One Degree
After spending 4 days in Las Vegas at the HOW Design Conference and seeing over 3500 designers, 15 speakers, endless paper samples, countless slot machines and too many PowerPoint slides, it’s difficult to distill it all down into a concise statement of the experience.
Since design tends to fall on the expressive, intuitive and asethetic side the work world, there was lots of talk about ‘being creative’ and idea generation and where design meets the rest of the world. All in all, such events do re-invigorate the weary designer… filled with new ideas, approaches, and concepts.
Like most people, we all strive to do the best we can, and given the circumstances we succeed to various levels… myself included. I always want the best end result, so maybe this is why of all the tidbits of enlightement and knowledge that the speakers gave out… one rose above the rest. The speaker spoke of working with a German car company, working to help brainstorm new ideas for the company. Things were not going well… progress at a standstill. All the ‘tricks’ were tried to get things moving, to no avail. Breakthroughs were not coming. One of the consultants went and talked to the car executives, just to get them talking… he looked out the window at the snow and the parking lot, and asked about their drive in to the office. One car executive said that his drive in was lovely — the snow was perfect, big dry, flakes, he was thinking of how to spend the Christmas bonus on presents for his family, looking forward to visiting relatives. The consultant asked what it would have been like if it were one degree warmer… The executive said, it would have been miserable, there would have sleet falling, cold and wet… he would would be thinking about how cheap the company was to give such a megear Christmas bonus, and dreading the visiting in-laws. The consultant looked at him and said… “It’s only one degree.”
The speaker then asked the collected designers — “What’s your one degree? What is that small seemingly inconsequential thing that you can change by one degree in your work and lives, and will have an impact?”