Design Thought Leader » Happiness

Eat, Sleep, Work, Play and Love: Natalia Ilyin tells Designers to Craft a Healthy Lifestyle

Nate Burgos — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:16:56 +0000

“So here’s an idea. Design could start to value the idea of the happy, balanced designer. I know. It sounds so wrong. The entire structure of design is against happiness and balance in its practitioners. What would we talk about if we didn’t talk about how tired we were, how overworked, how busy, how stressed? Imagine knowing a designer that wasn’t hurting himself in some way. Such a designer would turn the whole mythology of design on its head. Which needs to happen. Because, let’s face it, if a designer does not understand what it takes to sustain Self and spirit, do you really want his taking on designing sustainable things? For sustainable things, at this point, are really the only interesting design things.

And so I press you to take heed of the Committee for Happy American Designers at www.happydesigners.tumblr.com. They’ve had enough of the old Art Ball paradigm. They’re swimming upstream, relearning how to eat, sleep, design, play and connect with other people—not just machine—all in the same 24-hour period. Shocking, I know. Radical. And it’s an uphill fight, what with most of the art directors in the world having been schooled in the old ‘hurt yourself’ mythology. It could be crushed or it could be the beginning of something better than what we’ve got now. Sustainable design must start with teaching designers to sustain their own lives, their heart. I’m with them: It’s time we say goodbye to the Art Ball.”

Andy Chen on Happiness

Nate Burgos — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:30:41 +0000

I have never properly regarded myself as an artist. In fact, I have been taught to scoff at the idea that anybody could make a living by doing what they like. Life, in my parents’ worldview, is a process of sustained suffering, whereby the successful reap the rewards of their anguish in the form of BMWs and Caribbean cruises. Artists suffer for their craft. Like Kafka’s archetype, they starve themselves to death in the pursuit of misbegotten visions of transcendence. Art is something you do to get yourself into college, not what you rely on to pay the bills.

During a year off from Princeton, I worked as a sales executive for a mass distributor of blank DVDs. You know that person you want to tell to go shoot themselves when they call trying to sell you something you don’t want? That was me. I had accounts ranging from a Brazilian bootlegger to a belligerent drunk who would yell at me for an hour before buying anything. Aside from teaching me how to sell a B-grade product, the job was quite meaningless. The only saving grace was that my boss wanted the company’s website redesigned. I went to Barnes & Noble, bought myself a book on web design and created what I thought was a masterpiece. In retrospect, it was terrible, but from that moment on, I’ve been hooked on graphic design. Unable to draw or paint to save my life, I found myself slowly capable of using Photoshop as my canvas and my laptop touchpad as my brush.

At Princeton, I spend about five nights a week making or editing posters for the Student Design Agency. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, I am a slave to graphic design because I do not know anything else more fulfilling. I know it may seem pathetic, but setting type on a poster in a perfectly aligned way or creating the ideal visual for an event poster seriously makes me happy. I work with artists and visionaries whose talents far exceed my own, and I despair when I realize how stunningly mediocre I am at something I love so much.

Alain De Botton on Happiness

Nate Burgos — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:00:19 +0000

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kind of happiness.