All of Portland got laid off last week. That's how it seemed, anyway, last Wednesday evening, as a group of designers gathered around a pair of tables in a bar in the southeastern quarter of town. Once a month, for nearly a year now, a clutch of workers from across Portland's creative economy--15 to 30 of them--have been getting together after work to gripe about clients, enthuse about projects, drink IPA and and generally behave the way any other group of like-minded professionals might during happy hour. It's a remarkable group for its diversity within the field: there are interaction, product and graphic designers, students and educators, researchers, even the odd engineer or project manager, working in companies as big as Intel and Nike, and as small as a solo consultancy. On this particular evening, though, it felt more like a support group, with fully one-third of the regulars in attendance finding themselves out of work within the past few weeks. The culprit was a major technology corporation that had employed dozens of designers in the Portland area, and had recently cut creative staff as a cost-saving measure.
I knew about this before getting to the bar that evening, having corresponded with a few colleagues in the previous few days, and arrived expecting slack faces and morose dialog. I was disappointed, though. The overall mood wasn't just acceptance, but something like bemused optimism. "I'm actually fine with it," several of them explained, shrugging and chatting about where they were thinking of going next. And it occurred to me that this is the same reaction I've seen in pretty much every creative professional I've known who's lost a job, myself included. It's remarkable how surprised we act upon realizing our relative lack of anguish, given that it seems to be the rule and not the exception. True, we could all be putting a sunny face on a difficult situation, but comparing it to the reactions of laid-off friends and relatives in other professions, there's a noticeable lack of worry amongst designers and their kin.
This brings attention to one of the most crucial traits a successful creative professional needs to have these days that hardly anyone talks about: resilience. The creative field is a brutal one, in which jobs are lost frequently, often without any correlation to competence. There's a crucial truth to creative employment that makes this happen; a truth that very few of us are comfortable acknowledging: our jobs are dispensable.
The fact is, consumer goods are often produced without the input of product designers, buildings are built without architects, and web sites are created without web designers. Luckily for us, and for the consumer populace as a whole, they frequently aren't, but there is a critical distinction between the creative professionals, and the engineers, executives, accountants, sales reps, and other members of the commercial process. Namely, that without many of these other professions, there would in fact be no business. If an engineer doesn't sign off on a building plan, it doesn't get built. If an accountant doesn't do the books, the company goes to court. If the designer doesn't do his or her job, on the other hand, the company still exists. It still does what it does, and maybe makes money, at least until a competitor with the ability to be innovative as well as all that other stuff moves in and eats up their market. We constitute a competitive advantage, not a necessity, and lacking an advantage only matters if your competitor has it and you don't. So unlike many other professions, the stability of the creative's career is a function of the degree to which those making the decisions value that advantage; it does not flow naturally from the market, at least not yet.
A company can decide one day that it needs to be innovative, and these decisions ebb and flow, influenced, like most decisions, by trend and media. As the baton of design-centeredness gets passed from company to company and industry to industry, the qualified follow the work, knowing perhaps better than their employers how valuable they are in an economy that increasingly hinges on differentiation. Creative professionals have an understanding of their abilities and competitive worth that few other areas can match. From the first term of art or design school, we pin our work up on the board to have it praised or maligned. We follow our projects with days or weeks of documenting the results in the best light, and we compare them intently with our colleagues and competitors. We spend our spare time improving existing skills and acquiring new ones. We do all of this because our careers demand it, and this gives us resilience. A designer who's no good figures it out before long, and either gets better or leaves the profession. Those that remain take the vicissitudes of their jobs in stride, having already had faith in their abilities tested repeatedly, and received confirmation.
The punchline is that many other professions are starting to resemble ours. Increasingly service-oriented, globalized economies are bringing this type of transience to once rock-solid professions, to the point where analysts and middle managers are building portfolios too, or at least viewing their skill set as a portable thing, to be optimized for their own benefit rather than their employer's. When this trend is discussed by those new to it, the reaction is often one of fear and outrage: how could the corporate world betray us so? For those of us who've already become accustomed to it, we get to shrug and smile, tell them to get over it and go grab another beer.
