ALL ART BURNS

On the first day of one of my classes (“Human Experience in Design”), the instructor asked us to complete this sentence in 15 words or less:

“I want to be a designer because …”

He read aloud some of the answers people gave and he challenged us to answer the question every year and see how our answers changed during school and during our careers. I think this is a useful excercise no matter what your discipline, you should try answering this yourself and checking back every year.

In keeping with the original spirit, I’m going to keep my answer down to 15 words or less. I’m going to append five rules for acheiving the answer to my question and see how those change over time as well as the answer to the question.

I want to be a designer because I want to make things that people can use to improve their lives.

Five personal rules for acheiving that goal:

• Always remember that improving a person’s life is easy.
• Every project I work on should improve at least one person’s life, even if it simply entertains them.
• Never work on a product that a person will have to send to a landfill.
• Never attempt to convince someone to buy a product they do not actually need.
• Leave the world in a better place than it was in when I entered.

Technorati Tags: design, personal goals