This very pictogram was in the family bathroom when I was a kid. It’s a nice composition. There’s a balance between the weight of the type and the weight of the icon. But I remember staring at it for a good amount of time trying to work out what was going on.

So what’s going on here, exactly? Without the “SHAVERS ONLY” text, I can only guess. Is the guy Frankenstein (looks like a scar)? Is the rectangle a bandage? Is that his chin, because it’s a weird shape. Does he have train tracks across his face, or do the parallel lines represent facial hair? If it’s facial hair, why does the line meet his eyebrow and his nose‽

Wait a second! It also looks like the shape of an electrical plug, or the shaver itself. Hmm.

If that’s not confusing enough, it also slightly resembles an abstract El Lissitzky or Suprematist composition.

I just stumbled on this opinion of design at Carnegie Mellon. The Carnegie Mellon design department is one of the top design schools in the world, and the article was written by one of their ballsy design students, and published in the University’s student newspaper in 2007.

I’ll summarise the article crudely. Kristen Lukiewski feels that being educated in design at Carnegie Mellon is like entering a sausage machine. Into the machine goes the quirky, the creative, the uniquely-shaped; out of the machine comes smooth, even, indentical oblongs:

Our design program is touted as one of the best in the country, yet visits to design firms have revealed potential employers unimpressed with our work, and murmurs of “Oh, another Carnegie Mellon portfolio?” at interviews have shown the nature of the work students are churning out here: clean, efficient, and good, yes, but all the same.

Sounds familiar.

One of the biggest misconceptions of going to design school as an undergraduate is that you will do anything at all creative. After leaving Reading, I’ve slowly had to wean myself back to using anything decorative or illustrated in my design work. So it made me laugh to read this:

Sometimes, it’s okay for a part of a design to be decorative.

Yes… it’s OK to use decoration! Decoration is a contentious topic in design history. Walter Crane famously described the Art Nouveau movement as a “strange decorative disease”. The modern equivalent is perhaps the use of grunge typefaces on the web.

I think it’s more important to reject decoration than embrace it at undergraduate level. But it’s not really an issue of decoration. No real experimentation occurs at undergraduate level. Individuality and expression is definitely not encouraged. While I understand why this is, there is a saddening and dangerous aspect to this:

The rejection of individuality strips students of their passion for design, students slowly stop caring, and as peer expectation drops, so does motivation, and, in turn, production quality. Students dedicate more and more of their time to alternate classes and extracurriculars, where they want to learn the material.

Sadly, perhaps passion can only be rediscovered later on. Losing motivation seems dangerous though: how can we keep students motivated?

I empathise with the writer, having felt the same frustrations. But I now think that despite the homogenizing, and possibly damaging, side-effects of education, designers who exit the sausage machine will gradually take on their own unique shape.

And when they take on their unique shape they will then be able to add value to society and industry in a way that only genuinely confident, skilled, educated, and creative individuals can.

“Design is a game with rules,” said Otl Aicher, who did some truly innovative work with pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Creativity in design is about respecting rules, and, with enough confidence, breaking the rules in a way that works.

I have recently been thinking about things like success, motivation, and meaningfulness in work. Aristotle believed that service to society is the single definition of success:

All men seek one goal: success or happiness. The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical idea – a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends – wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust your means to that end.

Whether or not Aristotle’s view is correct, I think it aligns healthily with an unselfish view that is not totally divorced from the capitalist culture we are in. The thought led me to consider “service to society through design”. How can designers express themselves completely in service to society?

So when browsing some TED talks earlier, I was immediately drawn to watch William McDonough’s The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle, which is all about considering the full life-cycle of a product.

Cradle to cradle design concerns applying nature’s sustainable model to man-made things. At the end of a product’s life, it should be possible to either:

1. Return to industry technical materials which can be infinitely reused, or
2. Return organic, biological nutrients to the environment.

This issue is particularly relevant to the mobile phone industry, I think, where product turnover is rather high.

I know the issue is also horribly fashionable. But it’s a very important one. McDonough has a point, for as he says, something is definitely not quite right with a culture that sells toxic toy ducks to children. How on earth can that be justified?

He seems to know what he’s talking about, as McDonough is also designing seven new and entirely green cities in China.

Just a recap of what I’ve been up to:

• Mobile Design UK’s inaugural event was held on Wednesday 3rd December. (Expect a brief recap post soon.) We’re extremely happy with how it went and 25 people turned up to see presentations from Nokia, Trutap, Lastminute.com Labs, and Flirtomatic. Photos are on Flickr. The next event will be in February, so watch this space! Meanwhile, subscribe to the Mobile Design UK feed.
• RCA Open Day. I’ve been following the design interactions department at the RCA for a while. They do a lot of cool stuff and I’m really glad I went: the students are quite brilliant. Check out Nelly Ben and David Benque. It is always nice to meet interesting, creative, talented, passionate people. As well as being all these things, I found that everyone I spoke to was very friendly and approachable, and patiently answered my questions.

  As for the course itself: I absolutely love everything it stands for. Some of the projects students are working on are quite out there (see James Chamber’s “Blowout” project). The RCA wants to encourage “skeptical fascination with technology”, for students to “play a part in shaping a technological future”, to “have skills for making ideas tangible”, and to “think about implications as well as applications”. Fantastic, right?

  At the end of the day, though, I felt strongly that I want to stay within the industry and continue to work on great commercial products. So for now I am resisting the siren call of academia.