Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

Fortunately I got a chance to see Bill Strickland speak as the clos­ing keynote for the HOW Conference. As a speaker and a per­son, he is truly inspi­ra­tional. He grew up in poverty in the inner city of Pittsburgh and never left the area, instead choos­ing to make a dif­fer­ence in the lives of the peo­ple he knew and grew up with. Strickland estab­lished Manchester Bidwell, a jobs train­ing cen­ter and com­mu­nity arts pro­gram for dis­ad­van­taged adults and chil­dren. Through that enter­prise, he has taken his belief that “peo­ple are a func­tion of their envi­ron­ment” and run with it. The cen­ter is beau­ti­fully designed and stocked with first class equip­ment for all of their pro­grams, which have been incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful. Strickland is now work­ing with oth­ers to dupli­cate the cen­ters nationwide.

I’ll cer­tainly be try­ing to take away some of his teach­ings and apply them to my own life. In terms of design, I think his expe­ri­ences and accom­plish­ments speak a lot to how we as design­ers tar­get our audi­ences for any given project. There’s so much “dumb­ing down” going on nowa­days that I think it’s impor­tant to look at sit­u­a­tions such as Strickland’s and remem­ber that instead, chal­leng­ing your audi­ence can more often pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties to make a difference.

Make sure to check out his recently-released book this sum­mer — def­i­nitely on my must-read list

Sidenote: Before Strickland took the stage we also got a brief per­for­mance from Matt the Electrician, a singer/songwriter from Austin. He was really good, and reminded me of Matt Nathanson with a lit­tle bit more of a coun­try twang.