Design in the Dance

I am a working graphic designer and in my last quarter at Fuller Theological Seminary. I could regard design simply as my profession, and my faith as my spirituality, keeping the two separate. Yet I have found that my design skills are deeply connected to my spirituality, and I cannot isolate them. Within this community of creative people and the fundamentals of the design process, I have seen hope and insight that illuminate my faith and involvement in the Church. In addition, design gives a framework to approach the pressing humanitarian and environmental challenges of our time. This is the context I engage with the conversation, and one I hope you find meaningful or perhaps at least worth considering for your own context.

Finding the dance in design.

I am a graphic designer. It is my passion and my trade. Perhaps you know a designer yourself. We are a unique type of “creative” that tend to have an affinity for type and fonts (my favorite font right now is Neutraface), who use our skills to solve visual, functional, and experiential needs. With clients ranging from neighborhood churches to global enterprises, graphic designers create the visual environment that surrounds us.

Yet in reality, graphic design is just one of the many disciplines of the larger practice of design. The space you live and work in have all been designed. Your cities, and their streets, have been designed. The experience you have walking into a local Starbucks, has especially been designed. Taking this further in your own life, you designed your own appearance today as you picked out your clothes, as well as the interior (or lack of) in your own home. We have the ability and freedom to design a large number of components in our lives. Beyond clothing, we can now alter our bodies with surgery to design the “ideal” nose, chest or stomach. Even the sex of a child can be chosen and a family can now be designed. In addition, as technology continues to advance, the Internet and “new media” are redefining our lifestyles. Smart phones, GPS, laptops are designed to make information ready at the tip of our fingertips. Yet despite all this luxury and convenience, there is a nagging question for many designers and citizens:

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do? ”

The poignant question comes from Bruce Mau in the opening of his book, Massive Change. Trained as an industrial designer, Mau is an award winning designer and influential presence in the field, whose out-of-the-box thinking avoids an insular look at the design world, and dares to ask the larger questions about the design of the world. Mau addresses entire areas of industry, marketplaces, urban living, military, images, and lifestyles, consistently raises the point that we have the ability to design these areas to function and contribute to the greater good of humanity.

We can do so because the practice of design is adapting, with the world around it, to postmodernism. Already rooted in relationships, design has largely functioned according to the traditional client and designer hierarchy. This is a timeless love-hate relationship originated out of necessity. A client hires a designer to create visual communication, and the designer accepts the job to use their skills and receive compensation. The tension between the vision of the client, and the creative drive of the designer, keeps them in balance to solve the client’s needs in the most aesthetic way as possible.

While this has worked with traditional media mass media, the definitions of what can be, and need to be, designed continue to expand, especially in light of advancing technologies. As a result, one person is not capable of internalizing such a broad range of knowledge and trades. The design process is now shifting from a vertical relationship of one person into a horizontal collaboration from a group with complimentary talents, skills and areas of knowledge. Mau puts it this way:

“It is no longer about one designer, one client, one solution, one place. Problems are taken up everywhere, solutions are developed and tested and contributed to the global commons, and those ideas are tested against other solutions. The effect of this is to imagine a future for design that is both more modest and more ambitious. More modest in the sense that we take our place in … a group that collectively develops the capacity to deal with the demands of the given project. More ambitious in that we take our place in society, willing to implicate ourselves in the consequences of our imagination.”

In this collaboration, teams from a broad range of disciplines can reach better solutions than just one designer can alone, no matter how talented he or she is. The gusto of risking such radical creativity to address the real needs of humanity – food, environment, marketplace, industry, etc. – will bring designers from the background into the forefront of the conversation.

The design of faith communities is no different. In fact, it should be a crucial part of this conversation of rethinking and reimagining the most basic needs and facets of society. The quest for spirituality and deeper meaning is one of the most fundamental motivations we ever address. Advertisers have swiped this innate human motivation to help stir consumers to their products and services. (Check any magazine for ads that use spiritual imagery or verbiage – you won’t find a short supply). Meanwhile, Christendom is ending in the West and mainline churches are shrinking, leaving Christianity to appear largely irrelevant and out of date, or marketed and packaged by the mega church as “spirituality lite”.

Yet when believers are gathered, they are designers engaging in this new collaborative approach, if they choose to see it as such. A group has been gathered; hand picked by the Spirit, to “dance” as Patrick Oden describes the interaction with the Holy Spirit in his book, It’s a Dance. By taking inventory of scriptures, motives, traditions, and most of all, the people themselves, the church can develop into a community with gatherings , outreach, hospitality because of the people present. The missional church will not only welcome it members to join in their stories, gifts and needs into the dance, but it can rely on them to do so to create its collaborative design.