) have found these objects to be very visually satisfying as well. And this satisfaction has been enduring.

I’ve often wondered about the scarcity of this kind of value in the overwhelming majority of the objects that we have. This may be part of the price we pay (or don’t) for having inexpensive things that are impersonally machine made.

 

Paul Epp is a professor emeritus at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design Department.

When I was 19, I stumbled on the knowledge that there was an occupation called Design. This momentous discovery made me feel like I had won the lottery. Designing was something that I did instinctively, and if I could get paid for doing it, than I had found my life’s work. Even before I knew what it was officially called, I knew I had some talent for it. I’d been practicing since I was very young.

The circumstances of my youth were such that I spent a lot of time in church. The pews were hard and the sermons interminable. What’s a boy to do? I imagined the pulpit in a configuration that was more pleasing to my young mind and eye.

As a young adult proprietor of a store, I imagined jewellery and clothes that I couldn’t buy from my wholesalers. So I sourced materials, I sketched up, or mocked up ideas, I found small short-run shops, and then what I had imagined showed up in my store. I came to loath retail, but my reflections on the satisfactions that I found in the activities of designing and making stuck with me. Once I realized that this was a legitimate occupation, my life took a turn for the better.Then the pews and the light fixtures overhead benefited from my reconsiderations. And, once I was done with the interior, there was a whole parking lot of cars that could only be improved by my design (daydreaming) ideas. This got me though some hard times (the pews).

I don’t have the capacity as a writer to adequately describe the excitement that accompanied me to design school. I had gone to pre-secondary school in the northwest corner of Alberta and our curriculum wasn’t burdened with useless courses like art, so I felt myself to be at somewhat of a disadvantage. But

I was determined and very motivated. I felt like I was absorbing my instruction throughout my whole being; I practically vibrated with what I was learning.

Whereas I had always been somewhat aware of my surroundings and curious about the material world, I now knew who had designed what, who had taught whom, who had painted what, why things were made the way they were and all sorts of other useful things. Nothing would ever again look as it had before I learned to see things with my educated eyes. It was easy for me to imagine myself becoming a member of this privileged group.

 

My life was expanded exponentially. Nothing I looked at, touched, tasted, or even thought about would ever be the same. My horizons were, literally, expanded. With my fellow students, I visited other cities, like New York and Washington. I went to the great museums and stores. I started acquiring design-specific books and I read all the design magazines I could find. My life was transformed.

Looking back on this now, I’m struck by how fortunate I was, to discovery an activity that meant so much to me. I was suited to it and it was, by wonderful coincidence, suited to me. I’ve managed to make by living by doing what I loved. This living wasn’t always easy or particularly remunerative, but there were periods what things clicked like I had imagined that they would and I thrived in every way. I’m not rich or famous, but I feel like I am represented by a respectable body of work.

I have met and interacted with a very diverse set of characters, from the wise and generous to the mean and treacherous. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because of the diversity of activities that are associated with designing things, and making them, and getting them to market, I’ve had to learn a great deal about a very wide range of occupations and skills. And I have been enriched by all of them too.

Something I had not anticipated, as the young don’t think this far ahead, was how fresh the world of design remains for me to this day. I regard much of what gets published by the design press as often a bit silly, but so what? It’s wonderful that the young have the energy to try new things, however doubtful the conclusions might turn out to be. I’m happy to still be able to, and want to, cheer them on.

Paul Epp is a professor emeritus at OCAD University in Toronto, Ont., and former chair of its Industrial Design Department.

As I hang up my teaching hat, I’ve become reflective. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into being a teacher, and I’m left feeling that I’ve finally learned a few things about it. It has taken a while, and, like most learning, it didn’t come without its costs.

Maybe that’s the first and most important lesson about teaching: that which hurts, teaches. The original Latin sounds even better: Quod nocet docet.

I could probably just leave it at that and call this job done, but there are a few more points which I’ve found useful to keep in mind.

What gets counted, gets done.

I guess that’s why we bother to grade student work. If we don’t insist that it get done in a way that counts, it probably wouldn’t get done at all. Not only do people try to avoid pain, they actively seek out pleasure, even if this comes in the small doses of good marks. People respond to incentives.

Any interaction is training.

I’m not a fan of inflicting pain. I think that there is plenty enough of it lying around already, so I don’t need to deliberately add to its total. I prefer to reward achievement. It can be tempting to respond to bad behaviour, in a punitive way, but I’ve come to avoid that, if I can. I ignore it, if possible, and usually things sort themselves out. Of course, the most egregious examples do require a response and sometimes even an emphatic one, but we hope that those situations are scarce and they usually are.

Learning has occurred when behavior changes.

Until learning is demonstrated, it is only theory. We hope that our students learn but we can’t be sure until we can see its consequence through a change in behaviour. A lot of teaching consists of not only setting up situations that provide opportunities for learning, but also opportunities to demonstrate that a change in perception has actually taken place.

Design (and other forms of creativity) are a method, not a subject.

This method is employed in order to find original ideas that have value. The most useful and important skill is the ability to find many ideas, readily and diversely. Most of them will not be valuable, but the more that are found, the greater the likelihood is that a few of them will actually be worth keeping.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

That may, at first, seem like compromise. Maybe it is. As designers, most of us are perfectionists.

We really want to get it right.

And we can get so caught up in this that we neglect to pay attention to our diminishing resources, like time and energy, that we jeopardize reaching any conclusion at all. It is often more valuable to have something that is almost perfect, than nothing at all, however disappointing that might feel.

What we think we become.

So we ought to watch our words. To quote Henry Ford: ‘If you think you can do it, or you think you can’t do it, you’re right.’ Part of the job of teaching is to guard against the self-defeating messages that students often carry with them, and to replace these with more optimistic views.

The Dynamic Duo.

There is an important dynamic between seemingly divergent positions, with this duality typically described as that between self-control and self-expression, or Classical (rational) versus Romantic (emotional) values. It is a reflection of the differences between Left-brain and Right-brain activities. Successful design, and successful design students, must bridge this duality and arrive at a unified conclusion.

We are all different.

Now that’s pretty obvious, but we seem to require reminders anyway. I recall something I read a long time ago, about breaking horses: Be gentle with the timid, steady with the fractious, but lather the sulky ones like the blazes. Although students are mostly not like horses, this bit of advice has been useful to remember.

I’ll stop there, although I could go on for a while. When I first started teaching, I soon discovered, to my great surprise and huge benefit, that the activity of teaching was teaching me a lot too. I had to know what I was talking about in order to talk about it. I scrambled to learn and to stay at least a half-step ahead of the class. It wasn’t always easy but it was worth it. I like to think that we all benefitted.

Paul Epp is a professor emeritus at OCAD University, and former chair of its Industrial Design department.