UC Davis Design Department Graduation Reception
June 12th, 2010
by Alan Wells

I have to admit that I find it a little strange to be standing before you today. Three years ago today I was sitting where you are now, happy to be finished with school but anxious about heading into a future that held all sorts of uncertainty. I’m still trying to figure out how this crazy place called the real world works, so I thought I’d share a little bit about what I’ve been doing and a few things I’ve learned along the way.

During my time at UC Davis, I studied both design and ecology. I started with an ecology major but became interested in design and how it could be applied to solving the problems in the world around us. Shortly before graduation, I was quoted in UC Davis magazine as saying that I wouldn’t take a full time job until unlit I found a position related to sustainability. I thought that I could continue the freelance work I had started in school and find a job. Optimistic about my chances, I moved to San Francisco, signed a lease, and tried to get started – but the freelance work I had in school had slowed down, and I wasn’t making enough money to support myself. I needed a job – fast!

I applied for several positions at design studios but didn’t get anywhere. I also applied for a job as a web producer at a small startup called Affinity Labs. The word “design” wasn’t even in the job description, much less anything about sustainability, but it looked like something I was qualified for and I needed the work. I was offered the job and happily accepted it, acknowledging that my interests in sustainability would have to be put no the back burner for a while.

When I started at Affinity Labs, I spent most of my time sourcing content, writing emails, and engaging with the users on the social networking sites the company ran. Despite the fact that design was not in my job description, I found that I was able to bring my design skills into the position – first by designing emails and helping other producers with HTML. I was able to find ways to show my design skills, and was quickly moved into a position where I led the user interface design and software development process for the company’s social networking software platform – a job I would have NEVER been considered for had I applied for it originally.

Here’s the funny thing about what the work I did at Affinity Labs – due to class scheduling constraints, I only took one web design class at Davis, and I definitely didn’t consider myself an “interaction designer”. But this is the first lesson about design that I’d like to pass on today: the design skills you’ve learned here can be applied to a wide range of problems. There’s a trend in design to segment the field into an increasing number of very specific titles – “graphic designer”, “interaction designer”, “user experience designer” is particularly hot right now. But in my experience, these distinctions are fuzzy at best. The design process you’re now well-versed in is a framework that you can use to solve many different types of problems. Sure, different mediums have different tools and jargon, but those are the easy things to learn. The ability to develop an appropriate solution to a problem while working within constraints is the hard part, and you’ve been well prepared by your teachers here to use that process. So my advice to you is to broaden your design horizons as much as possible, and to open your mind to all the ways you can use what you’ve learned here.

The willingness to work on a wide variety of projects was key to the next stage in my career. I was offered a position as a product manager at a growing gaming startup called Zynga. For those of you who don’t know Zynga or their flagship game Farmville, the company has turned into one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. At Zynga, I was hired to design and manage iPhone games – another area I had never worked in before, but again, I found that the design process that I already knew transferred easily. Zynga should have been a dream job for me – I was designing at the hottest gaming company around, working on Apple’s then-new iPhone platform, and being well compensated all at the same time. But that quote about sustainability kept coming back to haunt me – I couldn’t get much further from sustainability than making an iPhone poker game.

I desperately wanted to work on a project at the intersection of technology and sustainability, so I decided to build an iPhone application that would help San Francisco residents recycle. I needed data the City had collected to make the application work, so I pitched the project to them and asked for the data. I think they were skeptical that the project would actually happen (I was proposing to create the app with no financial support from them), but they gave me the data I needed. I spent the next three months working nights and weekends to release the app to coincide with a recycling campaign they were starting last June. Along the way, several incredible things happened that made the app a reality. I found a programming team to build the app, and when I told them I was volunteering my time to design the application, they offered to develop the app at no cost. Shortly after we started development, Mayor Gavin Newsom got wind of the project and decided he liked it enough to issue a press release about the app. Later in the summer, we were invited to participate in the Mayor’s press conference about Government 2.0 technology in San Francisco. Because of the support from the Mayor, our app was covered in Fast Company, Fortune Magazine, CNN.com, and several other major publications.

Just before we released the app, when I heard that Mayor Newsom was going to put his weight behind the project, I came up with a company name to brand the app with. That turned out to be a good decision – the app put Haku Wale on the map, before we even existed as a company!

The lesson that I’d like to convey here is about the power of working on things that matter to you. When you put your heart and soul into a project, you’ll be surprised by the support the world sends your way. I know this may be hard to believe, but it’s true. W. H. Murray, the scottish mountaineer, once described this phenomenon: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back – Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

The danger in not doing work that is meaningful to you is that you will find it hard to fully commit yourself to the work. And if you don’t fully commit yourself, you’re missing out on all that Providence has to offer. And you don’t need someone to hire you or give you permission to do work that matters – find a way to do it own your own, you’ll be surprised by what comes from it. When you do work that matters to you, magic things can happen.

Shortly after the success of the EcoFinder app, I joined forces with a high school friend of mind to officially start Haku Wale. We didn’t want to lose the momentum we had gained during the EcoFinder launch, so we quit our jobs, said goodbye to our salaries, and tried to make a go of it. While our studio is less than a year old, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on some interesting projects with great clients, most of which have strong connections to sustainability and social impact.

The final thought I’d like to leave you with today is that I believe that now is the best time in recent history to be a designer. I know the economic context that we live in today doesn’t paint a rosy picture, but I believe the graduates in this room are better positioned for success than just about anyone else graduating today. In recent years, the value of good design is finally starting to be acknowledged as a key component to commercial success. In many fields, technology is no longer the limiting factor or primary challenge – the challenge is in creating things that are desirable, understandable, delightful. At its core, I believe design is a process for creating something that didn’t previously exist. So the question for those of you graduating today is: how will you use that process? What will you choose to create?

I’d like to leave you with a thought from Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect who built the first skyscraper: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work… Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

Think big.

Thank you and congratulations to you all.

Form has meaning; it can touch us at such a primal level that our mind is left scrambling to rationalize our emotional reactions. Consider the visceral impression conveyed by a natural setting: The deep serenity felt, for example, while walking through a majestic grove of redwoods. The delicate lace of fern fronds wave as you drag your hand through them as you walk, and your heart jumps into your throat when startled by a deer caught wondering across the trail. These natural forms hold an innate meaning that not only transcends the human experience, but even predates our verbal expression, definition, and measurement. In other words, we did not create this meaning; it comes from the forms themselves, and existed long before we did.“

The idea that form is a language that predates verbal expression is fascinating to me. It feels like there’s a convergence between this idea and a notion mentioned by Eames Demetrios at Compostmodern a few weeks ago that he described as “way it should be-ness”. The post also eloquently describes a dilemma I’ve been running into lately – my job as a producer at Zynga is extremely data-intensive, but the problems I’m most interested in solving are in the areas of experience and form. In a business driven by statistics like clicks, installs and daily active users, I’m finding it difficult to justify time spent focusing on the less easily quantifable aspects of designing intuitive and visceraly attractive products. Not only that, but when we do put the time into refining these aspects of the design, as I feel we did with Scramble Live, it’s challenging to measure the impact of that attention to detail.

One of my favorite photos from college.

California Lighting Technology Center: Working with my partner Ashley Brown, we redesigned the CLTC exhibit space and designed a modular case system to support their needs for flexibility in the space. I used Illustrator, Photoshop, and SketchUp to bring the designs together.

Green Design Wiki: a resource for exhibit designers interested in sustainability. I still maintain this site, and it gets about 1,000 hits a month.

“What do most people get out of blogging? After all, most blogs are virtually unread by outsiders…

The act of writing a blog changes people, especially business people. The first thing it does is change posture. Once you realize that no HAS to read your blog, that you can’t MAKE them read your blog, you approach writing with humility and view readers with gratitude. The second thing it does is force you to be clear. If you write something that’s confusing or in shorthand, you fail.

Respectful and clear. That’s a lot to get out of something that doesn’t take much time.”

Since my blog definitely falls into the “virtually unread by outsiders” category, why do I bother? For me, its more of a replacement of a journal. Of course its public and I suppose that limits what I can write about, but I’m a pretty open person so I don’t find that to be a huge limitation. For me its about having a written record of my thoughts and musings, as well as the books I’ve been reading, the music I’ve been listening to, and some of the other things that are a big part of my life. Being a child of the internet, I like that writing a blog (instead of a journal) makes this written record searchable, linkable, and easily shared. Also, it allows me to include digital things that are hard to get into a hardcopy journal – and although the converse is also true – there are things that exist in the physical world that are hard to get into a blog, I find that the balance sways in the direction of the digital. But I do keep a paper sketchbook/journal/notepad/collection of interesting things to fill in the gaps. In fact, if I had a scanner, I’d probably scan some of those pages and post them here, because I think they’re interesting in a raw, unpolished sort of way. I did this in my digital portfolio and I like the depth that adds to an otherwise all-digital website.

TEDTalk – Jeff Han / Multi-Touch Display

TED sounds like an amazing conference to attend, I’ve watched almost all of the published TEDTalks and have found them to be very interesting and inspirational. They’ve just announced their registration for TED 2008, and I think I’m gonna submit an application, I don’t quite have the achievements yet to back it up.

Hope to see you all soon,
Alan ]]> http://www.adub.net/blog/2007/01/27/california-im-coming-home/feed/ 0 http://www.adub.net/blog/2006/12/10/8/ http://www.adub.net/blog/2006/12/10/8/#comments Sun, 10 Dec 2006 07:30:09 +0000 admin http://www.adub.net/blog/?p=8 Now that I’m breathing easier after my final critiques, I’m working on a list of things that I’ve been thinking about over the past few months and have wanted to write about now that I have the time, so here’s what I’ve got so far:

- The idea of trying to connect the dots forward in one’s future in the way that Steve Jobs says is not possible in his Stanford commencement speech.

- I’m wondering what it is about California that makes it such a hotbed for really good ideas and new businesses. It seems like a disproportionate amount of the cutting edge things I hear about are happening right here in my own back yard in sunny California. Is it the weather, the water? I’ve got some ideas that stem from ecology and biodiversity that I think might be related in a theoretical sense

- I’ve got some notes and thoughts from a lecture that Eric Heiman of Volume Design gave at UCD this fall. He’s one of the best design speakers I’ve heard in my short career, and said some things that really resonated with me.

-I’ve been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, for the last few weeks. Its been an absolutely fascinating read so far and its interesting to see some of the things that I’ve thought about myself as a creative person be validated by a psychological study of other creative people

-As mentioned before, I spent thanksgiving in Copenhagen, and I had the opportunity to appreciate the refinement of danish design while there. I’ve been thinking about why their design has been pushed in the direction that it is, and I want to explore a few ideas about that

-I read a book called West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief by Steven Kotler… I hadn’t read a non-design book in a while and I really enjoyed the read. Kotler talks about some interesting topics including syncronicity and the genetic basis for spirituality. There’s something about the way he writes that appeals to part of me that’s interested in the intersection of science and spirituality.

-I read John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicty early on this fall quarter, and found it to be a great set of general guidelines for many things, and I’d like to share some of the things that have been most useful to me.

I’m sure (I hope) this list will keep growing but I think this is a good starting point for the first couple posts.

I’ve got a few things I’ll be addding to the portfolio over the next few weeks, but the major stuff is all done.