Design is, among other things, a social skill: Finding a solution in reduction
2007 Solo Exhibit, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT

The one most fascinating and annoying challenge of design is the need to educate clients about the process of design, the responsibilities of a team, and the procedures and requirements for the production and manufacture of information. Articulating the idea of design as a problem-solving endeavor to people other than those who understand design-speak is an important skill, learned through a combination of practice, trial and error, luck, and thin-slicing (thinking without thinking), a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell in the book Blink.

But the promotion of design is not the only situation for which designers need to hone their talking points. The procedures and steps for turning words into distributable information are quite different in a virtual “desktop” environment than they are in the commercial sphere. Teaching this lesson requires crafting a convincing argument that essentially outlines how much time it takes to conceive, design, review, produce, and manufacture a readable object and how much it is going to cost. After that hurdle is out of the way comes the delicate negotiations needed to get the word count down to where it will fit into the format—this is where it gets interesting and therapeutic.

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