Designers and Writers

I was invited by Peter Weingarten, who - with Steve Weindel - leads the architecture studio at Gensler San Francisco, to participate in a recent retreat. I was reminded in the course of it that design and writing have in common a vast diversity of methods, as many as there are individuals engaged in both tasks. Reading Paris Review interviews of writers, I'm often struck by this. By the time they make it to that august journal, writers are pretty clear about how they work and how it relates to what they write. I work as an editor, and most of my "for hire" writing is done with teams. This is more like design in the studio than most of the writing that the Paris Review describes. In a studio context, there's likely to be a way of working that drives most projects. Finding the right team isn't just a question of personalities, but also of feeling at ease with the tempo of the work. Some designers are purely iterative, so almost useless on fast-burn competitions. Others excel conceptually, but are bored stiff by the details of implementation. Good firms help sort this out, but the main burden is on the individual. When I joined Gensler, I shocked the person who hired me by saying that it would be a mutual waste of time for me to be the director of communications. I'm just not cut out for that role. I can direct from an editorial standpoint, because that's a reviewing, mentoring, and influencing sort of role. My nature is receptive, I think, rather than creative. As my friend Julie Bartlett once put it, "Give John a sentence or two, the germ of an idea, and he can turn it into an essay." A separate subject, also relevant to designers, is how to figure out which projects fit best.