Design was making me depressed. I brought it up to Steve that the more I learned about how to see the world through the lens of the designer, the more energy was getting sucked out of me. Everything around me needed to be fixed, everything around me could be better, everything undesigned needed our help, and there was too much of it. This feeling, he called, was the “curse of the designer”.

We learned to ask the right questions and identify the problems of the world. Not only that, we were taught how to create the solutions. All of these problems in the world could be solved, given the right resources and energy. But without the lens of the designer, I would not know this. I would accept the world as given to me, with out care, a c’est-la-vie-attitude. Believing it’s fine the way it is, this is how it will always be, and that ignorance was bliss. The volume of problems is daunting and to know the solution overwhelmed by the inability to fix it, causes anxiety and frustration. This feeling of helplessness from the seemingly insurmountable problems is the curse. Or so I felt.

Steve pointed out that it’s not a bad place to be. Designers take joy in stepping into a vehicle and tearing apart the details and analyzing how things could be better. We take pride in the ability to empathize with users and poke holes in software interactions. We outwardly express out dissatisfaction with the world, that does not meet our high standards. It’s the first step in the role of a designer , to critique the culture, identify places in the built environment that should be changed and propose a solution. The “curse of the designer” is the sacrifice we make to see the world like no one else. We know what’s broken and why it’s broken, but not only that we know how to fix it, how to make it better. There lies the optimism. Designers are the leaders of progress and it’s our duty to embrace the curse and make the world a little bit better.