Design and emotion

(enthusiastic music) - All right, tell me if this sounds familiar to you: As a designer, you bring people into environments like this, in the environments that we work in, our studios. And you always get the same question: "What do you do here?" You know, it's that question that we often get from our parents: "What do you do?" For a good long time, the way that I answered that, as a designer I would say, "I combine images and text in interesting and beautiful ways to communicate a message." But if you think about it, that definition's incredibly short-sighted, isn't it? I mean, why did I feel the need to add the "beautiful and interesting ways" part to that? I think subconsciously I was trying to add value to what would otherwise just be the communication of information. If you think about it, though, our goal as a designer isn't to communicate, it's to incite an action. And information doesn't incite action, emotion does. So, we're not really communicators, are we? We're empaths. You know, and empath is just someone who understands the emotions of somebody so well that they feel them themselves. And if you think about it as a goal, from a design standpoint, that's really what we're attempting to achieve. To understand an audience so well that we know what moves them, what will incite action, and that's really the primary purpose of a designer. It's to create an emotional connection with an audience member. To understand the human condition in such a way that we can translate information into emotion, and incite an action out of that, and that purpose in incredibly powerful. And we shouldn't take it for granted, and we certainly shouldn't soft-sell it in the context that we define what it is that we do and who we are. So the next time somebody asks you, "What do you do for a living?", don't sell yourself short, and just say that you're a communicator. Tell them you're an empath. Be truthful and then back it up with the work that you do. (enthusiastic music)