How To | Feel happiness while designing

The design job occupation can sometimes be quite monotone and become quite dull if you don’t fill it up with what makes you happy. Too many times have I found myself in the middle of a project and felt that this is not what I want to be doing right now. It’s not intellectually challenging, it’s not creatively inspiring and definitely it doesn’t fill my work days with happiness. Have you felt the same thing?

It’s important to mention though that there is no job on this earth making the individual happy every second of the labour. It’s just impossible. Every job has it’s downside and dull moments. No matter how you look at it. But, don’t worry. There are things you can actually do to improve the happiness in your work and really become more satisfied with your situation and even profit from it in every conceivable way.

Stefan Sagmeister’s speech from 2004 at the TED community conference will surely push you in the right direction. His quite genuine way of looking at design and the happiness it should bring its designer is more than inspiring. The important thing is to make sure you are using yourself as the tool and not let the every day machine tools take the overhand and just use you as the do:er. This usually occurs when projects are long and dull. We tend to fall into this trance of just doing. Whatever it takes we just do in order to get done. That’s not how design should be. We should feel and work our way through our ideas. We should feel our ideas and really let our brain wrap itself around it in order to get the best and most profitable result, not only for the client, but for yourself as well.

Watch this clip and you will get a hint on how Stefan manages to incorporate happiness into his everyday design work. It’s not impossible, it just takes a little bit of getting used to.