travelling

this past weekend I traveled to Texas Hill Country.  I spent four days under a cloudless sky out in the wilderness surrounded by (mostly) graphic designers.  New territory for me in many ways; geographically, professionally, contextually.  It was great fun, and the trappings were outstanding, of course.  There was an obscene amount of Texas-style barbecue and other delectables, the country was beautiful in a rocky way, the accommodations were lovely, complete with a hat rack in the room (thank God for Texas and cowboy hats).  But it was the contextual territory that was the most interesting for me.

I had been asked to lead a workshop about wood, giving it three times for two hours each.  This is tricky, if the desire is to have everyone leave with something.  I can spend two hours just turning a couple of planks over and over and switching them end for end to find the right combination of grain pattern and patina, of live edge and machined edge.  In the end we decided to make lamps out of locally found dead-fall trees, which ended up being pretty successful.

When I have been involved with this kind of workshop in the past, many if not most of the participants have had some experience with making things out of wood and working with their hands in a particular way.  That was not the case here.  These people were (in many cases) very experienced designers with many years of professional accomplishment behind them, and some are even very used to making books or screen printing (a process that remains opaque to me to this day.  Some day I shall have to remedy that), but that have little experience with wood or with wiring.  Not that they should, of course, that is why they were in the workshop.

But by and large these are people who design digitally, and design for print.  Their application of their craft and their design skills has a radically different user interface and a profoundly different expectation in terms of life-span, usually.  As we all worked, and as they grew comfortable exchanging a mouse for a screwdriver, an amazing and heartwarming shift began to occur.  As each person plugged in their nascent lamp to test it, their faces registered delight of a level that really moved me.  Many of them went from "I am not sure I can do this at all" to "I want to make everything into a lamp!"  And the really amazing thing is that by the end, many were helping their fellow students, showing them how to use the crimper or to wire in an in-line switch, people who two hours before did not know what an in-line switch was.

Some of the student work.  Photo by Andy Birdwell

This starting to sound self-serving, which is not my intention.  This shift that happened, this empowerment (pun intended) of all of these people, is less about any ability that I have and more about something much more important and profound:  A willingness to learn.  I have taught this information to hundreds of NYU students, only to look up and see them drooling on their t-shirts.  It isn't about the information, it is about being receptive.  The 60 or so people that I spent time with this weekend came to the class with something that can not be bought or sold, and that can not be injected from an external source.  They wanted to learn.  They were invested in their education for those two hours.  They sat down from a place of "I'll try that" instead of "I can't do that."  It was really inspiring.  This experiment would have been a dramatic failure without that attitude on their part coming in.

It served as a real object lesson for me with regard to changing contexts.  There is such a tendency on my part (and on many people around me) to approach the world saying "I know my place here and I know what I do well, and that is what I am going to do."  This is often a reasonable approach, and certainly is a comfortable one, like putting on a straight-jacket that you know and love.  Comfortable, but ultimately stultifying as far as growth.  Change is hard, of course, and new experiences can be painful or scary.  But I am inspired to adopt the attitude of the people I was so recently surrounded with to try to maintain that openness, that desire to learn new things, and the willingness to take on things that are likely to fail, simply because when they don't fail the triumph is that much greater.