Part Deux

How do we bring Kindness, Beauty and Truth to our work? This can be a challenge in a world that demands so much fleeting engagement and offers so few opportunities to develop our authentic selves. As a shorthand approach, it can be tempting to substitute pleasantry for kindness, attractiveness for beauty and personal honesty for truth. It’s great to be nice, attractive and honest; it’s just incomplete.

Pleasant, attractive and honest are temporal qualities whereas kindness, beauty and truth are enduring qualities. Though they may seem the same up front, the latter qualities take considerably more time, energy and investment to develop.

For example, we may value pleasantry but defining what is pleasant or prescribing pleasing behavior is to dive into an instant quagmire of social norms and subjectivity. We can consider someone unpleasant and therefore unkind when they don’t meet our personal or cultural criteria for what constitutes pleasantry. We can assume someone is kind who is simply being pleasant in order to gain something from us. Kindness is a virtue not so easily defined and therefore it is not easily withdrawn or undone. We trust and value kindness because it is a more permanent state of mind that can only be revealed over time.

Getting to my point about your design, it’s fairly easy to parse out the differences between what is temporal and enduring over time in design. Something you found attractive at one point can cease to be beautiful in your mind shortly thereafter. A lot of external factors shape our attraction to particular design elements. You can also find that although your design is honestly beautiful in one sense, it doesn’t reflect the truth of who you are and how you live your life. Neither of these scenarios seem worth the time, energy or investment you put into developing your design.

In finding your designer, making meaningful distinctions is more difficult. You may ask, does all this matter really? That is something only you can answer. I have found repeatedly that design cannot reflect something that does not exist within the designer (s) and the design process. If you want to create something with an enduring impact, both designer and process should be considered with that goal in mind.