Masking Complexity
When I think back at my time as a visual artist, I was always most interested in communicating complex ideas. My teachers were forever pushing me to express myself and find my artistic identity, but for me, art was about clarity of message. The best artists in my opinion always knew how to communicate a complex, or bizarre, idea such that the viewer understood. When I looked at pop art, surrealism, Bauhaus, I saw design even before I was aware of design. Art was about codifying a complex idea into a single image.
In hindsight, I was always more a visual communicator than I ever was a visual artist.
This was probably why I left art school to pursue art direction. Art provided me with a system in which to perfect simple, beautiful communication. It was a stepping stone to visual communication.
I was so drawn to visual communication, and its role in driving understanding and behaviour, that I decided to pursue advertising. I educated myself in this field and worked in it for almost as long. Advertising has its own confluence of complexity that has to be masked by simple and novel ideas. In my case these ideas came in the form of a visual concept, for a specific audience that solved an often complex business problem — on budget, on time, and within client expectations. These sorts of ideas are the lifeblood of the advertising world. Advertising may look easy, and sometimes overly simplistic, but it’s usually the most succinct expression of a very complex set of constraints and circumstances. It takes a special combination of dedicated, visionary individuals and circumstances to make a great piece of advertising real. I learned this, and I also learned what sacrifice often came in lieu of novel ideas in the advertising world, and this was often utility and return on investment. Unfortunately I believe this creates the conditions for a self-serving industry that awkwardly straddles the line between business and creativity. This is why I left advertising. I needed my work to have an actual, real world application and impact. I wanted to solve more meaningful problems.
I looked for meaning in social justice and nonprofit work, and I came across an idea that changed my life.
It was an idea, distilled into a single sanitary product, that had a multitude of positive implications for marginalized women. This idea was a micro-enterprise helping women set up micro manufacturing plants where they could learn to make biodegradable sanitary pads from an invasive local water plant, and sell these pads at an affordable cost to the surrounding community who would otherwise have no access. These small manufacturing plants were helping women escape sex work and abusive situations, helping girls miss less school because of their periods, and extracting an invasive water plant obstructing crucial waterways, all while having little to no environmental impact. Needless to say, I travelled across the world for this idea and ended up entrenching myself in the most complex problems I will ever experience. It’s difficult to put into words what this did for me as a human being. Suddenly, I had direct experience with the social, political problems I was so drawn to solving. I was entrenched in human-centered design.
What I did next was distill the complex impact of this micro-enterprise into a website experience, using only content that I had captured during my time in India. I masked the complexity of this culture, and positive impact with simple branding, copy and web design, all created by me. This introduced me to user-centered design.
After that, I decided to go back to school. Once again I was drawn to solve large and complex problems, but this time with an entirely new skill set as a designer and researcher. Inspired by my time with nonprofits locally and abroad, I decided to investigate the cause of poor donor retention at nonprofits in Canada. I was hit with the full force of this sector-wide problem and used research and Lean methods to mask its complexity. I figured out how each problem I encountered through research was related to poor donor retention, and the relationships between those problems. At the end of my research and investigation I was able to distill each of these problems — their relationships with one another and with poor donor retention — into a single diagram.
It’s funny to look back on my career and realize that I’ve always sought to transverse complex systems and ideas with simple ones. I was always striving to create an experience in which someone could navigate a complex system or idea without effort.
This has all led me to my current passion — helping startups navigate the complexity of finding problem solution fit, and/or product market fit with their products using Lean methods, and masking the complexity of business development with design thinking.
