WHEN A CLIENT HATES YOUR DESIGN – TAKE 2

Robert, one of our far flung correspondents, takes exception to my thoughts about clients hating your design.  (This link takes you to Robert’s comments, which are at the bottom of the page.)  Robert has been a fervent supporter of Transparent Drawing since day 1.  So I want to see if I can try again with my thoughts on this matter.  This gets at the heart of who we are and what we do as designers while working with the people who pay us.

I do not see my thoughts as a put down to our clients.  We are humans, after all.  And as human beings, we are subject to our more base animalistic urges.  Our Darwinian upbringing has conditioned us to be fearful of the unknown.  When we see something unexpected, be it a dark shape in the corner of the kitchen floor or a design with an unfamiliar language, our evaluation is primarily emotional.  We can’t help it.

It is normal for humans to make emotional evaluations.  Clients make a first evaluation of your design based on their emotions.  This is normal.  It is what happens.  It is how we function as humans on a daily basis.

The fact that psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, affect heuristic, was news to me.  Affect, in other words a gut feeling, has a huge influence on how we respond to stimuli.

And what I find amazing is that an affect heuristic, or emotional response, is not even touched upon in our schools.  It certainly was not mentioned in my education.  And it certainly is not mentioned in the design program that I have taught at.

BUT IT SHOULD BE!  Here we have an established and accepted description of a normal human way of responding.  And this way of responding is what occurs when the people who pay you first look at your work.  There is an established dynamic.  Yet this is not discussed at all.

Now, Robert might be taking the most offense at the second part of my post, in which I describe the rationalization of our emotions.  I describe, again, a typical human process in which we produce a logical rationalization of our emotional response.  Because after all, we do want to appear to be logical and rational creatures.

Yet, again, I don’t see emotional rationalization as a client put down.  Instead, I see it as a human phenomenon with a huge upside.  We have an established psychological, dare I say scientific, understanding of how we operate as humans.  This understanding should give those of us who design simply more of an understanding of what is happening in the interaction of the designer and the client.  That’s all.

This very fun discussion reminds me of some thoughts provided by Centerbrook Architects decades ago.  (Centerbrook, Reinventing American Architecture, p 13).  Centerbrook’s modus operandi was shaped by Charles Moore,  who of course preached collaboration and accommodation.  Yet Centerbrook writes, “I’ve had instances where clients said, after the building was completed, that they wished I had tried harder to talk them out of something that they were set on.”  “Until you’re convinced, beyond a doubt, that the client understands exactly what you’ve proposed.  If you’ve fully explained the idea through models and drawings, and the client has a complete understanding of the design and still doesn’t like it, then it’s time to change it and move on.”

Belief.   Transparency.   Problem Solving.    Humans.  Visual.  Primacy.