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July 20, 2005

The Alienation [possible] of the Professional & The Personal

Great post from Michael Bierut over of Design Observer on Rick Valicenti's (of 3ST) new design monograph. Bierut aims to describe a conceit perceived in Valicenti's book that I believe is a difficult tension for most professions, (and perhaps exacerbated in the small business world as opposed to the corporate). He states:

"Designers are yearn to be provided opportunities for personal expression, but we labor under the illusion that business must be, in the end, an impersonal activity. But is it?"

While that tension as present in the designers role, being such an inherently creative role, is so expressly manifest I can't help but feel that it's the struggle of virtually every worker. Even though I personally don't do the design and the programming or whatever, I simply must have and must be allowed to care passionately and personally about my work, and heck those are the people I want be with personally and professionally.

So I don't believe work has to be impersonal; I believe that if it is impersonal that it is by and large because the participants have granted it that status. The inverse is that you cannot enforce a personal and creative investing from an institutional standpoint, but you can encourage it and you can certainly refrain from discouraging/disallowing it. In the end it has to be a "from the people" culture.

I've got this nagging feeling there's way to much Marxist "alienation" woven through all that.