Do you like your work?
Don Norman Design Award, work vs. job, and finding purpose.
“The main secret is to be excited about what you’re doing… I want to do things that are important, and I want to have fun doing it. They are not contradictory.” said Don Norman at age 88.
These words, calm yet firm, came out from a small and frail-looking figure.
Above his white beard were a pair of blue eyes that mirrored the firmness of his words, glimmering in the shadow cast by the brim of a baseball cap.
A few weeks ago, I saw Don Norman speaking in person for the first time at the Don Norman Design Award summit.
He is a legendary figure in user experience design. His book was a mandatory read in one of my first design classes, where I learned the most fundamental usability concepts. It feels like a full circle to see him at the first notable achievement in my career.
The Design Award recognizes global projects and organizations that create solutions not only addressing users’ needs but also improving societal and environmental well-being. My team’s work at Stanford is among the eight programs that received the recognition for Humanity-Centered Design in Education.
This recognition will certainly help my team, but personally, it has encouraged me to renew my relationship with my work.
My team builds an education platform that teaches bioinformatics to underprivileged learners all over the world. Since we launched our first program, there have been many prolonged periods when I felt discouraged, frustrated, and lost.
I wasn’t sure if we were doing a good job.
The appreciation and good feedback from learners were often accompanied with a long list of things to improve.
Every item to improve always looks like a high priority that needs to be addressed immediately, but half of the time we do not have the resources to address it well.
The funding opportunities that we prepared so thoroughly for and were so sure about ended up going to other teams and organizations.
Hearing the doubts from colleagues confirmed my own, leaving my confidence to waver.
Do I like my work? I wondered many times.
My job and my work overlap, but they are different.
I have more control over my work than my job. Therefore, it makes more sense for me to evaluate my career progress based on my work, not my job.
My work
My work includes the outcome (e.g., the deliverable/product/service), its impact, and how I drive the outcome and its impact for the better.
I can put as much time and attention as I can afford to it. The work is free-of-bounds, yet it aligns with my values.
The work is intimate and personal.
I will put my name on my work.
My job
My job is a role that belongs to an organization. Working in this role, I am paid to deliver the outcome and impact for the organization. It is a transaction.
Organization structure and politics also interfere with what I’m capable of delivering.
The job views me through the lens of if I delivered what I promised, generally omitting my personal “whys” of doing the work.
In comparison, my work asks me to iterate my answers to the personal “whys”. My “whys” are eventually revealed in my work.
I’m a breathing being with thoughts and feelings. My job is an attachment to me. My work grows out of me.
It’s impossible to put my name on my job even if I want to because it belongs to an organization.
For many designers like me, we create our work in jobs. It’s easy to confuse the work with the job.
When I’m unhappy, should I blame my job or myself? Probably both, but it doesn’t matter.
A better question to ask is, “Do I still like my work?” because:
Generating a work is more intertwined with who I am than working in a job.
Although the job and I both define the work, as the creator, I am uniquely positioned to see the nuanced needs and desires of the people my work is serving, of which the job cannot describe.
I have the power to develop a deeper meaning of the work that exceeds the standard the job manufactures.
The question “Do I still like my work?” can be transformed to “Do I believe pushing for this deeper meaning through my work aligns with my values for living a life?”
A job is replaceable for me in my career, but the work exists in the universe forever, continuously influencing people's lives.
The personal annoyances at a job are temporary in my lifetime, but the consequences of a work will keep amplifying.
The question “Do I like my work?” can be transformed to “Do I want to spend any more of my finite lifetime working on this thing that has infinite impact on people’s lives?”
My name will be on my work forever, but my name will not be on my job because I’m also replaceable for my job.
The stake feels lower to produce for my job than to produce for my work. Knowing this, how would it affect the amount of thoughts I put into the work?
The question “Do I like my work?” can be transformed to “If I can always conveniently make my job or the next person taking my job the scapegoat for any bad consequences of my work, will I still like my work?”
Individualistic success vs. the greater good
Someone commented during the summit that design education should shift from teaching people how to create individualistic success to how to create a beautiful world.
Good design has great business value. We have seen it benefits the organizations and designers’ careers tremendously. However, when pursuing individualistic success becomes the primary goal, we become tunnel visioned to design for people who can afford the solutions. We not only leave the masses behind, but also lose the vision of what a beautiful world could look like along the way.
Without a vision to guide our work, design skills are reduced as a tool to be traded to generate economic value in a capitalistic market.
So much wasted potential.
The same design skills could have been repurposed and refined to support people leading healthy and fulfilling lives while co-existing in harmony with this planet.
There are plenty of opportunities to push for positive societal changes - anytime in a day when you see symptoms of poverty, inequalities, unsustainable business development, designers could make a difference.
Sadly, I don’t think the current design industry has developed the welcoming environment for designers to get into such a career. This is based on my limited knowledge and experience:
The experience of designers working in these areas are less known because the majority of the designers are working at for-profit companies. Those who are interested in working in this field have few people to look up to. It’s hard to know where to turn to when you need to get practical advice on how to navigate the hurdles at work.
Societal projects often lack funding to support various job functionalities. It is challenging to deliver the product/service with limited resources, especially for early-career designers.
Working on societal issues is praised but not rewarded well. It is difficult to retain talents when alternative career paths provide much more attractive financial rewards.
Societal changes take time to happen. It’s difficult to effectively articulate the project’s impact when the result is not obvious yet. It is a challenge for designers to demonstrate their effectiveness in an industry that places greater value in measurable, quantifiable results.
I’m not providing a solution to any of this, but I believe I have a role in shaping the solutions here.
I also believe a career is a dance between individualistic success and serving the greater good. These two elements could complement each other, allowing us to feel purposeful while seeking individualistic success. They could be correlational when we are so successful in one element that it ignites the other/ makes it more viable to do the other. There are also times when they are incompatible and we have to make a difficult choice.
If I ask myself now, “Am I excited for my work?”, I have a clear answer.
I encourage you to think about it, too.
I like the distinction between work vs job. It's comforting to know we are not tied to our "job" and we can in fact still do the "work" without a "job" necessarily.
Also very pleasantly surprised by the AI pencil drawing!