alan wells

Yesterday I gave a brief talk about web design at the Pixel graphic design club Alumni Day at UC Davis. Here are some of the notes I wrote down when I was thinking about the talk. The slides for the talk are included below, but probably aren’t as meaningful without the verbal component.

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The complexity and reach of the projects I’m working on has increased exponentially since I graduated. But the questions and process to solve the problems are fundamentally the same. Design provides a framework that is rarely taught in schools: a method for creating intelligent solutions to complex problems.

My advice to you: embrace the fact that everything in your life can (and should?) be a design problem. Think beyond graphic design, exhibit design, fashion design. See the world from a more holistic perspective – the world is a place full of complex problems in need of intelligent solutions.

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It’s been a while, a long while, since I’ve written here. My last post, on June 11th, was written a few days before I graduated from college (UC Davis), and began life in this crazy place known as the “real world”. I suppose it was slightly prophetic to end my last post asking, “Will I blink? Or will I take the step forward?”I think I’ve taken steps forward. I’ve probably taken almost as many backwards, but progress is being made, at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Much has happened in my world in the last four months. I finished school and continued my freelance design projects, and managed to build a business that made enough money that I thought I was going to continue freelancing for the foreseeable future. Things change quickly though… more on that later. At the end of July I moved out of Davis, a place that’s been a great home to me for the five years I spent in school (minus a long trip, and then a shorter one, to Australia). Although I didn’t think much about it when I was moving out, Davis is and was a wonderful place to be a student, a great place to do some serious growing up. I grew fond of that place, maybe more so now that I don’t live there anymore, but looking back 5 years to a time when I lost sleep over deciding between UCLA, Cal, and UC Davis, I’m fairly certain that I made the right choice.—

“Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than its worth.” – Baz Luhrman.

—A few days after I moved out, I spent almost a month traveling in South America with my dad and my brother. I haven’t spent this much time with them since I moved away to college, and it was great to reconnect with them and spend sometime learning about the person that my once little brother has grown into.I have a lot of thoughts about some of the things I saw in South America… I think I’ll save them for another day, but it was an eye-opening trip in many ways.I came back to California ready to get back to work, and moved into San Francisco the day after I got back… Unfortunately, my once burgeoning freelance business had pretty much come to a halt in the August slowdown that (apparently) is typical of corporate america. It was a nerve wracking few weeks until things finally started to get rolling again, but that kind of slowdown was new to me, and it spooked me. A re-evaluation of priorities (the flexible schedule student life becomes less important, a steady paycheck and professional development becomes more important) and a very strong desire to continue living in San Francisco sparked me into looking around for a full time job.Serendipity stepped in, and I figured out that what I’ve been doing in the freelance world is called web production, and after finally figuring out what to call the skills that I have, I found a job with an exciting startup (Affinity Labs) as a web producer, with my first task being to help grow an online community for artists and designers (ArtBistro). More on Affinity in a future post, but a month to the day after I started and I’m still challenged and learning new things every day, and that’s exactly how I want it to be.

According to William Glasser, we learn “10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what is discussed with others, 80% of what is experienced personally, and 95% of what we teach to someone else.”

Think about traditional school teaching methods in this sense. Are we leaving knowledge out of our brains because reading in a textbook and hearing a lecture are only scratching the surface of our capacity to learn? My design history midterms the last few days have increased my level of frustration with the way things are taught – not because I did badly – but because I did well without really learning anything I’ll rememeber next week.

This brings me to the bigger questions I’ve been asking myself since I returned from a few weeks off in Australia:

Is my college education preparing me for the “real” world?

Am I learning the skills I need to solve the problems we are facing in our time?

My gut reaction to these questions is no – that the most important lessons I’ve learned while in college have been learned outside the classroom, through my own explorations and the influence of good friends and unusually interesting professors. But maybe that’s the purpose of college – to provide an atmosphere that’s safe, slightly sheltered, and away from the resposibilities of the working world to allow those kinds of experiences to happen. I just wish they happened in the classroom a bit more.