Seeing the reality that design is one of the basic elements that form modern human activities keeps my enjoyment and perseverence despite the evident angst attacks. It’s easy to be stressed out working as designer. The first symptom is light insomnia, continued by concentration disturbances as a result of physical and mental hyperactivity, added up by acnes destroying my handsomeness and sprue inflammations in the mouth making any food tastes like razor blade for the mouth. I am frequently surprised that while these things are happening to me, the number of people that aspire to be designers is increasing daily. In institutional level, design discipline is booming, forming a new kind of belief system beyond morality. Despite the relatively good income, being a designer contains its own misery. I hope I’m the only one feeling it!
“the stupidest thing I’ve ever done is doing something that I know was a mistake ”
For the eleven years I’ve worked, I feel that professional demands and obligations have taken me hostage in fulfilling one’s need of livelihood (popularly known as lifestyle today). Being a critical designer is just as hard as finding one soccer player that deserves to be playing in the English Premier League, out of 238 millions of Indonesian population. How can a discourse about design can grow without any condusive critics? How can a designer fulfill her/his professional challege and contribute significantly to the public through her/his profession? Would I be able to survive within the next ten years? Can I be free of this “miserable curse” so I can enjoy food and sleep soundly? These are my 5 strategies to face the condition;
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1. Understand the situation and meaning
Enhancing skills to read and learn situations, in the context of learning more about production and distribution of meaning in my every incoming and outcoming messages. Just imagine what our response when we wake up in the morning, with tens of messages are demanding to be opened soon; spams, emails, messengers, chirps from social networks and other notifications! The plenty options before my eyes create the justification to my delay of toothbrush. Seeing those message attacks, we are given three systematical shallow attitude: to like, to ignore, or to delete. Then the other obligations I hate must be updated within second or even at that very moment, together with the information overload they bring with them. I am challenged to link every incoming message to position it against situations happening in personal and social level. We don’t have to be a genius like Robert Langdon in Da Vinci Code. But to proactively train our intuition to find connections between every incoming messages is my first test to understand this global world and its contemporaneity so that it would look like the new line written on the back of a Telkom employee’s vest, I just saw on this Friday prayer in the mosque: “The world is in your hand.” Finally it is something I can greatly understand.
- Learning to understand semiotics and implement it for certain contexts and situations are my basic strategy to keep my eternal Monalisa smile
