Evolve or die
You might or might not be familiar with the actress and comedian Lily Tomlin. To the many she’s an idol, to me she’s a superhero. More often than not lately the image of her dressed in a muscle t-shirt expressing the words ‘evolve or die’ has come to mind a lot, since I started looking for my next challenge in my career and discovering the market had somewhat imploded on itself with 100s of designers applying for one role. One role will not employ them all. Lily flashes in my mind wearing her tee, arms on her hips in a power stance. I’ve thought about how much I and the industry has evolved since I’ve been in it. My first design job was way back in 2006! I was a fresh out of uni graphic designer working on campaigns for The Green Party and something called The Green Awards. I worked in advertising for a number of years as an art director / designer. Realising then that I wanted to focus on my craft, contrary to the meme, graphic design is actually my passion. I followed that thread and focused on more design led studios. Then boom, there was the 2008 recession. I was lucky enough, very lucky to have not been made redundant along with so many of my colleagues. Instead I made myself indispensable by learning to craft for digital.
It was the early days back then, designing interactions using flash. Flashy then at least. I continued in advertising for a while working on campaign microsites for the likes of Lexus, TalkTalk, Argos, Carphone warehouse, Princes Trust and Vertu (the incredibly expensive phone costing a shivering £30k). Designers had and have transferable skills, employing different tactics to various audiences. We understood people and we understood our clients' customers. Having a range of insights across markets was very beneficial. We could see potential gaps, cross brand collaborations and sometimes a big gaping hole for potential.
These were the days when a lot of ecommerce was littered with banner ads, also using flash.
Enter the age of distraction, a precursor to the age of ADHD. Being traditionally trained I was an advocate for the clean page. For readability. For space devoid of distraction. I actually liked to think about the thing I was reading, let my grey cells chew on the content and spit out conversation in response. The noise made that challenging. A concern was starting to echo in society about the loss of creativity. Of deep thinking. I started to talk about this from a psychological perspective after doing a masters on the subject. I understood how our brains stored information, how we learned from our experiences and how creativity brewed on a level below the conscious. I pivoted again and found myself in a relatively new field called service design. Understanding how someone solves a real life problem, what they do, think, feel when they’re trying to do it and how tech might support them along that journey.
Maps. I loved maps. Even at school I thought about being a cartographer but here I was creating journey maps, funnels and experience maps. I was learning on the job and adding my own insights from my past experiences. While I was developing, so was the industry. We were both testing and learning. Enter the start up. Someone with a cracking idea that needed investment and an energetic designer to get things off the ground while having a stake in the company to boot. Cool. Designing at speed, prioritising features, developing brands and refining what it meant to work in a cross functional squad as touted by the likes of Spotify at the time. Here was something new again. User acquisition, retention, resurrection, subscription models. The list goes on and again this was all being developed as we went.
Back to Lily Tomlin and evolve or die, life, industry, roles, society et al is constantly evolving. New tech is evolving faster than I can make a cup of tea. I’ve played with VR, AR, XR, AI and data. I’ve designed for mobile, large screen, TV, tablet, web and outdoor, connected devices and smart buildings. As it is now this is not how it will be in a couple of years. To expect the same is to what Lily suggests as ‘die’. Lily was advocating for the LGBTQ community in the mid 80’s with her tee. As stated by The Hollywood Reporter ‘she was hiding nothing.’ She had guts and gumption. There was no cookie cutter way to deal with the challenge coming out that worked for everyone in their own context. Just like there is no cut and paste designer that should or even wants to work one industry in one vain of context. When designers go to uni do you think they are going to study growth in fin-tech? No, they learn the fundamentals, the rules then evolve through experience. What you get is a creative mind willing to learn and fail, learn and sail. If we do one thing to grow each fin-tech product out there then you’re looking at a very mono solution that speaks to dilution. I’ll put money on a start-up coming in to disrupt that s*$t.
No one should expect that this window of time we see ourselves in now is how it’s going to be going forward. God did not press a pause button on reality or time. Nor the simulation if that’s your bag and if it does then maybe the matrix will fall down and we’ll find ourselves somewhere else entirely. Go with Lily, evolve or die. Learn something, take a risk, be reflective, poke some proverbial bears. Maybe. Don’t pigeon hole a designer, we weren’t trained for that and if things have gotten a bit stagnant, think Lily.
