THE HUMAN BRIEF

WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON

The human brief is daily, intense, routine, and unpredictable at the same time.Twenty years of structuring design thinking have led me to think and to see how creative modes of action and expression open up interesting ways of coping, and at times surprising and new decision making paths.

Visual communication designers are quiet architects of consciousness. Underground agents who deliver messages, products, and inspirations to all of us. Visuals and texts shape our opinions and drive our actions. They are psychological architects. Intermediaries with attitude and style. And therefore designers are artists who need a personal style and flexible creative freedom in order to adapt their ways of thinking and creating to almost anything they wish to design. Personal artistic style develops over time. It may be innate, but it requires refinement, polishing, growth, radiance, and external validation.An audience.

Paradoxically, the more experience one accumulates and the wider the range of businesses and client types one encounters, the more the personal style narrows and becomes what is commonly called a handwriting or a signature. The leading design approach of experienced designers is often the search for the best possible solution to the specific problem at hand. This is an extraordinarily rich form of reduction. 

Design communicates stories. Stories of businesses, activist stories, stories of objects, or stories of service providers. Our personal lives are also full of stories, composed of small, fleeting everyday situations and of large, highly significant events.

In design, once you grasp the essence of a thing, the path to formal expression in the world becomes clear. With immense energy and a vision only I was aware of that design is a world through which one can adopt a way of observing reality. 

With this in mind, I began writing “TheHuman Brief”, in my head,  gathering design thinking channels that were born out of real design projects. With each project completed, another insight sharpened, and these became tools and design metaphors that can be used to decode another aspect of the human brief  living. This is not a guidebook or Zen wisdom. It is an invitation to design the small experiences we encounter every day.