Artists have a focus to their work. The freedom and limited constraints, forces them to look internally and search for a meaning to infuse into their creation. With less outside-constraints comes a need to self-focus. In a zen-like state, the focus comes from within.

Unlike design, they don’t have to consider the market, the audience, manufacturability, ergonomics, etc. So they define their artwork for themselves. This narrowing and internal search is where the creativity explodes into brilliance.

Designers on the other hand, we get complacent. We’re so used to outside directives, we’re so used to a range of outside considerations to incorporate in our designwork, that we create formulas and processes to make sense of it all. The unrealized consequence is that we start to seek inspiration from out there as well. We’re so used to seeking answers out there that we don’t look in here (imagine me pointing outward and then at my own chest). We make “image boards” with products that already exist, we present to the executives with justifications to appease them, and we confidently send market-defined designs. We do this because it succeeds, but it’s not the most creative.

The shoe-making undergrad class at the renowned School of the Art Institute of Chicago broke me out of this design-world cocoon and taught me to search within for answers to design problems.

I was Naive to think we can design anything (without knowing and learning more)
Shoes. It’s a product. I got a degree in design. I can certainly design shoes… right? Erick Geer Wilcox crafts shoes by hand. He taught the course and knows everything there is to know about shoe-making. (check out his blog here). He had equipment after equipment that I’ve never seen before, specifically for this shoe-making art. They didn’t have these tools in the ID woodshop. With my lack of experience with the 3-D sewing machine, skiving leather, and the lack of knowledge of analyzing a hide of leather, my shoe, came out like crap. I kept the ugliness to remind myself to respect every field of creative study.

I was Mirroring External Creativity
At the time of the class I was pretty excited about the Smart car coming out and so I slapped it on my image board and designed some footwear based on that. Designers do this all of the time. The other students in the class? The other artists? Their designs were inspired by taxadermy, historical criminals, poverty in the Phillipines, and human flesh. My inspiration, the Smart Car. Their inspiration, Taxadermy!? Human Flesh!? I was shocked and delighted. It’s like someone punched me in the face with a big creative tack hammer wrapped in dead flesh. What I thought was absurd was quite normal in the art school. I had become complacent and only used design to inspire design. This limited my creativity.

I wasn’t Internalizing the World
I was only consuming design. In my blind love for the profession I was reading design, drawing design, watching design. To design for the world I thought it was important to learn about the world from the perspective of design. I was wrong. Merely understanding the world is not enough to develop creative solutions to the problems. I had to internalize it, just as artists do. I had to store it all in at the core and see what emerged, then use that as the fuel for the design. This led me to new inspirations from the entire world, from galleries and underground art scenes, from etymology to poetry, from thinking to doing. To be creative is to internalize the world.

Art and design are different fields, but at the core lies the marrows of creativity from which my design life was saved. The artists showed me what true creativity was and I vow to never forget again. It’s an everyday practice that takes me to the absurd and to the appropriate back again and again, for the very first time.