The best thing...

In a blog I wrote a few years ago, for which I now realize I had prophetically chose a quote from B.F. Skinner to lead the text, I talked about what I learned from years of freelance work with clients:

"Over the years, doing freelance work for a number of clients, I came to learn one very important fact about working toward an outcome with others: People don’t want the best thing, they want their thing, and they want their thing to somehow be the best thing. So, if I am working toward giving my client the best thing I have to remember that they want their thing, the thing they’re asking for, no matter how far from ideal that thing is. I have to give them the thing they ask for, even when I know it may be bad for their business and will not produce the best outcome. When I try to give them the best thing, not my opinion of the best thing, but a researched and developed product designed to yield the best result, I find they are dissatisfied for one fundamental reason — they asked for A and I gave them Z. It is a simple equation to follow for working with a client who is paying you, because, ultimately, they are responsible for their business. There is no shared responsibility and they are not seeking a consensus on the result."

In the readings, the emphasis on how a designer learns to make best use of their creative talents to deliver work for others is a concept that can be difficult for some. Like I say in the quote above, there is a presumption that we as designers are being hired to be "creative," when, in reality, we are being hired to "create." We are not being hired to deliver our vision, we are hired to use our creativity to bring the client's vision to life. Even and especially when we are certain our creative ideas are in the client's best interest, it is important to make sure we are using our artistic abilities and the design and development tools at our disposal to deliver the outcome the client is looking for.

We learn when it's time to be an artist, and when it's time to make our artistic abilities work for us and for others. If possible, it is best to have a personal outlet for one's own creativity aside from the design work we do for clients. In my case, I had many outlets for my creative and artistic ideas that were for my own projects. This made it very easy to do all kinds of freelance design work. While my fellow designers languished and bristled at doing any work that did not allow for them to express themselves, I expressed everything I needed to in my own products and did the work my clients were asking for. I was also free to apply only the "design" that was needed, which, of course, led to much more effective work, as champing at the bit to unleash our creativity can often lead to a lot of very nouveau riche, indulgent and amateurish design.

The audience analysis for ID is centered on the learner and using instruction to improve performance. This makes it all the more important to make sure we are not centered on indulging our creative appetites, but are using our abilities and the tools to deliver effective learning outcomes.