In Defense of Design Rock Stars
There’s a bit of a backlash against what are called “rock stars” in the design profession (although I suppose every profession has its well-known practitioners.) When I said last year in my keynote at Interaction 09 that the role of any professional organization is to make its practitioners into stars, people groaned, saying we didn’t need more rock stars. Jeff Howard has even suggested (“Rock Stars Need Not Apply”) that the rock star stance is anathema to doing service design.
I’m in favor of more design rock stars, not less, for three reasons. The first reason is that rock stars make themselves indispensable to organizations, and are thus influential, well-paid, and highly valued. They are, to use Seth Godin’s term, linchpins for the organization. No one is going to outsource Jonathan Ive.
The second reason is that design rock stars can do things others cannot because of their reputation. Organizations are willing to take more risks with them. Phillipe Starck has (seemingly) no trouble selling ideas that would get me laughed out of the room. What cannot be overcome by reason can be subverted with glamor, wrote Bruce Sterling in Shaping Things. “Being designery is what one does, as a practical measure, in order to overcome the reactionary clinging to the installed base of malformed objects that maul and affront the customer.” The giants of the design world all knew this. Raymond Loewy filled his water coolers with martinis and played up his dashing Frenchman image, getting himself on the cover of Time. Henry Dreyfuss had brown suits made so that he would stand out from the blue and grey ones in the room. Employing a reality distortion field can be extremely useful design tool to get organizations to move outside their comfort zone.
The third reason is that for the most part, professions move forward and gain prominence through the work of individuals, not professional organizations. My friend Tom Alison pointed this out best on the old UX Blog (now gone) when he said, “If you look at anybody who’s made an impact in the industry, take a close look at what they’re like: eccentric, self-aggrandizing individuals who attract attention to their cause because they are in love with themselves and love being heard. And they also sometimes happen to be geniuses.” His examples: Richard Saul Wurman, Jakob Nielsen, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. It’s hard to argue.
How do you become a rock star? Well, that’s the tricky part. You have to know a lot about the work you do, be able to articulate and sell that work to clients and the world at large, and thus produce a body of work that attracts attention. It’s a daunting task. But one that I hope many designers strive for, because ultimately it’s good for them as individuals, for designers, and for the design profession as a whole.
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9 Comments
I think you’re talking at the wrong level. The role of a professional organization is to support practitioners of the craft working effectively as professionals.
The current shape of the field is that being treated as a skilled expert in a valued craft — in short, being treated as a professional — is rare. You have to be a “rock star” to just get treated like a professional. So your examples of rock-star-ism are adaptations to a failure in the industry.
In that environment, I agree that rock-star-ism is a valid career technique for a designer. As the only man in my organization to either wear a necktie or have hair below my collar, much less both, I’m no one to throw stones at designers cultivating a little deliberate eccentricity as a coping mechanism.
But that’s not a solution for the field. What we need is to be regarded as professionals routinely, without needing to play the rock star game. And I worry that too much rock-star-ism is detrimental to that project.
Of relevance:
“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
We seem to have arrived again at the argument of what is important in design: the designer’s vision or supporting evidence in the form of data or user research, and as we all have heard before, there is a middle ground.
I agree that (some) rock stars provide value to companies and to the profession. I think the same is true even in mature professions–there are rock star physicians, lawyers, preachers, and so forth. The problems arise when people take rock star status as an excuse to be arrogant jerks. Rock stars can still be gracious and effective collaborators, and have their star status make such behaviors seem worthy of emulation.
I’ve been questioning the value of the rock star ethos for a few years now. The rock star is a convenient package for a number of desirable traits but I believe it carries with it excess baggage that has the potential to cause more harm than good.
The first is the Matthew effect, that attention begets attention, which is a natural phenomenon and can occur for any number of reasons. It enables people like Philippe Starck to saunter into a board room and successfully pitch something that only a few other people like him could do. But as an owner of a few Starck pieces, I can vouch that it does not mean those somethings are necessarily going to be any good. Despite that, there is a finite number of board rooms, so every successful Starck pitch means one less non-Starck object gets produced.
Getting a job with Apple, Alessi or Adaptive Path is a public-facing vote of confidence cast by a small group of people. In this regard it is roughly equivalent to graduating from Art Center, RISD, New School or whatever. Or winning an award. It’s credentialism, and it only says that you managed to convince certain responsible individuals of your merits, not necessarily that you actually did anything (even though you probably did, but it is important to recognize that can’t be taken for granted). And since attention begets attention, such laurels are extremely handy for catapulting forward your career, just as prestigious education and honours lend themselves to prestigious employment and deals.
A peculiar condition of all this attention is the expert trap. As a rock star, people look to you for answers, and at all times you have to be ready with one. Anything, as long as it sounds plausible. To admit ignorance, or even to hint at it, threatens to burst your bubble of expert credibility and seriously endanger your position.
We have a strong mythology of the lone hero swooping in to save the day against impossible odds, often to his own great sacrifice. Luckily the sacrifice of the contemporary hero-martyr typically only takes the form of lost sleep and a Red Bull hangover, but it can be construed as a mutant form of individualism. The prevailing attitude is “leave everything to me”, whether or not you could realistically succeed on your own. Taking on such liabilities is extremely stressful. It is also particularly confusing because effective creative work entails understanding, and understanding is a private activity.
There are archetypes who accept the private nature of their work but understand its role in society. Consider the master craftsman, whose livelihood and indeed whose life is about creating useful objects for ordinary people, that is to say non-craftsmen. Closer still to the rock star is the virtuoso performer, who does so to enrich the lives of her audience. Genuine virtuosi only perform, however. A rock star’s life is a performance.
A rock star is actually kind of a miserable creature. A common thread among all but a handful of rock stars is that they don’t own their own success. While they indeed enjoy no shortage of creature comforts, they principally exist to line the pockets of others. They are sharecroppers, courtiers, employees.
Rock stars are also naturally insular, arguably antisocial. They can’t operate in regular society. They couldn’t so much as go grocery shopping without being harassed by fans (of course the UX equivalent would be to get mobbed at IxD or SXSW or something). As such they only bother to consort with their own kind, their discourse inadvertently degrading into an echo chamber of mutual congratulation. For a business sector with a uniquely voracious appetite for diverse ideas, this is tantamount to choking.
There are perfectly viable alternative archetypes to the rock star, like the master craftsperson or the virtuoso performer. These people are respected but they are not adulated. They can walk down the street without an entourage. They integrate with society, rather than ride in a litter on top of it — they have friends rather than fans. Most importantly, they perform to be substantively useful to the people around them, not to masturbate their egos.
I like your post. I agree with some of what you say, but I have these problems with it.
One: “Design Rockstars” also reinforce the snobby, exclusive, and self-important image that can make acceptance of design and UX in an older or more conservative organizations impossible. Plenty of organizations that desperately need design are suspicious and skeptical of people that are too loud about their opinions, and too confident in their own solutions.
Two: I would argue that (most of the time) it’s better to develop a sense of responsibility for design throughout an organization than it is to encourage people to think that you are a “design messiah” so that you can snow them over with your coolness. It might help you get your way as a designer more often, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be the right decision. I present you with an uncomfortable concept: sometimes the right decision for a product is NOT the first choice of the designer. Sometimes the developers know best.
Three: “eccentric, self-aggrandizing individuals who attract attention to their cause because they are in love with themselves and love being heard” are irritating, frustrating individuals to work with. My experience has shown me that groups of non-geniuses that are happy working together and like their product will just about always create better products than any group of combative, self-involved, attention whores, even if they’re geniuses. In 2 1/2 years at Microsoft this was reinforced just about weekly.
With very few exceptions products and services are made by teams, comprised of many people across several disciplines. Individual rock star designers can contribute vision and great thinking, but they (usually) can’t actually make anything. To grossly over-simplify (and potentially misrepresent) Bruce Sterling, Design that never gets made is Science Fiction. Even if you’re using your significant influence to gain acceptance of your conceptual design, if you don’t work with a team to get it built you’re just doing some very expensive daydreaming.
Shouldn’t even need to be defended. What you say is exactly right. In particular, design rock stars, because of their reputation, get clients to agree to “risky” (i.e. bold, pushing-the-envelope) material, and to new and higher standards. In turn, this benefits all designers and all of design.
I wonder if readers are getting hung up on the term “rock star”. Instead of projecting negative characteristics we’ve learned from VH1 Behind The Music (ego, arrogance, pre-madonna, etc), think of the design “rock star” as a fearless leader who has earned the respect and influence needed to drive projects and ideas of all types. In my experience these “stars” don’t arrive at this status by being arrogant or eccentric but by having the kind of confidence, awareness, dedication and love for their craft that nurtures personal and professional growth. We definitely need more of these people in design and everywhere else.
To extend Shawn Collin’s idea, perhaps you should draw a distinction between rocks stars in order to help clarify.
Jonathan Ive is portrayed in Objectified (http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/) as (for the most part) humble. In the film, he talks a great deal about the minutiae of product design detailing (and literally saying) how he and his team spend a great deal of time focusing on tooling, rather than the the product itself, in order to achieve results like minimizing material waste.
On the other hand, Peter Arnell, is a well known designer who has huge clients and makes a lot of money, but gosh he just seems like such an asshole. (http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/10001438/peter-arnell-pepsi-logo-is-bullshit-tropicana-is-not-my-brand-so-what-the-hell/)
It’s the difference between Bono and…I don’t know…Jimi Hendrix. Both rock stars but one has used his influence for good on a global geopolitical scale and other died of a drug overdose. Although I prefer Jimi’s music.
Someone on Jeff Howard’s blog post said it best when he noted there was a difference between a DIVA (a pain in the ass) and a star. You can be a star without being an a-hole. Starck vs. Ive is a good reference.