vegas, please
We have roll-up shades in our bedroom. It used to be Penelope’s room before we switched a few weeks ago, and we’re planning on swapping shades soon, so she can have the more opaque roll-ups in her room for naptimes and we can have the more easily adjusted conventional blinds.
I glanced at the base of one of the shades earlier and lingered on the brand name Levolor. It brought to mind a job interview I had with them some years back, in 2002, just after I had returned from Florida. I was keen to find another design-related job, having less than a year of “real world” experience under my belt after graduating. I was living in Chapel Hill at the time and the position was actually closer to where I am now–at their facility in Greensboro–so that would have been a hike of a commute every day, but at that point I was eager for anything I could get.
I think my main interviewer sensed that quality as well since I didn’t get offered the job. I think I succeeded in masking my hesitation about the length of the commute, and I did my best to feign enthusiasm about the prospect of designing a myriad of varieties of window shades, curtain rod finishers and vertical blinds, but in retrospect my mild disdain for the nature of the work was probably pretty obvious.
The funny thing is, I remember detecting an implicit, and sometimes borderline explicit, measure of the same attitude in the interviewer himself. He was a graduate of such-and-such reputable design college and had worked for Levolor for a number of years and I could tell was really getting quite bored with, if not developing a degree of contempt for, the work he did. I mean, how many different ways are there to design home furnishings? An infinite number of ways, I hear you say–especially with the new trends that are coming out all the time–but consider that he worked on a limited subset of the home furnishing category, and what are most new trends except recycled variations of older trends? Surely that narrows the spectrum a bit for the designer in question. Thinking back on the whole experience, I’m convinced he was trying to hire his replacement.
Admittedly, I don’t have contact with a whole lot of designers, but among those I have interacted with, especially industrial designers like myself, I have the sense that the majority of them aren’t designing what they really want to design. I suppose that’s common to most folks in the working world–how many of us do what we really want to do?–but I was just reminded of people in my line of work today. One of the big common interests between my boss (another industrial designer by degree) and myself is our mutual interest in airplanes and the design thereof. I don’t think he’s quite as geeky as me about it, but we do e-mail articles back and forth about the A380 or the upcoming 787 and debate the finer points of their aesthetics, both interior and exterior. When I was designing our website about a year ago, he had put together layouts of his vision for the site, and there’s no coincidence that our site ended up bearing a strong resemblance to that of Teague (albeit without the Flash-y elements), one of his most admired design firms–a firm which, moreover, is responsible for the interiors of most Boeing airliners. So between those things and various snippets of conversation scattered here and there, I can assemble a fairly complete picture of where he’d like to be, given his druthers.
I have to admit, designing aircraft interiors isn’t a niche of our profession I would object to filling, either. And I have filled it, briefly: a few years ago I designed the seats for the Eclipse 500 business jet, a plucky little plane whose parent company entered Chapter 11 within the last few months, which is a shame. And I lobbied vigorously for an opening with a local company, BE Aerospace, before I landed the job at ImageWorks.
So most of us aren’t where we’re really like to be. But in the case of my boss and fellow designer and myself, we do work for a great company, and whatever the object of our designer-ly focus on any given day, our work is interesting, varied and challenging, and I’m sure we’re grateful for that. I, for one, am content.