GET OUT OF THE STUDIO AND MAKE SOME FRIENDS, OR A PREFACE TO THIS UNFINISHED NON-MANIFESTO, OR OTHER PEOPLE’S MANIFESTOS, OR SOME THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS I’VE HAD WHILE WRITING THIS, OR MY FAVORITE PROJECTS, OR MY CURRENT ELEVATOR PITCH,OR MY NOTES APP, OR MY COLLECTION OF SUPPORTIVE NOTES AND EMAILS, OR RANDOM SHIT I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT

Is there a difference between art and design? I think so: to make a work of art is to occupy a small piece of space and time. To design is to occupy a small piece of space and time — a small piece of the universe and your short time in it — and give it to someone or something else.

I’m not saying that artists are inherently self-absorbed, or that designers are inherently selfless, or even that a hard boundary exists between art and design. A piece and a person can occupy multiple states, and most, if not all, pieces and people exist somewhere in the middle: some of the best works of art, really, are excellently designed, and the best pieces of design are infused with the subjective and the solipsistic and necessarily engage with questions about Art and its Purpose. To me, the difference comes down not to what you’re making or even who’s doing the making, but to whom the making is made for: art can, but does not always, engage with an audience. Design does. It has to. Whether you’re designing for the whole world or a community or one person — even if that one person is your professor, or your mom, or yourself — to design is to consider who is doing the looking, and whether or not they see what you see. If art is an act of expression, design is an act of empathy. You have to listen in order to say anything interesting.

But if you just sit there and listen, then you’re not really a designer, either. You’re not even human — you’re just a crystal goblet, and you’re super boring. You can’t pick up a glass without leaving a fingerprint or five behind here and there.

I used to say I study design and not art because I didn’t have anything interesting to say. Looking back, I was just being lazy. You can’t separate the designed object from the designer any more than you can separate the art from the artist — as a designer, your work is your life, as the materialization of how you choose to fill your space and time and other people’s space and time. If I’m going to design anything at all, I am responsible for the space and time my work occupies whether I like it or not. I’m being asked for my opinion. I’m being asked to write this manifesto.

Well, shit.

I want to preface all this by saying that this is how I design, and not the only way I think stuff can or should be designed. These opinions are kind of baseless, and entirely my own. But I guess that’s kind of the point.

Based on a somewhat random sample of everything I’ve made in the last two or so years, here is how I fill my space and time: my suitemates. G. Heav. All the systems that don’t quite work at Yale. Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That. Original student music. My family. My dead tamagotchi. The crushed solo cups outside frat row. Dead malls. My little brother. Yale’s investments in colonialism and violence. Our messed up fashion system. Getting drunk outside the Beinecke in the middle of the night with my best friend. The opposite of loneliness, and the fear of losing all this.

For better or for worse, I tend to write what I know: I can’t help but engage with what’s right in front of my nose. Yale, all the yellow things in my room, the funny and unexpectedly profound thing my friend said during the walk home from that one party — the mundane and the hyperspecific make up the majority of what I make. I like reality, and find it difficult to engage with abstraction for abstraction’s sake. I like thick description, weak theory. My website has this one photo of this one pair of mary janes, and I will tell you now that that photo is about that one specific pair of mary janes and where I got them and that one time I wore them to the ballet and look at the texture of that velvet. You wouldn’t be wrong to say the mary janes also represent childhood or commodity fetishism or whatever the hell, but I see all that generalization as secondary. I’m more interested in the shoes.

I worry sometimes that the hyperspecificity of my work lends itself to myopia. To be clear, I worry about the world and its problems as much as the next Yale student, but I’m sick of doing graphic design ‘about’ any of that. I tried that in high school, and it got old really fast. If designers really wanted to fix the climate crisis, or destroy capitalism, or create lasting peace in the Middle East, I think we’d all get off our asses and actually do that instead of aestheticize real issues for the sake of a (beautifully typeset) project that may or may not leave the confines of a white box in Green Hall. I’m not saying that designers should give up and stop caring about these issues — I’m saying that we should stop pretending that design is more sacred or important than it actually is, and that design is only a social good insofar as it circulates with intention and generosity. I’m saying that unless what you’re making directly helps those already doing the good work, you might as well get out of the studio and actually do something about all this stuff your work is ‘about’. You could at least get out of the studio and make some friends.

So I guess that’s what I’m interested in: design that tangibly, actually does something, and ideally does something valuable for someone other than me. Design that expands space and time as opposed to design that just occupies it. Put simply, I would rather do unsexy marketing work for a student club than make a sexy poster for class. I want people to actually see my work, and I want them to get it. If all I can do right here and now is offer up my own space and time, then I want to give that space and time to something or someone I love. Something real.

I guess that’s what all this boils down to: space and time. I live in a dorm room the size of a shoebox, and I can’t help but feel like I’m always running out of time. I don’t know why but I’ve lived with this premature sense of loss for as long as I can remember — at midnight on my sixteenth birthday the first thing I did was pull up the calculator app on my phone, and calculate that assuming I’d live to be a hundred years old, I had approximately 2.6 billion seconds left to live. 2.6 billion seconds isn’t nearly enough time to see and experience and be in love with everything, and now I don’t even have that.

Weirdly, the only thing that makes me feel better is to design: to spend a small eternity staring at the same thing in a windowless room in Green Hall. If to design is to give something more space and time than it would otherwise get, then I see design as an act of preservation. Of devotion. Of care. I’m not religious but I imagine design as something akin to building a cathedral: you carve out space and time for something outside of yourself in hopes that it will outlive you. Design is at once deeply selfless and utterly selfish.

I want cathedrals for all my friends. I want cathedrals for the cherry blossoms I encounter on my walk to class and cathedrals for the color yellow. Nothing I have to say is more interesting or complicated or important or beautiful than the world right outside my studio, so I may as well use my space and time to immortalize some of the cool stuff I’ve found in my little pocket of existence. To design is to territorialize space and time — to grab someone (gently) by the hand and say, Look at this thing! This thing exists and you exist and I exist. In a way, it’s like playing God. Let there be light.

Maybe this is why I am constitutionally incapable of making art that is explicitly and exclusively sad. Some people make art to express how they feel. I make art to change how I feel. If I'm going to immortalize something, then I would like to immortalize something that makes me happy and hopefully makes other people happy. I’ve never been good at sitting with sadness without at least attempting to fix it. I’ve never been good at sitting with sadness in general. How do you maintain emotional distance when design demands that you collapse all distance and actually care?

Maybe this is also why I tend to design for the small and specific. It feels egotistical and naive to demand space and time from everyone everywhere forever, so I usually feel better trying to design for one person or community rather than, say, for all of humanity. Depth is found in specificity; I’d rather make work that actually means something to someone than work that means nothing to everyone. I’d rather my work hang on a dorm wall than on the walls of the Whitney. Maybe that makes my work myopic. Maybe that’s exactly the point.

The challenge, then, is to continually expand your circles of empathy and expand whatever space and time you do have as a designer. To get out of the studio and fall in love with more people, more dorm walls, more cherry blossoms, and yet engage deeply and specifically with each. How do you be present with and actually do something for everything and everyone everywhere? How do you immortalize spacetime itself? I’m still working on it.

At the end of my freshman year, I stole a table knife from the dining hall and used it to carve my name into a brick in a dorm wall. I’m pretty sure it’s still there. One of these days I’m going to find myself a really small knife and a really big brick, and I’ll carve the whole universe in.

Last Updated: 05/01/24