by Indu Aishwerya Anand

Indu Aishwerya Anand writes about designing 'herself' applying her first principles of design in her career as a 'commissioner'.

In the past few months, I have given design much thought. 

I have been sitting with the many pieces of my life, puzzling over them with a precariously-held patience that is not unexpected of times when there's not a lot else one can do - the kind of patience that is often mistaken for fortitude. I’m mulling over the pieces of my life, and contemplating making many difficult and some irrevocable decisions - what to keep, what to let go, and what to add. In short, I am designing me (or if you’re a pedant, redesigning me). And in order to bring some method to the madness, I’m taking on the role of that evil creature all providers of design love to hate, the client, or the 'commissioner'. 

I am, now, my own client. 

As that, I am attempting to apply to this process some of the same set of 'first principles' of procurement, purchase, commissioning, whatever you will, of design that I have evolved and applied in my nearly twenty-five-year long career as a corporate and marketing communications practitioner. Most of these years have been in-house, that is on the 'buy' side - with a large American financial services conglomerate, one of the world’s top five aerospace, defence and security companies, and a software services company focused on the movers and shakers of the US capital markets. 

In these brand custodian roles, my primary job has been to rally all forces and sources to protect, preserve, and promote the cause of the enterprise, to continuously design and re-design the brand. 

This time around, that brand, that enterprise, is me. 

As someone with direct experience of the pain, the panic, and the privilege of leading both relatively straightforward brochureware jobs (although I did almost lose my job over the Oxford comma) as well as large, expensive, and dramatic projects in environment branding, I am testing upon myself a few of these 'first principles' that I have applied in the conventional space, at work, where I, the buyer, and the designer have met, to deliberate, and design, create and make, solve and showcase, and change. 

My first 'first principle' is Honesty. For corporations like the ones I have worked for, design is one of a large toolset of solutions that can be tried and tested toward a solution. But like they say, the first step is the hardest - the honest, and often brutal, acknowledgement, and then acceptance, that something is broken or at the very least, not functioning.  For instance, an engineering company I worked with, worried about its dwindling apprentice pipeline, discovered that its visual brand lacked appeal amongst this audience – the brand needed to compete not with other stodgy, ‘metallic’ industrial companies but the likes of Apple. This part is often slow and arduous and fractious, replete with false starts and quick fixes, and a few conveniently placed lies and half-truths here and there.  It is at this stage that leadership must rise above Management. 

A determination that design, or redesign, be a route to a solution requires courage, and most managements are retained for their predilection for predictability and consistency, and sometimes a pass-mark level of creativity. Design solutions - be it a new logo, or a complete overhaul of the branding system, fresh photography, product, packaging or space design - are inherently unsafe. Buyers of these services come under immense scrutiny, in some cases even suspicion, in seeking design-driven solutions, and it must be the shared burden of the design provider to support the buyer in this journey. However, as much as design solutions are difficult to defend, they are a disruption that can deliver outcomes far beyond what is measurable, certainly beyond that quarter's results.

My second 'first principle' is actually more a caution, against using design as distraction. While organizations are not always humane, they are a gathering of humans, and human nature seeks the proverbial 'low hanging fruit'.  Design is that, still, and especially ornamentally-oriented design. One of the principal reasons for deploying design as a distraction is that these services are typically outsourced, and therefore require little or no internal inquiry, investigation, reflection, responsibility, and well, no immediate rolling of heads. Commissioning a design solution is hitting two birds with one stone - first, the management has acted, and second, it has handed off its problem to someone it can blame. In my journey, this is the one crevasse that design service providers are easy bait for, and very often, the reason that some clients never return with more business - because they get 'found out'.

Design, as we know, doesn’t 'disappear' fundamental faults, for instance, a problem with the quality and consistency of after sales service, but it has often been misused to defer the discovery of enterprise failures. 

My third 'first principle' is design's challenge to 'taste' or the ‘mera waala green’ syndrome. Once organizations overcome the utility of their intrinsic dishonesty, at least momentarily, and determine that design is not simply a distraction, comes decision-making, and the more pedestrian but no less pesky matter of taste. Each of us prides ourselves on our good taste, our personal aesthetic, and that pride, which is really contained superiority, is a problem for decision-making in design. This can be a major obstacle in obtaining the, well, green signal on milestones because the management may consider design solutions, their personal fiefdom, like a home interior decoration project. 

Buyers such as I often find ourselves brokering peace piece by piece with our managements, carefully managing fragile egos, fickle views, and vague shakes of the head.  It is at these crucial moments that the interminable debate about design as an investment versus design as an expense surfaces. As someone who has lived, survived and thrived through many of these moments of stuffy silence, my approach has been to allow ample time to decisionmakers to deliberate over the design options, both in the conference room and by the coffee machine.  The circle always completes itself at the buyer's desk.

Finally, regardless of whether these 'first principles' resonate with us all, or work for you, and me, the one principle that we must bring to every table, drafting or boardroom, is empathy, because without it the direction of design is bound to be wrong.  

And likewise as I design myself, it is empathy I try to summon and that has been the hardest to conjure. 

Illustration: Concept & execution by Namita Jain