Dear Designers,
Working with us will provide you with design exposure. You are only as good as your last design project. We need 3 design options by tomorrow. Please change all fonts and colors as per our brand book. In fact—please rework completely. By yesterday.
Sounds familiar?
Sleepless nights, pixels pushing, designing and redesigning. Working and reworking. Starting over from scratch. Often with anxiety and panic about how the next design meeting would go. Crippled with imposter syndrome because after so many designs and redesigns—we have stopped in believing ourselves as creators. We are only as good as our clients tell us or pay us.
Toxic.
We are asked for perfecting and perfection but are those who ask for those things perfect? Far from it.
Let me tell you this: you cannot pay your bills with ‘design exposure’ and your last project does not say anything about your value as a creator. Your entire being is not determined by clients and neither is your creativity.
Or maybe the time has come to cancel the word ‘designer’ and replace it with a new one that of a ‘creator’.
Why?
To be human means to create. We are creative species. We love to make and create and build. Our entire existence and progress depend on it.
It is true that as we get older (as compared to the all-the-time-why-asking-kids), we take creativity as being less important and rationality prevails. But that is only because it is required from us by centralized systems such as education. The system teaches us that our value is only when a company finds our skills valuable (getting a job). But what now when systems are becoming more decentralized? Who determines our value as creators in decentralized systems? It is no loner about getting a job but getting the job done.
So where exactly is our value as creators? Where do we create and add value? Where do we make positive differences?
The keyword: Community led design.
Up to now one has had to go to a design school, an art school, an architecture school or an industrial design school (and many more) to be recognized as a ‘designer’. Their value has purely been defined by designing for a company (client) that sells their design to the company’s customers. Elites much?
Whaaat?
Clearly every designer in the web 3.0 space is now asking can I serve customers directly (without working for a company or a client?). Can I design for customers without middle men? Can I use my creativity and help and improve customers’ lives with better designed solutions that will enrich their lives?
The answer is a 100% yes!
Times are changing with the web 3.0 but that is nothing compared to how meanings are about to change. Things will now have different definitions and terms of reference in the web 3.0. This is not just rephrasing but definitive reframing.
Here is how:
Customer = community member (a human being).
Company = community.
A designer = creator within their community (co-creator) and, of course, human being too.
NDA = open source.
Marketing = educating.
Sales = community benefits or utilities.
So… do we still need a ‘client’ in the web 3.0 times?
No, we do not.
The community decides what is beneficial for itself.
We can create and co-create directly together. Just you and I and more of us (as that is what makes community).
That is real social responsibility delivered. Big problems can only be solved like this: with communities and these communities working with and for themselves.
Sustainability, inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility and more - all these require participatory ideas and communal solutions. These challenges are way too big to be solved by one (centralized) entity. No company and no individual alone can solve them.
Up to now we needed a client to give us a job as a designer but with the web 3.0 everyone is a creator.
And we are just getting started.
We will need to create our destinations and our roads to get there. We will need new decentralized creation tools and toolkits, frameworks, processes and systems. We will need to build new collaborative interfaces and experiences.
Now is the time to build.
There is no I anymore, there is only we.
Everyone is a creator now.
I welcome you on my journey to establish and contribute to decentralized creativity.
Please join me.
I have already started building.
My decentralized virtual world is at https://spatial.io/s/JK-Designverse-637430f8e051b600011c8285?share=7637423745025379816
Let’s meet! I can’t wait to hear all your ideas, thoughts and feedback.
Let’s do this together,
Jozef
0x456B3F59BfCA6BB747eCb24418Bf547d93a2944a